The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  ‘Yes he does. Look at him.’ Fabel nodded towards the monitor. ‘He’s waiting. He’s waiting for something to happen and he wants us to be looking the other way. And that something is to do with Jochen Hübner . . .’

  Fabel watched the perfect stillness of the figure sitting at the interview table.

  ‘Time to commune with the dead.’

  *

  ‘Where is Jochen Hübner?’

  Zombie stared at Fabel, his drawn, pale face motionless, his eyes large and watery in their sockets. There was no hostility in the eyes; no anxiety, no impatience, no concern. No interest.

  ‘Herr Mensing, you work as a social therapist in prison. You know what life can be like in there. You helped Jochen Hübner, an extremely dangerous prisoner, to escape. For that alone you will go to prison. But if he kills any more people, then you’ll be spending the rest of your life behind bars.’

  Zombie laughed quietly, as if Fabel had said something stupid.

  ‘Where is Jochen Hübner?’ asked Fabel again.

  Mensing looked up, his pale, too-thin face calm, a smile on his lips.

  ‘Where is Hübner?’ repeated Fabel.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do to me, Herr Fabel. No threat you can use, no promises you can make, no deal you can offer, that will have the slightest effect on me. These are all things of the living. I am dead, I remain dead. What happens to my body is inconsequential. I don’t care if I’m in my apartment, if I’m here or if I’m in prison. It makes absolutely no difference to me.’

  ‘Okay, maybe you don’t care about yourself, but you know what Hübner is capable of doing – the pain and terror he’ll spread because he’s at liberty. If you have any decency left in you, you’ll tell me where he is.’

  ‘You have no proof that I helped Hübner.’

  ‘We found xylazine hydrochloride in your apartment – the drug used to fake illness and get Hübner into a civilian hospital. Incidentally also the drug used to sedate each of the victims, but I’ll come back to that. And, if you don’t mind me saying, you are not the biggest or most robustly built man, Herr Mensing, yet we have found internet transactions for oversized clothing and boots – in the kind of sizes that can only be sourced from specialist stores.’

  Silence. Peace. Stillness. Mensing’s eyes, his expression, remained empty, except for a moment when he seemed to look past Fabel.

  ‘Okay, Herr Mensing – what about the killings? Traxinger, Hensler, Albrecht, Mortensen . . . Why did you kill them? Or why did you have Hübner kill them?’

  Silence.

  ‘You admit you had them killed?’

  Silence.

  Fabel responded in like. The two men sat mute, staring at each other for a moment. Fabel had been there before – suspects engaging him in a silent staring contest, but this time it was different. This time there was no defiance or stubbornness in the gaze that met his. Mensing’s eyes were empty of anything. For a moment Fabel could almost believe there was nothing living behind those eyes.

  ‘I know so little about what’s going on here.’ Fabel broke the silence. ‘But I do know that it has got something to do with that night fifteen years ago when Monika Krone died. The same night you were attacked and nearly died yourself. I know that those two events were connected, I just don’t know how. Why don’t you give me at least that much? Why don’t you tell me what happened that night?’

  Again Mensing said nothing, his pale, skull-like face empty of expression. But once more Fabel thought there was a temporary flicker in the eyes as Mensing looked past him, then back.

  ‘You want me to cooperate and I will. I’ll tell you what happened that night. I’ll tell you that and a whole lot more. But not now.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘Because I’m tired. I need to rest first. Can I go back to my cell?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me now, get it over with? Get it off your chest?’

  Mensing fell silent again. Fabel sighed and stood up.

  ‘I’ll have an officer escort you back to your cell. We’ll reconvene in thirty minutes.’

  ‘That should be fine.’ Mensing smiled.

  *

  Before calling for a uniform to take him back to the holding cells, Fabel let Mensing sit alone for a moment while he rejoined Anna Wolff and Nicola Brüggemann in the next room. Again he watched the silent, implacably patient figure on the screen.

