The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  The phone rang and Anna told him that the medic had confirmed that it would be okay to interview Mensing in an hour, but that he may still be tired and unresponsive.

  ‘Whenever you get a chance, or whenever he’s capable of understanding,’ he told Anna, ‘remind Mensing that he can have a lawyer present when I question him. I want you and Nicola to observe on the closed circuit, but I’d like to fly solo on this interrogation. Can you fix everything up in an hour? I have something to do . . .’

  ‘Sure,’ said Anna.

  Fabel hung up, one hand resting on the receiver, his other on the German–Latin dictionary he had got Sven Bruns to find for him. Another answer was in place, but the idea that had led him there now seemed too abstract, too unlikely. They had Mensing and they were hunting Frankenstein Hübner. They had found xylazine, the drug used to incapacitate the victims, in Mensing’s apartment. He had his killers.

  But there was one conversation he knew he had to have.

  *

  Kerstin Krone sat with the same quiet grace as the last time, as every time Fabel had talked to her. It was a composure that hadn’t faltered when she had answered her door to find Fabel there. She had offered him tea, but he had declined and now she sat down facing him. Her hair had been cut since the last time he had seen her and it was now even shorter. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a blue striped shirt over it. The haircut and the clothes style were both deliberately androgynous, but again it seemed only to emphasize her femininity and the perfect, fine-boned architecture of her features.

  ‘There’s a couple of things I wanted to discuss with you, if you don’t mind,’ Fabel said.

  ‘Of course I don’t mind. I’ll do anything I can to help you find who killed Monika.’

  Fabel watched her for a while, his expression blank; hers calm, patient. The ember of an idea still burned in some dark corner of his mind; a dim glow that illuminated nothing. But it was there.

  ‘I appreciate it.’ He smiled. ‘I need to ask you again about the phone call you got that night. The one we found on Monika’s phone records, from her cell phone to yours. It was an hour or so after she left the party and, as I’m sure you’re tired of hearing, the very last contact she had with anyone, other than her killer.’

  ‘Okay.’ Kerstin still made no sign of being impatient. ‘I don’t know what more I can add. I’ve gone through it so many times – not just with the police, but myself, in my head. Over and over.’

  ‘And you say she effectively just phoned for a chat?’

  ‘To talk, yes. Monika was never one for chat. But there was nothing about the conversation that suggested she was in any danger or trouble.’

  ‘So there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about the conversation?’

  ‘No, nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘You see, I find that strange. Firstly, it was a very strange time of day – a very strange time of night – for her to call, simply to catch up. Secondly – and I’m sure you don’t mind me saying this because you’ve said as much yourself – you and Monika were never close. You weren’t close even for ordinary sisters, far less twins. In fact, throughout her time at the university, Monika never so much as hinted to anyone that she had a sister, far less a twin sister. And you told me she had practically no dealings with you over those last two years – almost as if she was actively avoiding contact with you – and vice versa. Do you see why I find it strange that she phoned you out of the blue?’

  ‘Of course I do. I found it strange myself, but that’s the way it happened. Monika was a strange girl. A troubled girl.’

  ‘But it’s more than strange . . . To me that last call suggests a cry out – a call for help to the only person who maybe truly understands her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Herr Fabel, I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

  ‘I don’t know if I know myself.’ He sighed. ‘If I were honest with you, your sister’s disappearance has haunted me for fifteen years. An investigation like this should be all about the facts – about information and pieces of evidence. Books and movies would have you believe we’re creatures of gut instincts and cases are solved on hunches. But it’s not like that at all. I once explained to someone that there are no such thing as hunches, only your unconscious processing data that your conscious hasn’t access to. That sometimes you know something but you just don’t know what it is yet.’

  ‘And what is it you think you might know about Monika’s murder?’

  ‘That’s what I’m still trying to work out, I’m afraid. There are events in history, in life, that are either significant or insignificant in their own right, but they set in train other events, start a sequence. The discovery of your sister’s remains seems to have been one such event. Four men dead. Four men who were closely involved with her killed almost immediately after her body is recovered.’

  ‘But why would Monika being found cause that?’

  ‘Something happened the night Monika disappeared – and these men were all involved. Maybe they acted together and, once Monika’s body was discovered, someone else is avenging her death.’

  ‘And that’s what you think is behind it all? And I’m guessing you have suspicions as to who this avenger would be.’

  ‘I have a couple of ideas.’ Fabel paused, little more than a heartbeat. ‘But it could be the opposite. It could be that Monika’s killer is behind these other deaths.’

  ‘Why?’ Kerstin frowned. Beautifully. ‘I mean, why now, after all this time?’

  ‘I have this odd feeling that whoever killed Monika believed their identity was safe as long – as you put it before – as the box remained unopened and no one knew for sure what had happened to her. It could be that each of these four suspected each or all of the others of Monika’s death. Maybe these four men had to die simply because they were pieces in a jigsaw that the reopening of the case would – and has – put together.’

