The Ghosts of Altona Read online

  He gently eased the door fully open.

  Please don’t let it be me who finds it.

  Fabel sighed and wasn’t sure if it was out of relief or disappointment: there was no chaos in the dark of the wardrobe, just two suits, a pea coat and three casual jackets hanging neatly. He eased the clothes apart and checked the bottom of the wardrobe: three pairs of shoes, one of work-type boots.

  He opened the other side and saw two pairs of jeans hanging inappropriately neatly from hangers; another pair of boots beneath them. Nothing else. No chaos, no horror. No Timo.

  Fabel closed the wardrobe doors. It was then he noticed the box.

  It was an unsealed cardboard box – the kind movers used – squeezed into the space between the wardrobe and the corner wall. He leaned down, lifted one side of the lid and reached in.

  Oh God no. Oh Jesus God no . . .

  Fabel stood up abruptly, staggered back. He caught the back of his calf on the corner of the bed, stumbled and landed heavily on the floor. What he had felt inside the box lingered as a phantom on the palm of his hand.

  You sick fuck. You sick murdering fuck.

  There was shouting from the living room. Through his disgust, his fury, his revulsion, Fabel vaguely guessed that they had heard his stumble and Anna had lost the battle to keep Schalthoff occupied. He didn’t care. In that moment he was no longer Fabel the policeman, he was Fabel the father. He just wanted to get to Schalthoff, to grab him, to smash his fist into his face.

  He rushed out of the room and down the hall, his mind racing, the phantom sensation of soft curls on a dead child’s head burning the palm of his hand.

  Anna wasn’t arguing, she was yelling. Schalthoff was yelling.

  As he got to the end of the hall, Fabel unbuttoned his jacket and reached for where his service automatic rested on his hip.

  It all happened in what could have only been a couple of seconds, yet time slowed, stretched. Fabel reached the living room end of the hall and his first thought was Where did the gun come from? Then he remembered the drawer. That was what was in the drawer. Not a trophy taken from a murdered child, not some incriminating evidence hastily concealed: a gun. Schalthoff had got around Anna and now stood facing her, his back at an angle to Fabel. The killer’s arms were stretched out before him, a revolver iron-clasped in his hands. Fabel could see his profile: drained of colour, features distorted in a tug of war between terror and fury. Anna had one hand raised towards him as if halting traffic, the other held out from her body, poised to go for her sidearm, but frozen in Schalthoff’s aim.

  They shouted at each other: Schalthoff existential rage; Anna professional commands. Fabel stayed silent, for the moment unseen, reaching for his gun.

  It was then that Anna noticed Fabel.

  Schalthoff turned to follow her gaze.

  Fabel heard three shots, deafeningly loud in the confines of the apartment. Two in quick succession, then a third that sounded different.

  The whole world shifted on its axis. Tilted. Shook.

  Fabel was on his back.

  The universe became the junction of wall and plaster ceiling where the hall entered the living room. He heard screaming and another shot. There was no pain. All there was was the strangest sensation that something heavy and immovable had been dropped onto his chest, stopping his lungs from filling with air. And he was afraid. So afraid. He was afraid because he could not breathe; he was afraid because he could not feel any pain; he was afraid of the pain that was to come.

  He’s shot me dead. The thought, and the anger with which it burned, penetrated his fear. I’ve let everyone down because I let the bastard shoot me dead.

  There was no more yelling. Even the bass beat from the apartment above stopped abruptly. They must have heard the shots.

  From where he lay, Fabel could see the print on the wall beside and above him. In the midst of his fear and anger a realization dawned on him: Charon isn’t the artist’s name, it’s who the figure is.

