The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  ‘So you can have a near-death experience “bad trip”?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘I have – or had – a patient whom I wanted to take part in this group, but he refused. He refused further treatment, for that matter, despite him being a professional therapist himself. His near-death experience – following an attack in which he was stabbed – was actually, like yours, a mainly positive experience, but towards the end it took a very, very dark turn. He found himself in some kind of hell filled with demons. The damage was lasting, too. I’m afraid I was treating him for Cotard’s Delusion when he stopped coming to see me.’

  ‘Cotard’s Delusion?’ The young ex-medical student frowned, forcing him to adjust his eyepatch, and Fabel realized it was the first time he’d seen him look troubled. ‘That’s bad . . .’

  ‘Cotard’s Delusion,’ Lorentz addressed the rest of them, ‘is a tragic personality disorder, also called Delusion of Death. It is, like in the case of my ex-patient, often caused by trauma. Sufferers believe themselves to be dead. A common characteristic is for them to turn up at graveyards and demand to be buried. Some believe they are ghosts, others that they are animate corpses, moving about but rotting away. It’s tragic, but thankfully it’s rare. I’ve only come across this case and one other in my whole career. Anyway, my point is that what you experienced at the point of death is no more or less than the same kind of psychedelic trip that an ayahuasca or DMT user experiences.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Sepp, the unexceptional business-type, ‘what ayahuasca causes is also a genuine spiritual experience.’

  43

  Hübner had found it odd how, from their first encounter, he had opened up to Zombie. It had been like that even in the prison. Herr Mensing, as Zombie was known there, had been Frankenstein’s social therapist and counsellor. There had been something in the way Zombie had looked at him – or more correctly something missing in the way he looked at him: fear. There had never been the slightest hint of it in the way Herr Mensing had dealt with Frankenstein during their sessions. No fear, no apprehension or mistrust or revulsion. He had even insisted at the first session that the guard leave them alone, which he did only reluctantly. The other thing that had set Herr Mensing apart was that he treated Hübner with respect; he was interested in what the giant of a man across the table had to say about himself, the world and his place in it.

  To start with, Frankenstein had suspected their empathy had something to do with the way Mensing looked himself. His thick dark hair emphasized the sickly paleness of his complexion and his face was all skull angles, his hands skeletal, long fingers almost fleshless under the skin. At times, Hübner had felt that Mensing was only partly there in the room with him, as if some other fragment of his being was absent, or occupying some distant place. Eventually Frankenstein decided it was simply that they had recognized each other as outsiders, shunned by the world and sharing the same dark corner.

  Jochen Hübner had never had friends, never had time for or wanted friends. When, from the age of thirteen, he had slowly turned monstrous, he had settled himself to a life alone, but one where he set the agenda for his rejection from society. For whatever reason, Herr Mensing – Zombie – was the only person he had trusted. The only person who had not treated him as a monster; the only person who had talked to him, tried to understand him, who had shown him kindness.

  It was as if Zombie had been blind to Hübner’s appearance. And that here, in this misleadingly remote house hidden in a swathe of woodland in the heart of Germany’s second biggest city, Jochen Hübner had come to know friendship and had become blind to his own monstrosity.

  Zombie came once a day, usually at the same time, around lunchtime. He would let himself into the house and the cellar, deliver the fresh provisions he had brought and sit for a while, talking to Hübner and sometimes sharing lunch. Today he chose to talk about the mission he had set the giant.

  ‘What I want to know,’ Frankenstein said, ‘is why? You know that I’ll do exactly what you’ve asked me to do whether you explain it to me or not. But I’d like to know why.’

  ‘That’s reasonable,’ the pale wraith in the corner said. ‘I’ll explain . . .’

  And he did. He talked for over an hour, explaining what had happened, about a night fifteen years before, a nightmare, who had to pay for it, why they had to pay for it, when and how.

  When Zombie had finished, Frankenstein sat quiet, nodding. There was more than one kind of monster, he realized. And the real monsters were the ones you couldn’t recognize by looking at them. The ones disguised behind a mask of normality.

