The Ghosts of Altona Read online

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. Everyone checked out. She seemed to have been involved with two fellow students, but they both had alibis. And we didn’t have a body back then.’

  ‘You know Kerstin Krone was right, don’t you? Finding a body after so much time doesn’t give us any real new hope.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Fabel. ‘But Monika Krone has haunted me throughout my career. It’s a ghost I’d like to lay to rest.’

  ‘What about Kerstin? No chance she could have done her twin in in a fit of sibling rivalry?’

  ‘You’ve met her – not the type. Anyway, we checked her out at the time. She was living and studying at the Leibniz University in Hannover. Physics.’

  ‘That’s not so far away. Couple of hours by car at the most.’

  ‘We looked into it, of course. Kerstin was with her boyfriend in Hannover the night Monika disappeared.’

  Anna nodded thoughtfully. ‘We’ll never know for sure if Monika died that night or not. She could have been kept somewhere for days before being killed and dumped.’

  ‘She died that night.’ Fabel looked surprised by his own statement. ‘I don’t know why, but I’m sure of that.’

  8

  Georg wrote it all down in his notebook. He wrote all the important things he remembered, as he remembered them, into his notebook and locked it away in the desk drawer. His greatest fear was that he would forget that he had the notebook at all: it was his testimony, it was his record. It was his memory.

  After he had killed Helmut Wohlmann, even if he could not explain himself, the notebook would do the explaining for him.

  After writing out his plan in full, when he was going to do it, how he was going to do it, why he was going to do it, he placed the notebook back in the drawer. The key to the drawer was on a chain and after he had locked it, he hung the key around his neck, pushing it down and out of sight under his shirt. It had been the first thing he had worked out: even if he forgot about the notebook, forgot about Helmut Wohlmann and his crimes, he would still be puzzled as to why he had a key around his neck. He might lose his memory, but he wouldn’t lose his curiosity. He would try the key in every lock in his room – and there weren’t many – until he found it fitted the desk drawer. Then he would find the diary and read. There he would find his memory.

  He went over to his wardrobe and fingered through his selection of ties. He did not usually wear a tie, but today he would. He selected one that he thought would do the job: a nylon mix in the material making it stronger. He wrapped the tie around one hand, then the other, snapping the material taut between them. He tried to imagine Helmut writhing and thrashing as Georg tightened the improvised garrotte around his friend’s throat. Helmut had been a big man, physically strong, in his youth and, in a life-or-death struggle, some of that vigour might come back to him.

  The tie would be strong enough for the job, decided Georg. But would he?

  9

  It was such a small piece of news, almost lost, adrift on the ocean of information technologies.

  With a logic that only Hamburgers could understand, the Morgenpost, Hamburg’s morning paper, comes out in the evening and its evening paper, the Abendblatt, hits the streets in the morning.

  Both newspapers, as well as that evening’s edition of TV’s Hamburg Journal, carried a mention of the discovery of the bones beneath the mini-market car park in Altona. It was reported that the remains were suspected to belong to Monika Krone, the young literature student who had gone missing fifteen years before, although this was still to be confirmed by the Polizei Hamburg.

  All the items were unsensational, almost perfunctory. A couple of centimetres of newsprint. Hamburg’s attention was elsewhere, focused on the imminent march and counter-demonstration in Altona. The television mention of the body’s discovery was squeezed in after an item about the forthcoming inauguration in Altona of a new building named after an anti-Nazi martyr and before the sports results and weather. There was nothing more the media could say until the identity had been confirmed. Brief, factual, unsensational.

  But that small scrap of news reached out across Hamburg and for three men – three men leading very different lives in different parts of the city – the news had the impact of watching planes flying into New York buildings.

  She had been found.

  The ghost of a past that united the three men – and another two as yet beyond the scope of the news – reached out from print and screen and seized them.

