‘All that could be true. But we’re talking about a painting that Traxinger treasured but hid from the world, even from his business manager. It clearly had some deep significance for him. However, I do admit there could be any number of coincidental reasons why she’s turned up here, and I need you all to start looking for historical connections between Traxinger and Monika Krone. But there’s coincidence, there’s correlation, and there’s causation . . .’ Fabel turned and looked at the photograph closely, before tapping it with his forefinger. ‘And I smell a cause and effect here. If we hadn’t found Monika’s remains, I would still have found this painting and would have been surprised at its presence. But I would probably have put it down to chance. The fact is that Traxinger was murdered within days of Monika’s body being unearthed. That’s a coincidence on top of a coincidence.’
‘So you think that the discovery of her remains was some kind of trigger for Traxinger’s death?’
‘It’s possible. And what I really don’t like is that it could also have been the trigger for the escape from prison of the only suspect we had for Monika’s murder fifteen years ago.’
‘You think Jochen Hübner maybe killed Traxinger?’ Anna asked. ‘What would his connection to him be? And anyway, it looks like Traxinger let his killer get close. I don’t see that happening with Frankenstein.’
‘Maybe not, but like I said, when the coincidences start to pile up, I look beyond chance for a correlation. But we’ve got to keep all investigative options open.’ He turned to Glasmacher and Hechtner. ‘Thom, Dirk, I need you to stay on the chronology of Traxinger’s murder and his personal connections. Have you found anyone close to him?’
‘We’re going through his emails, cell phone records, et cetera,’ said Glasmacher, ‘and we’re working our way through his friends, or more correctly his acquaintances. It would appear Traxinger wasn’t someone who got close to anyone. I get the feeling he was difficult to like. Plus he had no close family – he hadn’t spoken to his parents or brother in years.’
‘What about relationships with women?’
‘Well, there were a lot of those,’ said Dirk Hechtner. ‘But all casual. Very casual. There are some I don’t think we’ll ever get to, because they involve married women. It’s like Traxinger actively avoided any lasting or deep relationship with a woman. There were two marriages though, both short-lived and disastrous.’
‘Oh?’
‘Two ex-wives, one Italian, one French,’ said Hechtner. ‘He apparently didn’t much care for the domestic product. Both moved back to their native countries several years ago. We’ve arranged for statements to be taken by the local police, just to check on their whereabouts when he died. But, reading between the lines, both ex-wives were glad to put as many kilometres as possible between them and Traxinger. And I’m guessing neither will be in mourning. In both marriages, he was a drunk, unfaithful and I suspect occasionally abusive.’
‘So we’ve got nothing of interest with the ex-wives . . .’ said Fabel.
‘Not directly,’ said Thomas Glasmacher. ‘But there is one thing that is interesting. We processed Traxinger’s home. It’s a huge villa out by Blankenese. For someone who was supposed to have avowedly socialist ideals, he sure liked to live well. Anyway, we found photographs of both ex-wives. I really don’t know how he managed to land women like that.’ Glasmacher flipped open a file and took out two photographs. He walked over to the inquiry board and taped them onto it.
‘He certainly liked his redheads,’ said Fabel, examining the photographs. ‘Shit . . . I see why you said this is interesting.’ Both women were beautiful but did not look at all like each other except for their hair colour: exactly the same shade of auburn-red as Monika Krone had had. Exactly the same colour the artist had seemed obsessed with capturing in his paintings.
‘I’ve got the painting Traxinger did of Monika Krone down in forensics,’ said Fabel. ‘We need to know when that painting was done. I asked Traxinger’s business manager, Anja Koetzing—’
‘The one who looks like Anna?’ Dirk looked across at Anna and grinned.
‘Vampira? You saying I look like the Queen of Darkness?’ Anna said jokingly, but was clearly a little annoyed. ‘Thank you very much.’
Fabel laughed but, looking at Anna, he could see that there was a similarity in look between the two women and wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before. The memory that he had been very attracted to Koetzing disturbed him and he pushed it away.