  ‘I saw things,’ said Frankenstein, emboldened by Zombie’s openness. ‘When my heart stopped, I mean.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ Zombie leaned forward, a slow folding of cloth and bone.

  ‘Memories, but memories I could watch. I saw who I used to be. I remembered what it was like not to be a monster.’ The huge shoulders sagged. ‘It was nice. Beautiful. It made me happy then, but sad now. Now that I can’t go back to it.’

  ‘Yes you can.’ Zombie smiled. ‘I can take you back there. Without the risk. Would you like to go?’

  Frankenstein nodded.

  *

  ‘It isn’t working,’ said Hübner. ‘Nothing is happening.’ It had been five minutes, at least, since Zombie had injected the DMT.

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Zombie. ‘Just wait.’

  Hübner felt the impatience rise in him, but noticed that it was a cool, rageless impatience, unlike the restless fury he usually felt. ‘I’m telling you, nothing’s happening . . .’

  ‘Just wait . . .’ The voice that said it wasn’t Zombie’s. Zombie’s mouth hadn’t moved. Hübner looked around the cellar. Something else, someone else had spoken to him, but he knew it wasn’t a voice in his head, it was a voice from outside his head. It was the strangest feeling: he felt completely normal, felt totally in control, yet everything was beginning to operate on a different level. He looked down at the floor of the cellar. He couldn’t see through the flagstones, through the dense clay and soil beneath, yet he knew there were roots beneath him, a spider web of tendrils from the trees around the house, alive, feeding, drawing moisture and nourishment, holding the house like cupped fingers beneath it. He could suddenly smell the soil, smell the life and death in the soil, the cycle of decay and renewal; he became aware of the forest beyond the walls of the cellar: a vast, living, breathing thing. The air around him began to change: it became viscous, palpable.

  Frankenstein started to fade away; his body became a concept, not a solid reality. He left his monstrousness behind.

  He collapsed into himself. He remembered things he thought he had long ago forgotten and they played out in front of him. Not once did he lose his bearings: he knew he was still in the cellar, but he was also everywhere else, every time else he had been.

  He was a small boy again. He was playing with his toy cars and trucks in the garden of his parents’ home, creating his own imagined world, contented and unaware of the genetic predestiny within him, of the malevolent endocrinology already conspiring to turn him into a monster.

  He lay down on the cellar floor, not because he needed to, but because he wanted to be closer to the roots beneath him, around him, through him; the endless web of consciousness that linked every place, every time he had ever been.

  He saw his mother again. She was beautiful. She smiled at little Jochen and held his cheek in her soft, cool palm and talked quietly to him about his toys.

  It wasn’t that the scene changed, it was more that another level of time and place superimposed itself. It was now his fourteenth birthday. There was piano music, soft and echoing, a slow, sad waltz, and Jochen danced with his mother. Already he was big and clumsy, but his mother didn’t seem to notice. He had been so happy that day and she had said the strangest thing to him: that she would always be there to look after him. To make things right.

  There, in the dark cellar now and in the bright room where they danced then, two m
oments that occupied the same space, Jochen forgave her. He forgave her for her lie: she had left him alone. Two years later she went away and even that day when they had danced she would have known about the disease growing inside her, spreading. Taking her away from him by degrees. But he forgave her.

  The experience lasted hours, maybe even a full day, most of it spent with his mother and others he could not quite see. Then Zombie guided him back, slowly, gently, as the DMT started to wear off.

  When he was fully back in the now, Frankenstein checked his watch. The whole experience had really only lasted about fifteen minutes.

  Afterwards, he thanked Zombie for being his guide and guardian once more, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  44

  It took less time than Fabel had imagined it would. It was like triangulation on a map: they now had three landmarks, reference points: Monika Krone, Werner Hensler and Tobias Albrecht. All three had been at the party the night Monika had disappeared, but Detlev Traxinger had not. But their relative positions gave Fabel’s team the coordinates they needed.