  ‘Do you see?’ said Fabel. ‘He’s looking at the exact same spot again. He kept looking past me during the interview and he’s looking at the same thing again.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s the clock. He’s sitting there watching the clock. That’s what he’s waiting for. He knows something is going to happen and he knows when.’

  ‘I don’t see how that helps us,’ said Brüggemann.

  ‘He doesn’t have a watch,’ said Anna. ‘While he’s in his cell, we could put the clock forward, not much, but maybe twenty minutes or so. But we’d have to do it with any clock he might pass between the cell and the interview room. Your watch as well.’

  ‘It’s a good idea, but it wouldn’t work,’ said Fabel. ‘We can only keep him in his cell for half an hour tops, or whatever he has planned will have happened before we talk to him again. Anyway, his internal clock would tell him if we’d almost doubled the time.’

  ‘Ten minutes then,’ said Anna. ‘Bring him out ten minutes early and have the clock set at the time you’ve already told him you’d resume the interview.’

  ‘It’s worth a try, Jan,’ said Brüggemann.

  ‘Okay. You two listen to the interview here and as soon as you get a hint of what it is that he’s been waiting for, don’t wait for my instructions, just get our people there fast.’

  ‘Okay, Chef.’

  *

  Fabel gave the custody team their instructions: after exactly twenty minutes they were to bring Mensing back to the interview room, but before that they were to make sure that any clock or watch that he might be able to see in passing should be advanced ten minutes.

  Fabel was waiting for him, seated in the interview room, when they brought him back.

  ‘Are you rested?’

  Mensing nodded. Another glance past Fabel.

  ‘Are you ready to tell me where Hübner is?’ he asked.

  ‘Nearly,’ said Mensing. ‘In a while. But you asked me what happened that night, fifteen years ago. I’ll tell you about that first. Maybe then you’ll be able to put it together for yourself.’

  Fabel made an open-handed gesture, inviting him to continue.

  ‘I loved her, you know,’ said Mensing. ‘I really, truly, completely loved her.’

  ‘Monika Krone?’

  ‘Of course, Monika Krone. But so did all the others. But she was cruel, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘So I’ve gathered.’

  ‘Some monsters – the very worst monsters – are often pleasing to look at. Monika was at the one time the most beautiful woman I have ever known and the ugliest. It was just that all of her ugliness was in the inside, hidden from the world. She played us, one off the other. She wanted to see how far we would go to please her. We all thought there was this great sadness in her. An emptiness. But it was more a black void where the rest of us have emotions.’

  ‘Were you all members of the Dea Tacita society?’

  ‘You know about that?’ A flicker of surprise.

  ‘The tattoo on your chest. You all had the tattoo. It took me a while – and a Latin dictionary – to work out the significance. Monika Krone was your Dea Tacita, your Silent Goddess, right?’

  ‘She was. Right from the start she led us. Led us right into the dark.’

  ‘So what was it? A sect? A death cult?’

  ‘It started out innocently enough. More a student society than anything else. We were all fascinated by Gothic literature. Me too, but my special interest was mainly movies – the Gothic influence in German Expressionism. Although the truth is I think we were all more fascina
ted by Monika. To start with there were four other girls in the society, but Monika marginalized them, belittled them until they left. Truth is, I think they tired of the men all being focused on Monika.’

  ‘Were there any other members? I mean other than Monika, you and the four who are dead?’

  ‘Like I said, there were the four girls and another three male students to start with. But at the beginning it was a laugh – nothing to take at all seriously. But Monika did. She knew from the start what she wanted the society to be. Traxinger and Hensler maybe took it a little more seriously.’

  ‘Albrecht?’

  ‘Tobias Albrecht was just playing a part. It was a game of dressing-up for him. Paul Mortensen was the least into it. He was a serious, quiet guy: a Dane, studying medicine. I think it was all just a joke for him to start with, but he was as hypnotized by Monika as the rest of us. He was all reason, except when it came to her. He would have done almost anything for her. We all would.’

  ‘But something happened to change that, didn’t it? They killed her, didn’t they?’ asked Fabel. ‘And that’s why you killed them, or had Hübner kill them . . .’