  Kerstin Krone watched Fabel for a moment. ‘And what picture do you get from the pieces?’

  Fabel gave a bitter laugh. ‘That’s the something I know . . . but can’t reach yet. But I do know it has to do with this . . .’ Reaching into his jacket pocket, Fabel took out two photographs and laid them side by side on the coffee table in front of Kerstin. One was a close-up of the monogram Traxinger used on his paintings, the other of the tattoo on the painter’s chest.

  ‘You’ve shown me these before,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what it means.’

  ‘I struggled with it myself. I mean, to start with we assumed the DT stood for Detlev Traxinger, but then we found the same tattoo on the others. And I assumed that when it was at the bottom of a painting it was his signature. But that was a mistake I made once before: I saw the name Charon at the bottom of one of his paintings and thought it was a signature, but it wasn’t. It was the subject. All of those paintings Traxinger did of Monika had that at the bottom, but it wasn’t his initials, it was the subject. Monika was “DT”.’

  Kerstin made a confused face.

  ‘I couldn’t work out what it meant. Then someone who was intimate with the architect Tobias Albrecht said he had let slip the words “Silent Goddess” when referring to the paintings of your sister. DT stands for Dea Tacita, the Silent Goddess. The female personification of Death.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I still don’t understand . . .’

  ‘I think Monika lost her way. I think she perhaps went too far in finding out how much she could manipulate the men around her. Push them.’

  ‘So you think one of them killed her? And it has something to do with this Dea Tacita thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I believe the so-called Gothic set took things a little too far – with Monika the high priestess of her own little death cult. Something happened the night she disappeared, the night she called you. Something from which there was no going back. I think she made that call because she needed a way out.’

  ‘Why do I feel you’re skirting around something, Herr Fabel? That th
ere’s something that you want to say, but you’re afraid to say it?’

  Fabel gave a small laugh. ‘There’s this other case we’ve been working on – an old Nazi in a seniors’ home murdered an old anti-Nazi. But he killed him because he got confused – the roles became reversed. He believed his actions were justified because he was killing a man who was guilty of crimes that in truth he had committed himself. A very sad case.’

  ‘I really don’t understand what this has to do with Monika.’

  ‘Just that I think that night, the night she phoned you out of the blue, Monika would have given anything to do exactly the same thing – to slip into another life. Even into the life of her twin sister. Like you said, escape the storm of her own making. There’s another odd thing,’ he said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. ‘We’ve uncovered a link between Monika and a man called Jost Schalthoff – you’ll remember I asked you about him before. And we know she had a sexual affair with the architect, Tobias Albrecht. Schalthoff worked for the City Council; Albrecht was at that time an architecture student and had done a work placement with the City Planning Office. It’s entirely possible that, fifteen years ago, either or both men could have known about the development and building work on the site where the remains were buried.’

  ‘So that makes them suspects?’

  ‘In the original killing, yes. But, as I know only too well, Schalthoff died two years ago – and unless he has risen from the grave, there’s no way he can be behind this current spate of killings. And Albrecht has ended up a victim himself.’

  ‘I don’t understand your point . . .’

  ‘Simply that Monika perhaps knew about the site herself.’

  ‘What?’ Kerstin frowned to emphasize the effort of following Fabel’s logic. ‘She went there, committed suicide and lay down where she knew her body would be hidden? That’s absurd.’

  ‘Absurd and physically impossible. Monika lay in tight-packed clay. She was buried after her death. Deliberately and by someone else.’

  ‘I still don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  Fabel paused. There was the sound of a car passing along the street outside, the ticking of the clock out in the hall. He remembered sitting in another room full of expectant silences, fifteen years ago. This is mad, he told himself, the parents must have known. She couldn’t have hidden it from them. They would have been able to tell.

  ‘I had an experience,’ he said eventually. ‘A couple of years back. And it involved Jost Schalthoff. He shot me before he was gunned down himself.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She sounded genuine.

  ‘The fact that Schalthoff was involved isn’t the point. The point is that I came as close as you can come to death and still come back from it. I saw things, experienced things. I went through the whole near-death experience. When I go back to the Presidium, I’ll be questioning a man we’ve been looking for in connection with this most recent spate of killings. Martin Mensing. Is that name familiar?’

  Kerstin shook her perfectly sculpted head.

  ‘Mensing knew Monika at university and was a member of the Dea Tacita crowd along with Traxinger, Hensler, Albrecht, Mortensen. The very same night that Monika went missing, he suffered a near-fatal stab wound to the chest, missing his heart by millimetres. And if our chronology is right, he was stabbed sometime shortly before the time you had that telephone conversation with your sister. His account of how he got the wound doesn’t fit with the injury itself, and he couldn’t explain how he had got to the hospital, but that was all let go. Anyway, that’s not why I’m telling you about him. My point is that Martin Mensing had a near-death experience the same way I did after I’d been shot. Except he came out of it believing he hadn’t come out of it – that he had really died and all he is now is an animated corpse. Cotard’s Delusion, they call it.’