  The painter stood alone at his easel, a face burned into the canvas of his recall. The architect, as usual surrounded by others, hid his shock in a sleek smile and handsome isolation in a party crowd. The writer sat at his computer, staring at the item on the Abendblatt’s online edition, feeling betrayed that his sanctuary of a million words, which he had spent fifteen years constructing, had been destroyed in a single paragraph of disinterested journalism. The past he had spent so long convincing himself to be a fiction had now broken the surface of the real world, shattering his present.

  Three men: each alone with memories he could not share with anyone. Memories they could not share with each other, even though the painter, the writer and the architect thought of each other in the desolate wake of the news. They had sworn long ago never to have anything to do with each other again. Three men haunted by the same ghosts; divided forever by the same experience.

  But each, in his own way, felt the chill arrival of an overdue reckoning.

  10

  Hamburg’s Police Presidium on the north edge of the Winterhuder Stadtpark was exactly the same age as the Monika Krone case. Fifteen years before, Fabel had been in the middle of the Krone investigation when the Polizei Hamburg had moved headquarters from a sixties high-rise office block in Beim Strohhause to this custom-built building in Alsterdorf.

  The new Presidium – and Fabel still thought of it as the new Presidium – was a six-storey structure that had been built as a circle around a central atrium open to the sky; all the office suites, including the Murder Commission, radiated out as the arms from its circular hallways. From the air, the shape was that of a giant Police Star, the symbol of police forces throughout Germany.

  Anna drove the service BMW down into the underground car park beneath the Presidium, parking in one of the Murder Commission’s allocated spaces.

  ‘Get everyone together for a briefing,’ said Fabel when Anna switched off the engine. ‘I need to know where we are with caseloads before I start allocating resources to the Krone case. It’s a cold case, after all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’d like to take the lead on it myself. I know you’ve got other stuff on, and you’re usually teamed with Henk Hermann, but are you okay working it with me?’

  Anna turned to him. There was a cautious, compliant softness in the way she looked at him and again it saddened him. He missed the frank, defiant Anna who had always taken him to task on any decision she didn’t agree with. Rank, he had long realized, had been an abstract concept to Anna. But now she deferred to him unquestioningly. It was as if he had survived the shooting, but the old Anna hadn’t.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘No problem.’

  They got out of the car. This, decided Fabel, was the moment.

  ‘It’s all right, Anna,’ he said.

  She frowned as she looked at him over the roof of the car. ‘What?’

  ‘I just wanted you to know: it’s all right.’

  ‘What’s all right?’

  ‘Me. Things. Everything.’ Fabel closed his car door and leaned his elbow on the BMW’s roof. ‘I know you’ve found it hard. Since I came back, I mean. What happened . . . well, what happened was a trauma for you, too. You saw me shot and you killed a man. But I think you still worry about me and I wanted you to know it’s all right. I’m okay. We’re okay.’

  Anna seemed to watch Fabel for a while, her expression unreadable. She sighed. ‘I go through it in my head all the time,’ she said. ‘I see Schalthoff begin to turn, like it was in slow m
otion. I take it apart movement by movement.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ said Fabel.

  ‘I hesitated.’ Anna broke eye contact with Fabel, looking down for a moment at the floor of the parking garage. ‘Going through it in my head . . . taking it apart like that . . . I can see now that I hesitated in firing. I could have shot him before he got off his second round.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Anna. You maybe remember hesitating, imagine you hesitated, when you didn’t. You’ve interviewed enough witnesses to know that people fill in the gaps their memories leave. And what if you did hesitate? I wouldn’t want to work with an officer who didn’t think twice before ending a life. We’re police officers, not soldiers. In any case, I didn’t even have my own firearm drawn. If anyone made a mistake it was me. I let my own emotions cloud procedure. I was just so . . .’ He struggled for the right word, which refused to yield itself. ‘You know, finding little Timo Voss like that. It got to me and it could have cost both our lives.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Listen, Anna, there are things I’ve learned because of the experience I went through. Different ways of looking at things, I suppose. You learn to appreciate what you’ve got, professionally as well as personally. I know I gave you a hard time when you first joined the team, but that was because I had to control the very energy I recruited you for. I don’t want you walking on eggshells when you’re around me – not just because it makes things awkward, but because it inhibits your effectiveness. I want you back, Anna. Completely back. If you don’t agree with something I’m doing, I want you to tell me. I need you to challenge me again.’