  Anna was above him, looking down on him, blocking out his universe of wall and plaster ceiling. Her face was filled with fear, panic, and that made Fabel sad. He remembered when she had first joined the Murder Commission, how she had been so edgy and defiant and difficult to manage. So young. He remembered how she had dealt with Paul Lindemann’s death on duty, so many years before, and it filled Fabel with a deep sorrow and anger at his own clumsiness realizing that she would now have to deal with his own death. She was talking loudly and urgently to Fabel, tearing at his shirt, pressing down on his chest and adding to the stifling weight.

  She was crying. Fabel had never seen Anna Wolff cry.

  He thought of Gabi, his daughter. And Susanne. He should have married Susanne. He should have asked her.

  He tried to speak. He tried to say Little Timo is in the bedroom. Don’t forget little Timo. But he had no words. No breath.

  Then it came: the pain Fabel had feared. It consumed him, travelled through every nerve in his body like an electric current: white-hot, jangling. He looked pleadingly at Anna, unable to speak, unable to move anything but his eyes. She was using her free hand to make a call on her cell phone, speaking urgently, desperately; choking on her grief and panic. But Fabel couldn’t hear what she was saying because the pain now rang in his ears, seared through his head, burned every millimetre of his body, impossibly increasing in intensity. And anyway, it was too late.

  Jan Fabel had already begun to die.

  2

  As Jan Fabel lay dying from his wounds, two things, and two things alone, filled his universe. Pain and fear. His pain reassured him he was still alive. His fear screamed at him that death was imminent.

  Then the pain began to fade. There was a moment of intense cold, as if every window and door had been thrown open and winter had claimed the whole apartment. Then nothing.

  Fabel knew that the damage to his body was still there, that every nerve would be jangle-hot, but the connection had been switched off: not yet severed, just switched off. The fear persisted, but only for a moment; then even that, too, was gone. He was removed from the machineries of fear and pain, which he now realized were in his body, not his mind. Fabel knew that with each moment his connection to his body was becoming fainter, more tenuous, less important. He was no longer defined by his physical presence.

  I am dying, he thought without fear or sadness, rancour or concern. And at that moment he became aware of the slow, dark turning of the Earth beneath him.

  He was leaving now.

  He saw Anna’s sad, frightened face start to fade; the picture and the plaster ceiling beyond it fall into shadow. Everything went dark, but not a dark like any he had ever known, not a dark without colour. The full spectrum danced across his vision in gentle glows and vivid flashes.

  The world was gone. The world, he now realized, had never truly been there, had never been truly real. This was real, whatever this was. Everything he had ever experienced in life had been dulled, muted, out of focus. Now he was experiencing true reality, where everything was sharper, clearer, brighter. He was bodiless, free from form; all around him, in him, through him, the colours grew more intense, more varied: he now saw colours beyond the spectrum, colours he had not known existed. He saw deep within himself; he saw with eyeless clarity the inconceivable beauty of his own existence – spirals of light and energy of which he was made, an endless coiling that was not just himself, but all the generations that had gone before him. He remembered memories that were not his, but had gone into his making. He sank deep into the warm, fathomless ocean of his own consciousness and saw answers to everything that had ever eluded him.

  Things happened, thoughts came, visions revealed themselves simultaneously, yet without confusion. There was no sequence because Fabel was, he realized, beyond chronology, outside Time, and everything he experienced was instantaneous.

  Fabel, without bodily sensation, to whom a body now seemed an unnatural and distant concept, could somehow sense that he had started to move,
and that he was accelerating to a great speed. The light and colours around him became distorted and stretched and he became aware that he was travelling through a tunnel of no substance. A bright light, that would have dazzled had he still had eyes, seemed to fill everything. Jan Fabel felt a euphoria he had never before experienced. A deep, profound, total, indescribable joy.