  Mensing laughed, shaking a skull-head that looked too heavy for the thin neck. ‘You’re being impatient, Herr Principal Chief Commissar. You’ve asked me to tell you what happened that night, so I will. But I’ll do it in my own time. And I’ll do it in a way that means you will understand.’

  ‘Go ahead . . .’

  ‘We started to meet regularly. Once a week, sometimes twice. It started off with readings of poetry or from Gothic novels. Werner Hensler, even back then, was an incredibly knowledgeable Poe scholar and he would start every session with a reading from Poe in English. But then we started to focus on German works.’

  ‘I thought the Gothic was an almost exclusively English-language form,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Its Golden Age, perhaps, but Germany is the true Gothic land,’ Mensing explained. ‘The literary form was born in the English Gothic novel, which became the French roman noir and the German Schauerroman. But it was in the Schauerroman that Gothic literature came home, you could say. Home to our dense, dark forests and our dense, dark souls. No nation, no people, is more haunted by its own ghosts. Through the Schauerroman the Gothic became darker, more horrific – filled with violence, blood and death. And that was what we – our little group – started to explore. What we didn’t realize is that we were all just children playing with fire. All except Monika, who knew exactly what she was doing. Did you know she was an enormously talented writer?’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘It was her writing that turned our little literary club into a pagan-Roman cult. It was her story that changed everything. It was the summer before – we went away for a weekend, the six of us. I didn’t think I’d be invited: I was never the most confident of people and some of the others treated me like a hanger-on. But Monika . . . Monika asked me to come. We all clubbed together and rented a house near the bay at Gelting.’

  ‘In Schleswig-Holstein?’

  ‘Yes . . . Angeln, you see. It was one of our pretentiously clever in-jokes: we thought the original homeland of the English language would be the ideal place to celebrate one of its greatest literary forms. A truly Gothic weekend.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘What happened? We had a wonderful, beautiful time. The last truly good time we had together. We drank and talked and watched the sun come up over the water. Monika had this idea that we could do the same as the original Gothics at the Via Diodati – you know, each of us write a ghost story. She cast herself as Mary Shelley and Albrecht as Byron. In Mortensen, the medical student, we even had our own Dr Polidori. So we all tried writing stories. They were all crap except, of course, Werner Hensler’s. Detlev Traxinger was too drunk or stoned or both to write anything coherent, so instead he illustrated Monika’s story.’

  Mensing paused and for a moment Fabel saw something like emotion fleet across the thin features.

  ‘Anyway, we sat on the sand, around the fire we had lit, and listened as she read us the story she had written. She had called her story Dea Tacita. It was painfully sad, beautiful and graceful; it was also so very dark and terrifying. It was the most perfect Gothic tale. It was the story of the Silent Goddess – a Roman personification of Death. In Monika’s story, Dea Tacita was the most beautiful of all women and all men loved her. She endlessly wandered the ages and the world seeking love. But because she was immortal and man is mortal, whenever she found love, found a man she wanted to be with, her very first touch would end his life. In the story Dea Tacita sees a young girl by the sea, singing contentedly as she mends fishing nets. It was the way Monika described the goddess’s feelings – her terrible longing for a simple, carefree life like the fisher girl . . . It was so beautifully written. Heartbreaking.’

  ‘And that’s what she became to you? Dea Tacita?’

  ‘We all knew it was her own story. Monika was the most completely destructive personality I have ever known. But the truth is that we all wanted her touch, even if it meant death. That was when we got the tattoos. Detlev sketched it out and we took it to a tattoo parlour we found in Eckernförde, on the way back to Hamburg.’ Mensing paused, his thoughts for a fleeting moment in a different place and time. ‘After that night in Gelting we were all completely hers. We would do anything for her, but we had to constantly prove that we would do anything for her.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘We became less like a literary group and, like you said, more like a religion, a cult. But the truth is none of us took it that seriously. Only Monika, and we didn’t know just how seriously she was taking it. But we started to get sucked into it. She knew the tools to use . . . Sex, mainly, then as time went on, she used drugs more and more. She said that as a civilization we couldn’t connect any more – get in touch with the other side of reality. With the gods. She explained that there were gods and angels and monsters residing in us all.’ Mensing shrugged. ‘I know it’ll sound ridiculous to you. It even sounds ridiculous to me . . . now.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Fabel, ‘I don’t find it ridiculous. Go on . . .’