  ‘I see . . .’ Kerstin said, still patient.

  ‘The funny thing is that I really can understand why he believes he’s dead. When you’ve gone through an experience like that, it changes you. Completely. It changed me – to the point that sometimes I feel like I am a completely different person to who I was before. Sometimes people close to me find it difficult to adjust – they see the old me, the person before the event. But inside, I know I’m different. Maybe to the extent of being someone else. And, yes, there are nights when I lie in the dark and I wonder if I really did die back then, and everything I have experienced since has just been an illusion created by the last-second flutterings of my dying brain.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thought.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, of course. I’m just saying that you have moments, when you’ve been through a life-changing experience like I have. Like Mensing has . . . Like you have.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Losing your sister like that. Losing half of a genetic identity, an alternate you.’

  She held him in her gaze. Her expression remained the same, but something changed in the eyes. An emerald glitter like the one a painter had fought so hard to capture.

  ‘I suppose so . . .’ she said. ‘Are you fully recovered now, Herr Fabel?’

  ‘I am. But sometimes I like to get away for a while. Go somewhere for a coffee or a drink where no one knows who I am, what happened to me, or what I do for a living. Just a time to be someone else, I suppose. Just for a while. Have you never been tempted to do that, Frau Krone?’

  ‘I can’t say I have. I’m content with the life I have.’

  A silence stretched between them.

  ‘Anyway . . .’ Fabel stood up with a ‘that’s it’ gesture. ‘Thanks for your time. By the way, I was sorry to hear about the suicide of your boyfriend – the one who confirmed you were with him in Hannover the night Monika disappeared.’

  ‘Thank you, it was very sad. But we had split up by then. Is that all, Herr Fabel?’

  ‘It is. Thanks again. I’m sorry we’re no further forward.’ He paused, holding her gaze. ‘I want you to know that I will find out what happened to your sister that night. I promise you that. And I’m never going to stop looking for who killed these four men. Incidentally, have you ever met a doctor from Bremen, a haematologist called Marco Tempel?’

  ‘No . . . not that I can remember.’

  Fabel nodded. ‘Thank you for your time, Frau Krone. I’m sure we’ll see each other again soon.’

  She stood up and smiled. ‘I doubt it, Herr Fabel . . .’

  64

  No one was calm when they had been arrested. Not even the most experienced and hardened criminals. Arrest brought with it its own form of claustrophobia: the awareness that you were restricted, confined, stifled; not free to go about your business, to move around the world as you wanted. Added to that was the anxiety about what would happen next: dark projections into a future you could not control; imaginings of an even more claustrophobic prison cell, of the unnatural and frightening life of a prisoner.

  No one was calm. No matter how hard they tried to hide it, there was always a tell-tale fidget, a tick, a bouncing knee, restless fingers on the metal tabletop.

  Except now.

  The closed circuit camera was mounted in the corner of the interview room, slightly above and facing Martin Mensing, who sat at the table with complete calm, as if he were waiting for a bus or a fast-food delivery. The T-shirt and coveralls supplied by the Polizei Hamburg were loose and baggy on the prison social therapist, as almost all clothing would have been, and it made him look even more insubstantial.

  As he, Anna and Nicola Brüggemann watched the unnaturally thin, unnaturally pale face of Martin Mensing on the monitor, Fabel could see that he was totally at ease. No fear, no anxiety, no impatience.

  ‘He’s waiting,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Waiting for what?’ asked Brüggemann.

  ‘That I don’t know, but I wish to hell I did. But I think it’s no coincidence he was off his head with DMT just as we came to arrest him, meaning we couldn’t interview him for near
ly two hours. Then there was the chase across town to get to Susanne . . . It’s like he’s been playing us. Delaying tactics.’

  ‘There’s no one left to kill,’ said Anna. ‘At least that we know about. So why would he deliberately delay us?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re right, everyone else we know about who was involved with the Gothic set is dead . . . except him.’ Fabel shook his head.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Nicola Brüggemann.

  ‘I don’t think it was him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know it makes no sense, but I don’t. Just like I don’t think it was Hübner either. All we’ve got on them so far is suspicion, some circumstantials, and a sequence of events that would lead you to an obvious conclusion. We don’t have a single forensic trace or witness to place either him or Hübner at any of the crime scenes.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they weren’t there.’

  ‘I know . . . but there were no signs of struggle at any of the scenes. The painter Traxinger was killed with a weapon that you had to get up close to use. It suggests he was killed by someone he knew. If you saw Frankenstein Hübner coming for you, wouldn’t you make a run for it?’

  ‘It was maybe him . . .’ Anna jutted a chin towards the figure on the monitor. ‘Traxinger knew him and he’s certainly not the type that would scare you into flight.’

  ‘True, but I just don’t believe he’s behind the killings. It’s like he’s deliberately stringing us along. Whatever he’s guilty of, it hasn’t happened yet.’

  ‘But if he’s innocent, then he has no reason to string us along,’ said Anna.