  In that same instant, and without a sense of motion, he found himself elevated above and looking down on Grosse Brunnenstrasse. The rain-damp road glistened and sparkled with overlapping blue flashes from the cluster of police cars and the ambulance that had pulled up outside the apartment building. There was sudden activity as a group of paramedics and police burst out of the main entrance and rushed a wheeled stretcher over to the open doors of the ambulance. An Emergency Service doctor trotted alongside the stretcher, leaning across it and working on the body of a blond man in his late forties. An oxygen mask obscured the patient’s face, his shirt had been ripped open and the bright white of the wound pads bloomed dark red as he bled out. Fabel observed the scene with dispassion, disinterest: the body on the trolley had been his, but he now had nothing to do with it, had no further use for it. He watched as they loaded the trolley into the ambulance and Anna Wolff, who had been running behind, clambered in after it.

  He remembered, as if remembering a story, how he had once been in the business of investigating deaths, had attended countless murder scenes, and he now wondered vaguely how many of the dead had looked down on him with the same dispassionate curiosity while he had stood over their remains.

  Fabel drifted up, further above the scene. He was now high above Altona and was surprised to see how close Schalthoff’s apartment had been to his own in Ottensen. Higher. He now saw the whole of Altona and beyond, his sense of sight sharper, further-reaching and more detailed than it had been in life. His vision took in everything around him, in all directions. He was now above the Palmaille and he could see all Hamburg. So much water. Hamburg’s element glistered in the night: the lakes of the Binnen and Aussen Alsters; the dark serpent writhe of the River Elbe through the city; the deep harbours of Finkenwerder. He watched the lights glittering along the Reeperbahn, across Sankt Pauli. He could see in all directions at the same time and the whole dark city – from Blankenese to Altengamme; Sinstorf to Wohldorf – sparkled with hard, sharp obsidian clarity.

  Fabel understood why he was here, temporarily back from that other place that wasn’t a place or a time. He had loved this city so much. He had come to say goodbye.

  Suddenly, his view extended even further, reaching out across the low, dark, velvet land beyond the city and taking in the scattered small constellations of illuminated towns and villages.

  Again there was a sense of rapid and accelerating motion, of colour and light. Hamburg was no longer below him. Once more, nothing of the world he had known remained. He knew he was back in that place where the laws of physics were completely altered and again Time rushed by and Time stood still. The moment he occupied was both fleeting and eternal.

  He was accelerating towards the light that was more than a light. It was the purest white, yet he could distinguish every colour that combined in it. He moved ever faster, yet as he travelled, his entire life played out for him. All of it, every encounter, every sight, sound, smell, touch. He rewitnessed everything he had ever done, everyone he had ever known, every wrong and every right.

  As the light grew close, Jan Fabel again felt the most profound joy. It suffused him, filled his being. Dying was beautiful. The most beautiful part of life, he realized, was its end.

  His father was waiting for him. His grandparents.

  Paul Lindemann, the young officer he had lost to a gunman’s bullet and who had haunted his dreams ever since, was there too; but unlike in the dreams, Paul’s forehead was unblemished by a bullet wound. Fabel saw little Timo Voss, whose knowing smile made Fabel feel that it was he who was the child and Timo the carrier of great wisdom. There were countless others long gone and Fabel recognized some of them as those he had come to know so well, but only after their deaths: the victims of the murders he had investigated. They all welcomed him, and without speaking – without the machinery of speech – Fabel told them how happy he was to have joined them. And all the time the light that was more than a light grew brighter, warmer, more joyous.

  *

  Something burst deep inside him: a hot, burning intense explosion. A vast shadow, like the beat of some broad dark wing, flickered across the light.

  ‘What is happening?’ he asked his father.

  ‘It’s not time yet. Don’t worry, son. It’s just that it’s not your time yet . . .’

  Another burst. This time it came with a surge of intense, searing pain. The light around him dimmed once more. Those who waited for him became shades.

  Again. Another searing pain.

  Everything around him was gone. A dark rushing. A falling back into the world.

  He was back in Hamburg.

  Once more Jan Fabel looked down on his body. He knew where he was: the Emergency Room of the Asklepios Hospital in Altona. From somewhere near the ceiling, he watched as a team of four worked on his body. Three stood back as the fourth applied the defibrillator paddles to his chest.