  ‘You have to understand that we were caught up in this thing and although we didn’t take it that seriously to start with, we began to lose sight of reality, of normal behaviour. Everything was dictated by Monika. Anyway, she started to introduce potions, I suppose you’d call them. Entheogens – hallucinogenic drugs designed to make you have spiritual experiences. Shaman drugs. And, like I said, there was the sex. Monika would use it as a tool to control us. She would choose one of us to make love to her, some more often than others. It was a reward we all wanted to win. But there was also her wrath, which terrified us all.’

  Mensing paused to drink from the plastic cup some of the water Fabel had brought in for him; as he did so the angular knot of his Adam’s apple jumped sickeningly in the scrawny neck.

  ‘About two months after the weekend by the Baltic, Monika started to demand we had meetings at midnight – naturally – in places like graveyards. Graveyards were perfect because part of the original Roman religion of Dea Tacita was to make offerings to the dead.’ Mensing laughed. ‘Truth is, we were chased out of a couple of cemeteries. It was then that this guy suddenly appeared. Monika had found him. He was some kind of ditch-digger or something for the City.’

  ‘Jost Schalthoff? Was his name Jost Schalthoff?’

  ‘Yes. He just didn’t fit in with the rest of us. He was obsessed with the Gothic, all right, but Gothic horror. He seemed to be every bit as obsessed with Monika, but in a different way. He was a pleasant enough looking guy, but there was something very dark about him. I knew, whatever it was, it had to do with death. It was only years later, when I read that he had been shot by the police, that I found out he had been a child-murderer. Anyway, Schalthoff was our caretaker, if you like. He arranged it so we could meet at the Altona Jewish Cemetery. That’s where Monika wanted us to have our
little rituals.’

  ‘What form did these rituals take?’

  ‘It all became about death. Instead of us making offerings to the dead, it started to involve death itself. We had to make, well . . . sacrifices. Birds. Small animals. It got sicker and sicker . . . We resisted at first, but everyone wanted to please her. And between Monika’s manipulations and the effects of the peyote or whatever the hell it was she had us drink, we were all beginning to lose our minds a bit. Every gathering had to end with the taking of a life. Instead of a Roman religion or Gothic games, it started to look a hell of a lot more like Black Masses.’

  ‘And you never once thought that it was becoming extreme? That it was ridiculous? Mad?’

  ‘It was mad. But it was a creeping madness. We’d drifted out from the shore of what was sane and normal in slow centimetres. Before we knew where we were we had lost sight of what was normal, barely even remembered what was normal. All that existed for us was Monika and the storm around her. Each gathering, each ritual, became more and more extreme. We became afraid of her, afraid of each other. But the main thing was she kept mixing cocktails of entheogenic drugs into the wine. We got lost in the madness.’

  He paused and again looked past Fabel to the clock on the wall.

  ‘I was the weakest. I would have done anything for the Silent Goddess. She said that we had all been bound together by Death, but the bonds weren’t strong enough because the deaths we’d offered weren’t big enough, significant enough. There had to be a human sacrifice. Someone had to become the husband of the Silent Goddess – had to know her true touch.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘None of us really believed she’d go through with it. We were caught up in her frenzy and half off our heads with drugs, but I think we all thought it was some kind of symbolism – or that she was just testing us all to see how far we’d go for her. We had no idea how mad she was. It was that night after the party. We had all arranged to leave the party separately and gather at the Place of Broken Stones – which was her name for the cemetery. When we got there she was wild, her eyes were insane. Like before, she made us all drink something. Again it was wine, but there was something mixed into it that was stronger than the stuff she’d given us before.’