‘Okay, can we focus?’ he said. ‘I asked Frau Koetzing if she knew when the painting had been done and she said she had never seen it before. She said that she was generally always aware of what Traxinger was working on, which would suggest the painting pre-dates her involvement in the business. Detlev Traxinger knew Monika Krone – we need to know how, where and when. We’ve also got this to explain . . .’ He pointed to the print of the riot scene, titled Charon. ‘Another hidden gem from the Traxinger oeuvre. Again, Anja Koetzing said that this was an old piece that never left the studio’s gallery, and pre-dates her involvement with the business. She also swears blind that no prints were ever made of it, yet here we have one. And it was found in the apartment of Jost Schalthoff. Another inexplicable coincidence. Anna, where are we on that?’
‘I haven’t been able to find any connection whatsoever between Detlev Traxinger and Jost Schalthoff,’ explained Anna. ‘Traxinger and Schalthoff were both from Altona and had spent much of their lives there – in Schalthoff’s case all of his life. But it’s kind of like two aircraft occupying the same airspace, but at completely different altitudes. As far as I can see, their paths never crossed.’
‘This,’ Fabel nodded to the print, ‘says otherwise.’
‘Maybe the print was stolen,’ said Nicola Brüggemann. ‘Or found, somehow. There seems to be no direct or indirect connection between Schalthoff and Traxinger.’
‘And Schalthoff comes into possession of the only print of a highly personal painting? I doubt it, but let’s keep all options open. In the meantime, stay on possible connections . . .’
38
It was odd how personalities could be read through their living environments, through the subtle expressions of individuality: a language Fabel had learned to read over the years.
During the original investigation into her disappearance, Fabel had visited Monika Krone’s student apartment frequently, and had indeed carried out a detailed search of its three rooms: it had been a place of disorder and chaos, the walls completely hidden behind often overlapping posters of medieval, pre-Raphaelite and Gothic art, or flyers promoting Gothic literature events and exhibitions. The tones had been dark. A modern computer desk, he remembered, had stood out incongruously and had been mismatched with a heavy, ornately carved, almost cathedra-style chair that looked like it had been salvaged from a church. Fabel had refreshed his recollection of that apartment, once more poring over photographs from the original file.
This home could not have been more different. Kerstin Krone lived in a small house in the north of Altona. It was compact, immaculate and ordered, with white walls to make the most of the limited space and bright, colourful, modern paintings hanging here and there. This was a place of light, not darkness. And everything was in its place, books ordered on shelves, the magazines on the coffee table in front of him neatly stacked.
‘You live here alone? Thanks . . .’ Fabel accepted the cup of tea she handed him.
‘Yes,’ she said, a deliberate, amused puzzlement in her expression that wordlessly but eloquently asked and why is that relevant to anything? She sat down opposite Fabel and placed her coffee on the low table. Again Fabel was struck by her natural elegance and beauty. It occurred to him that Kerstin Krone tried hard to tone down her looks, to distract people from them. Her hairstyle was less than flattering and she wore no make-up, which only served to accentuate the naturalness of her beauty. He found it difficult to imagine her teaching physics to a disruptive class.
‘You’v
e never married?’ he asked.
‘No. Why?’
‘Listen, Frau Krone, your sister’s death fifteen years ago may be linked to a very recent one. In fact, I have the suspicion that the discovery of her remains may even have been a trigger or catalyst for this recent killing – although I do have to point out all that is pure conjecture on my part.’ He held up a hand to emphasize his point. ‘Monika seems to have attracted a great deal of male attention. Infatuation, almost.’
‘So you think I’m some kind of man-magnet too?’ Her smile had no warmth. ‘A tormentor and serial breaker of hearts?’
‘If I may say so, you are a very striking-looking woman. I can imagine that you have had no shortage of suitors. But I wasn’t trying to pry. I’m just trying to understand Monika, to get a handle on her relationships. You’re the nearest thing I have to being able to talk to Monika directly.’