  He phoned Susanne and told her he’d be late, which turned out not to be a problem because she was working late herself at the Institute for Judicial Medicine. He sat in his office examining the connections the team had made that day and going through fifteen-year-old statements, letting the past come to life in his head. It was something he was good at, a natural at. Fabel had always considered that he had become a policeman by accident: he had been a gifted History student at the universities of Oldenburg and Hamburg and had always seen his future mapped out for him as a historian. But then a girl, a fellow student he had been having a casual relationship with, had been abducted, raped and murdered. Suddenly his relationship with her had no longer seemed casual and his future less clear. He became obsessed with trying to understand what had happened to his girlfriend and what led people to commit acts of violence on others. The day he finished his studies, he applied for officer-level entry into the Polizei Hamburg.

  But the instincts and skills that would have guided him as a historian instead guided him as a detective – and now he used them to force an event from the past to come back to life in the present.

  Going through the fifteen-year-old statements from the partygoers, he saw that three girls who had been friends with Monika had previously dated Tobias Albrecht, then an Architecture student. One of them had also dated Werner Hensler, the future horror writer. Another couple, who probably had long since parted and married other people, had attended the party together and had both mentioned in their statements that Hensler and Albrecht had been friends of sorts.

  And all five referred to someone who had not been able to make the party that night. It was a detail you had to be looking for to find. Two partygoers referred to the missing person as a friend of Hensler, one stated that it had been a friend of Albrecht, and two witnesses indicated he had been a friend of both men. It had been, in the original investigation, less than a footnote. All named him as Detlev Traxinger.

  During the original investigation, Traxinger hadn’t even made it onto the list of Monika’s acquaintances. He had been identified as an absence, rather than a presence. Was Traxinger, Fabel wondered, the ghost whose presence he had sensed in his rereading of the files?

  At the end of a three-hour session of referencing and cross-referencing, Fabel set the members of his team their respective tasks. Tobias Albrecht was someone Fabel wanted to talk to personally and he asked Anna to fix up a time for them both to interview the architect.

  ‘And Anna,’ said Fabel, ‘be insistent. Herr Albrecht is connected to two murder victims, one of whom was found in a building he designed. Until we can ascertain otherwise, he’s a potential suspect. Explain to him his full cooperation is in his best interest.’

  *

  Throughout his career, Jan Fabel had always tried to keep personal feelings out of how he treated a witness or a suspect. Sometimes, he knew, you took a like or dislike to someone on first meeting and it was very difficult to keep those feelings from colouring your attitude. The guilty, Fabel had learned, could be likeable and charming; the innocent could be arseholes.

  Fabel took a profound dislike to Tobias Albrecht the instant he met him. So profound that he was surprised by the intensity of his antipathy towards the architect.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t been cooperative. Albrecht certainly hadn’t delayed seeing them, agreeing to meet Fabel and Anna at his offices the very next morning. His architectural practice, Albrecht and Partners, was located in the HafenCity, Hamburg’s twenty-first-century interpretation of its Hanseatic traditions. Albrecht had, of course, designed the building himself and Fabel was surprised to see how elegant and restrained it was in comparison to the incongruous jangle of steel and glazing in Altona where they had found the writer’s body.

  Everything in Albrecht’s offices was cool and elegant, including the staff, all of whom looked as if they had been recruited from a modelling agency rather than architectural college. Albrecht’s sense of the aesthetic obviously extended into every part of his business. A tall, blonde and glacial assistant catwalked Anna and Fabel to where he waited for them.

  Albrecht’s office was a huge and mostly empty space with a vast redwood desk sitting throne-like at the far end, the wall behind it a mosaic of slate shards. The architect stood up when the police officers entered, and smiled a vulpine smile. He was dressed in a pale grey houndstooth double-breasted suit and a black shirt, open at the neck. Albrecht’s hair was almost unnaturally black against his strikingly pale complexion and his strong jaw was blued with precision-measured stubble. His eyes were a piercing blue beneath the dark arches of his eyebrows. He asked Fabel and Anna to sit.