  Another burst of dark energy and pain as the current arced up and reconnected him to his body.

  The scene he looked down on dulled. The superhuman clarity and range of his vision were gone. The peace and joy he had felt dimmed.

  Jan Fabel sank back into the darkness of life.

  Part One

  Two years later

  3

  His first thought when he woke was that his wife had left the curtains open, as she preferred to do. His second was that the night sky beyond the window must have been clear of cloud, because a toppled slab of grey-white moonlight lay angled across the carpet beyond his bed. His waking had been into confusion and he raised himself on one elbow and took in the moonlit room, analysing an unfamiliar geometry of shadows, trying to remember if he knew this room, where it was, what he was doing in it.

  He struggled to make sense of the dark rectangle in the shadows on the far wall. A painting? And out of the darkness next to his bed, numbers glowed a malevolent red: 01:44. What was this place?

  The panic fell from him. He remembered. I remember it all. I remember everything and I remember that I will soon forget.

  The glowing numbers came from a clock. That’s how clocks were made, now. The painting on the wall wasn’t a painting but a television set. These days, they could make them as thin as a picture frame.

  These days.

  He remembered everything. He remembered that his wife could not have left the curtains open because she had died twenty years before. Her face at age thirty, fifty, seventy returned clear in his recall.

  He remembered who he was, Georg Schmidt, retired bookseller from Ottensen.

  He remembered that he should have died so long ago; that he was old, so very old, and the great weight of his age pulled at him as he eased himself up into a sitting position. He had been dreaming. His dream had been that he was young again and inhabited a world of weaker gravity, where movements were careless, automatic and without thought. Then he realized he hadn’t dreamt that: it had been yesterday and he had been awake. His unravelling mind had deceived him into believing he was young again, took fragments of memories and turned them inside out, making him believe the past was the present. He remembered that too: that the palace of memories he had built over nearly a century of life was crumbling, falling in on itself.

  And he remembered that moments like this, times in the here-and-now, were becoming rarer, less frequent, less sustained. He had to cling on to each such moment. He had to cling to them because he had an important task to complete before the last threads of his memory finally unwound.

  He focused. He brought every part of his mind into that single moment; seized his clarity of thought and clung on to it. He knew where he was: the Alte Mühle Seniors’
Home in Altona. Where they kept the old hidden from the young, and today hidden from yesterday.

  I am Georg Schmidt, he told himself. I am Georg Schmidt and was there in 1932. I saw it all happen but no one would believe me. I am Georg Schmidt, I live in the Alte Mühle old people’s home and my only friend here is Helmut Wohlmann. I am Georg Schmidt and I play chequers with my friend Helmut Wohlmann every evening and we talk about the old days.

  I am Georg Schmidt and I will soon be dead. But, before I die, I must kill Helmut Wohlmann.

  4

  Frankenstein sat in the cell, in the dark, the night-time ritual sounds of confined men and their keepers resounding through the concrete, steel and brick of the prison. He sat unmoving, a massive, malevolent shadow; something yet darker in the darkness. He had the cell to himself, isolated both from those who would do him harm and those whom he would harm.

  Jochen Hübner knew he was a monster. He saw his monstrosity reflected in the mirror, in the expressions of those he caught looking at him; a flash of unease or fear in quickly averted eyes. He was a walking nightmare. The stuff of Gothic tales.

  And like most Gothic monsters, he was man-made. Or at least in part man-made. The truth he had learned was that you become that which others hold you to be, that which others tell you you are. Nature may have shaped him, but it had been people who had defined him. A tiny abnormality within – the smallest of growths on the smallest of glands – had been mirrored in huge abnormality without. It had made him monstrous to others, an object to be feared. Mankind had made him: indirectly through its fear and loathing of his appearance, directly through its botched medical science, trying to cure one problem and creating another.