‘Then you’ve made a serious mistake.’ Kerstin’s tone was flat, but not hostile. ‘The problem with men, with most people for that matter, is that they cannot see past the most superficial level. I look exactly like Monika. Or I imagine we would still look as similar at this age as we did at every other. But that is where the similarity ended. There’s a lot of crap talked about twins. Sure, some – maybe even the majority – have a very close bond and very similar personalities, but not always.’
‘And you and Monika were one such exception?’
‘We couldn’t have been more unlike each other. Biologically, identical twins are clones of each other. The raw material was identical, you could say. But there was a fundamental difference . . .’ She frowned and shook her head. ‘No . . . not a difference. A deficit. Some twins are born and they’re identical, except one of them has a deformity or a finger missing or something like that. That’s what it was like with Monika. There was something missing, but you couldn’t see it, something missing inside. A deficit of the soul, you could say.’
‘And what form did this deficit take?’
‘Monika believed she was at the centre of the universe, that everything and everyone else was there for her convenience or amusement.’
‘Including you?’
‘Especially me. I loved my sister, Herr Fabel, but she loathed me. No, that’s not right either – she was incapable of hating anyone just as she was incapable of loving them. She hated what I represented. She saw me as an imperfect reflection. Weak, unambitious, introverted – everything she was not. She gave me a hard time, I’ll tell you. Do you know why I didn’t study at Hamburg? Why I went to Hannover to study and told no one I was a twin?’
Fabel shook his head.
‘Monika used to think it was a great joke to pretend to be me. She would sleep with men, victimize other girls or get into trouble under my name. It was her way of punishing me for being her reflection. My parents always believed me – they knew what Monika was like – but no one else would buy the whole “evil twin” thing. It took me a long time before I came back to Hamburg.’
‘Why did you?’
‘It was tough on my parents. They felt they’d lost both daughters. I wanted to be near my mother after my father died of a heart attack. Then she got sick and died two years later. I was her main caregiver.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this the first time round, when I asked you about Monika’s death fifteen years ago?’
‘I didn’t think it had anything to do with her disappearance. To be honest, for a long while, I thought it was just another Monika stunt – that she would turn up on the doorstep sometime.’
‘Your Schrödinger’s Cat analogy?’
‘Exactly. I kept her alive in my mind because it helped me, especially after Mamma and Papa died, but also because I believed there was a faint chance she really had escaped to another life. Like I told you before, Monika spun so many webs around herself that she ended up being the one trapped, or lost in a storm of her own making. It was always possible, no matter how unlikely, that she had simply chosen to untangle herself.’
‘Did you ever think she could have committed suicide?’
‘Never. Yes, Monika was a destructive personality – but never a self-destructive one. Whatever the situation, she would find a way out of it.’
Fabel was about to answer when his cell phone rang. He excused himself and answered the call.
‘It’s Anna, Chef. We’ve got another homicide. Another weird one.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At the Bruno Tesch Centre, you know, the new building the Principal Mayor opened. We don’t have an ID for the victim yet.’
‘How was he killed?’
‘That’s the weirdest thing. He was buried alive.’
39
It was an ugly building. Fabel was far from being a traditionalist, and even counted himself as an admirer of modern design, but he believed that architecture should always reflect its context: topographical, architectural, historical. Just like you could tell a lot about a person from the interior of their home, it struck Fabel that you could tell a lot about the character of a city or a quarter from its architecture. This jagged jumble of geometry and dark glass had nothing to do with Altona. It was like a completely alien race had crash-landed a spaceship in the middle of the quarter.
Fabel had heard of its opening. The building had been named the Bruno Tesch Centre which, in an ironic way, summed up the perpetual ambiguity of German history. Hamburg had produced two sons called Bruno Tesch, both of whom had been executed. One – the one after whom the building had been named – was the anti-fascist martyr of Altona Bloody Sunday in 1932, beheaded by the Nazis; the other was the inventor and supplier of Zyklon B gas used in the death camps, hanged by the British.