  ‘As Frau Commissar Wolff has already informed you,’ Fabel began, ‘we are investigating the deaths of the painter Detlev Traxinger and the author Werner Hensler, whose body was found in an incomplete building designed by you.’

  Albrecht leaned back in his leather chair and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes . . . yes, it’s all a terrible business. Obviously I’ll do anything I can to help.’

  ‘We believe that both victims were friends of yours,’ said Anna.

  ‘No . . . not at all.’ Albrecht seemed surprised by the suggestion.

  ‘But you did know them both?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Knew them, yes. But I hadn’t seen or spoken to either for years. No . . . actually that’s not correct. I bumped into Detlev at a city function, about three months ago, but we only exchanged a few words. Werner I haven’t seen for years.’

  ‘Since university?’ asked Fabel. ‘You were closer back then, would I be right in thinking?’

  ‘We certainly had more to do with each other than we do now, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘What I mean is that you were friends. We know that for a fact.’

  Albrecht held Fabel in his cold blue gaze. If he was rattled, he wasn’t showing it. ‘Acquaintances. Not friends. Part of the same crowd. We were students at the Hamburg Uni at roughly the same time, but studied different subjects. We went to the same social events, had friends in common, that kind of thing.’

  ‘And you all knew Monika Krone, didn’t you?’

  ‘What’s this got to do with Monika?’

  ‘Don’t you find it a coincidence that within a month of Monika Krone’s body being discovered, two members of the same crowd, as you put it, are found murdered?’

  ‘You can’t seriously be suggesting there’s a connection?’

  Fabel didn’t answer right away, but took in the office: the wall behind Albrecht with its blue-grey shards of slate, the polished wood of the floor and the raw wood in the ceiling beams, the large windows looking out towards the elegant nineteenth-century red-brick warehouses of the Speicherstadt from one aspect, the rest of the HafenCity from the other.

  ‘This really is a beautifully designed office,’ said Fabel. ‘I really like the way you’ve combined the natural, the organic, I suppose, with the
high-tech. I also like the way you’ve combined the past with the present, even the future.’

  Albrecht didn’t answer.

  ‘The past and the present are always intertwined,’ Fabel continued. ‘The HafenCity has nothing to do with the Speicherstadt, really, but if there hadn’t been a Speicherstadt, there wouldn’t be a HafenCity. If Hamburg hadn’t been a medieval Hanseatic city, it wouldn’t be leading the world in trade with emergent economies today. History echoes through everything, Herr Albrecht. I’m hearing echoes with these killings.’

  Albrecht pulled his handsome features into a maybe expression. ‘It’s a hell of a stretch. Isn’t it more likely that it’s just a coincidence? Werner and Detlev didn’t have anything much to do with each other after university either.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Fabel. ‘And how would you know that? I mean if you had no dealings with either, for all you know they were in regular contact with each other.’

  ‘I told you I bumped into Detlev at a function. I asked him then if he ever saw anyone from uni, and he said no.’

  ‘I see.’ Fabel paused again. ‘The three of you were all involved, in one way or another, in the arts scene, you all went to the same university at the same time, and all three of you remained in Hamburg. Isn’t it odd that you never had any contact with each other, or even bumped into each other more than you did? It’s almost as if you went out of your way to avoid each other.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Albrecht. Another faintly amused but confused expression. ‘People go their separate ways, that’s all. Have you kept in touch with everyone you went to uni with?’

  ‘I’ve kept in touch – even regular touch – with the people I was friendly with. And like I said, the three of you were involved in the Hamburg arts scene—’

  Albrecht laughed loudly. ‘I wouldn’t call what Werner did art. And I did tell you that Detlev and I would run into each other at the occasional function. I’m sorry you find it odd if we didn’t see each other otherwise. But that’s as far as it goes: maybe odd, but not sinister, which seems to be what you’re implying.’