  Anna looked at him without answering for a moment.

  She nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll try. It should be easy because you can be a real arsehole sometimes.’

  Fabel grinned. ‘That’s the attitude I like to see, Chief Commissar Wolff.’

  *

  Fabel caught up on outstanding paperwork and answered internal emails for an hour before it was time to head to the Murder Commission’s meeting room. There was a knock on the door and a woman in her forties entered. Principal Chief Commissar Nicola Brüggemann was Fabel’s deputy. A no-nonsense Holsteiner, she was at least one metre eighty tall, and her short-at-the-sides and thick-on-top dark hair added to the masculinity of her look. There was a tall, thin, blond young man with her whom Fabel recognized as Sven Bruns. Werner Meyer, Fabel’s longest standing colleague and personal friend, had retired from the police earlier that year and Fabel had had to reshuffle his team. A Frisian like Fabel, Bruns was the newest addition to the team. He had served as a Criminal Commissar with the Polizei Niedersachsen before transferring to the Polizei Hamburg.

  ‘Welcome on board . . .’ Fabel stood up and shook hands with the taller man. ‘Your timing is perfect, we’re just about to have a briefing.’

  ‘It’s an honour to have been selected,’ Bruns said so earnestly that Fabel smiled. ‘I won’t let you down, Herr Principal Chief Criminal Commissar.’

  ‘Chef will do,’ said Fabel. ‘We’ll get you teamed up and operational, but in the meantime it’s a watch and learn set-up. If you have any questions about anything, or any problems crop up, my door is open, as is Principal Chief Commissar Brüggemann’s. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’

  *

  The team was waiting in the briefing room. Fabel’s second family. Like so many other things, so many previously unconsidered elements of his life, it was something to which Fabel had given a lot of thought since the shooting. People abstracted basic instincts into the most unlikely contexts, passions took the strangest forms. For Fabel, his instinct as a father was one of his most powerful and he had extended and abstracted it into a management style. It hadn’t been something conscious or contrived, it was natural; just the way things were with him. He was protective of them, ambitious for them, continuously anxious for them.

  The Murder Commission was divided into five teams of two officers each. The senior teams were made up of Chief Commissars: Thomas Glasmacher worked with Dirk Hechtner, Anna Wolff with Henk Hermann. The two Principal Chief Commissars, Fabel and Nicola Brüggemann, oversaw all the investigations on the board and, when there was a particularly high-profile or complicated case, one of them would take personal charge of it. Fabel’s own expertise was being requested more and more by other forces across the Federal Republic. He knew the fifth floor – the Presidial Department where the Police President and the senior management of the Polizei Hamburg had their offices – saw Fabel as a poster boy for the Polizei Hamburg. The truth was he found it tiresome to be dragged away from his beloved Hamburg to help track murderers with twisted agendas in Bavaria or Thüringen.

  He started the briefing by introducing the new guy, Sven Bruns, who would eventually be teamed up with a senior officer. There were the expected good-natured jokes about there now being two Frisians on the team and Fabel saw some of the tension ease from Bruns’s earnest expression. He would watch the new detective, Fabel decided. They had agreed a three month probation and Fabel had explained that there would be no disgrace in moving on afterwards: working constantly with murder was something only a few officers could do, and it was often only after experiencing the reality of it that you found out if you were cut out for it the job.