Nicola Brüggemann was waiting for Fabel at the main entrance.
‘The body was found in the main atrium,’ she explained. ‘Although the building was officially opened a week ago, a lot of the completion work is still to be done. They’ve had teams working to get it finished.’ She led Fabel into the atrium. He spotted security cameras angled towards the entrance and across the concourse. As the space opened up before him, Fabel had to admit that the building looked better from the inside – looked better, but still lacked any connection to the character of the city quarter around it. He could have been anywhere in the world, and the design style was strangely sterile, soulless. He took a moment to gaze up to where the shard-like angles of glass came together high above them. Oddly, the triangles of dark glass seemed to diffuse but not weaken the light from the sky.
‘It’s some kind of energy capture technology.’ Nicola Brüggemann read Fabel’s thoughts. ‘Or so the site foreman told me. We’re over here.’ She nodded to the centre of the atrium, which had been cordoned off by tape. The forensics team were standing by.
‘They’ve done their initial forensic recce,’ said Brüggemann. ‘They say we can have a look at the body in situ, but not too close, before they start detailed processing of the scene and removing the body.’
Impossibly, a vast marble block seemed to float in the air at the heart of the atrium. When he grew near, Fabel could see it was actually a huge trough filled with earth. There were two stepladders set next to it.
‘The Floating Garden,’ explained Brüggemann. ‘It’s based on some Japanese concept.’
‘Very minimalist,’ said Fabel.
‘If you ask me,’ said Brüggemann with mock seriousness, ‘the problem with minimalism is that you can get too much of it.’
Fabel smiled. ‘How’s the conjuring trick done?’
‘The trough is actually held up by a titanium support that’s shielded by mirrors. The mirrors are angled to reflect the floor in such a way that, unless you crouch down and really look, you can’t see what’s keeping it in the air. Clever shit.’
‘Your site foreman again?’
‘Yep. To be honest I think he has a bit of a thing for me. We have a lot in common. More than he realizes – mainly that we both like women. I’ll break it to him gently that
we don’t have much of a future.’
Fabel laughed.
‘Anyway, the idea is that they were going to fill the Floating Garden with small trees, shrubs, crap like that, and you get the idea of it all kind of levitating above the ground. I’m sure it’ll look quite something when it’s done.’
They both donned forensic gloves and overshoes before ducking under the tape. A technician also handed them masks to prevent DNA contamination.
‘This is a really weird one,’ said Brüggemann, her voice slightly muffled by the mask. ‘The gardeners came in this morning to start planting, one of the last phases in completion. The earth was delivered and put into the planter last week. When the gardeners started digging into it, they hit something solid . . .’ She indicated that Fabel should climb the stepladder, which he did. ‘The forensics boys say we’re not to stand on the earth or even on the ledge edge of the marble. Lookee, no touchee.’
Fabel climbed to the top of the ladder and looked into the trough. It was big – he reckoned about three metres wide, six metres long and, from what he had seen from the outside, roughly two and a half deep. Looking into the trough, he could see where less than a metre of soil had been cleared to expose a wooden box, its hinged lid opened. Some of the earth has spilled back into the box and partly covered the naked body of a man. His mouth was wide open and his neck arched back as if mid-scream, but the face and the open eyes were empty of any fear, of any expression at all. His arms and hands had fallen into the pose of a dog begging and Fabel noticed the fingertips were raw and bloody. He saw scratch marks and streaks of blood on the inside of the now open lid.
‘Shit . . .’ he muttered in English.
‘Hell of a way to go, isn’t it?’ said Brüggemann. ‘It’s not a coffin as such, by the way. Apparently it’s a wooden tool chest that was kept on site. But it had been padlocked shut and they broke the lock to see what was inside.’
‘So whoever did this must have been familiar with the site and what was available.’
The Ghosts of Altona Page 19