  They ran through the incident board. Contrary to what most people believed, murder was almost always a sordid and dirty affair; usually the result of drink- or drug-fuelled violence. In reality there were practically no cool-headed and cold-blooded assassins; even the public’s movie-influenced image of serial killers was skewed from reality. Serial killers were, for the most part, of below average IQ and acting on the most base of instincts, often impulsively, seeking sexual gratification through the torture and death of others. Those killers who were organized and intelligent were almost always disadvantaged by towering egomania or were otherwise deranged. Or there were the Angels of Death: the medical professionals abusing the trust of others and their licensed access to lethal substances simply to watch the light go out of the eyes of their victims. For many, it seemed, there was wonder in Death.

  There were four cases current. Three of them were balefully straightforward: an abusive husband had bludgeoned his wife to death; a youth in his late teens had stabbed another outside a bar in the Kiez; an illegal immigrant had been kicked to death by a gang for no other reason than not being German. The three cases were at various stages of completion and Fabel listened to the progress reports on each. As he did so, he found himself wondering about each victim’s leaving of life; whether their experiences had been similar to his.

  The fourth inquiry stood apart. Fabel let Anna run through the history of the Monika Krone case.

  ‘Anna and I are leads on this, but I’ll need some of you for follow-ups,’ said Fabel when she had finished. ‘I’ll allocate once I have the case plan worked up. Anna, when we’re through, could you give me a note of the days you’re off over the next couple of weeks?’

  ‘Sure. Why?’

  ‘Just want to make sure I have you with me for a couple of interviews,’ Fabel said. It was a lie and he didn’t feel good about it. It was a lie because there was one interview he specifically didn’t want her to attend.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to the team. ‘Let’s proceed as normal, but remember we may have more cases on our plate by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘The march?’ Nicola Brüggemann asked.

  ‘The march. Hopefully there’ll be as few injuries as possible, and God knows it would be great if it passed off without incident, but I doubt it. All it needs is one knife brought to the party . . .’

  11

  The café was in the Schanzenviertel, on the ground floor corner of a chunk of solid and previously grand Wilhelmine architecture now dressed at street level in black-painted stucco and graffiti. In the bright spring sunshine, the café’s urban, alternative cool just looked worn, tired and grubby. It suited Zombie perfectly.

  Zombie was, as he always was, ten minut
es early for his meeting with Alex Schuldhaus, who was perhaps the only remaining voluntary connection Zombie had with the living, and it was a connection maintained purely through necessity.

  He always chose to meet Schuldhaus at this café because there were tables outside, which meant there was less chance of anyone smelling his corruption. Zombie also knew – although Schuldhaus didn’t know he knew – that his dealer lived in Bartelsstrasse and the café wasn’t far for him to come. If you could call Schuldhaus a dealer at all: Zombie knew his former fellow student was no organized-crime figure, and hardly a drug pusher in the professional sense. Instead he was someone who provided a tight circle of friends with weed, and very occasionally something a little more legally challenging. But Zombie was a special customer. Someone who paid over the odds for an already expensive commodity: something very special that he knew made Schuldhaus nervous – noticeably nervous – when carrying. It therefore made sense to make their meet as close to his apartment as possible.

  Schuldhaus arrived on time. He was dark blond, tall, rangy and good-looking and wore an outfit of jeans and a Hamburg Freezers T-shirt. He had an old-looking canvas rucksack slung over one shoulder. He was the type who at forty dressed the same way he had as a student; who lived broadly the same kind of life. When they had been at university together, Schuldhaus had been popular and had barely acknowledged Zombie. He didn’t hold it against him. Zombie had been the type not to be noticed.

  Alex Schuldhaus shook hands with Zombie, a ritual he seemed to insist on following, before sitting down opposite him and ordering a herbal tea. Zombie watched him. His natural liveliness and vigour outshone his nervousness. Schuldhaus smiled a lot. At Zombie, at the waitress, at the world. His perpetual optimism and cheer made him the polar opposite of his customer and Zombie found his vigour nauseating in the same way others would find the presence of a rotting corpse sickening.