The Ghosts of Altona Page 7

  Georg’s father had loved to hear the facts that his son seemed to soak up like a sponge, especially those facts about their home quarter: how Altona had started out as a small settlement of fishermen and craftsmen, how it had grown to become the second biggest city in Denmark, envious eyes cast on it by its German neighbour, Hamburg. How it had developed a very Danish character and became known for its tolerance and its religious and commercial freedoms, attracting Jews and others discriminated against in Hamburg. Even after becoming German and absorption into the Prussian state of Schleswig-Holstein, Altona had kept its individuality and had influenced the liberal and social-democratic policies of its Hamburg neighbour.

  But to some, Altona was a symbol of something to be wiped out. A Red Flag to a Brown-shirted bull.

  *

  Seven thousand of them had come that day. They zigzagged their way through Altona Altstadt, a brass-band-heralded assault on the city quarter. It hadn’t taken long for the first trouble to erupt. The Nazis had shouted inflammatory chants, taunting the Communist Party and threatening Jews and other Altona inhabitants. In reply, Communist Party members had jeered and barracked the marchers. Shouts turned to scuffles and scuffles turned to fights, fists and improvised weapons flying.

  Georg had been under strict instructions to stay indoors, his father going out to do his duty as a KPD member and stand up to the fascists. There was going to be trouble, his father had told him, maybe even bloodshed. But it had been too bright and warm a day and Georg too bright and curious a boy and, once his father had left, he had slipped out and followed him at a safe distance.

  Georg had navigated through a dense forest of Altonaers, gathered along the route of the march, fenced in by often scared-looking policemen. Eggerstedt, the President of the Polizei Hamburg, was a Social Democrat, but had not heeded Communist Party warnings that allowing the Nazis to march through Altona would result in a bloodbath. But the political climate had been tense and the Nazis were being appeased, added to which neither Eggerstedt nor his deputy were in Hamburg on the day of the march. His officers, tense and outnumbered on both sides, had been left to deal with the consequences.

  Georg had weaved through the crowds, keeping his father just in sight. The jeers and the strident sound of drums and brass swelled in the warm air and, despite himself, Georg felt a thrill.

  Then the jeers turned to yells, the tension turned to fury. Georg could now see the marchers, in SS and SA uniforms, and he could hear them too, their full-throated singing of the chant, Die rote Front schlagen wir zu Brei! We will beat the Red Front to a pulp!

  And it was then he saw Helmut Wohlmann. Wohlmann was four years older than Georg and had been his father’s apprentice until recently. After his parents had died, Helmut had lived for a while with Georg and his father and had become like an older brother to Georg. But then, at a time when it seemed like everyone was becoming radicalized, polarized, Helmut had joined the NSDAP. As fervent a Nazi as Georg’s father was a Communist, Helmut had moved out and all contact had been severed. And now Georg saw him, brown-shirted, marching with the others.

  There was a pulse, a sudden swell and surge as the crowd lurched forward, straining the thin police line. In response, the SA marchers launched themselves at the bystanders, belts wrapped around their fists, using their buckles as weapons.

  Georg found himself unexpectedly near his father. Their eyes met and Franz Schmidt looked suddenly scared. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, shooing Georg away from danger.

  It was then that shots rang out.

  Two SS men fell to the cobbled ground. One dead instantly, the other screaming for a few moments.

  The police looked around wildly, confused, trying to find the source of the gunfire. Then, as the crowd surged forward in fury, fists flying, batons were swung to beat back the wave. First one, then another policeman fired shots at imagined gunmen – the first of five thousand police rounds to be fired that day, most into the crowd.

  Georg was pushed forward with the charging crowd and a police baton smashed into his right temple, robbing him of consciousness.

  But before the darkness overcame him, one picture was burned into his mind: that of his father clutching his chest and sinking to his knees, and Helmut Wohlmann in his SA uniform standing over him.

  *

  After he replaced the notebook and locked the drawer with the key that hung around his neck, Georg Schmidt sat back down to watch the television. He gazed at the screen, suddenly confused about what he was watching.

  There was some kind of trouble, a riot. He didn’t know where the riot was taking place or who was rioting, and it upset him terribly that he could not remember why this news item should make him feel quite so angry.

  14

  It would happen now. After so long, Zombie would have his revenge. It was like a starving man anticipating a long-denied feast. For Zombie, that anticipation was a sensation that almost matched the intensity of feeling he had had when he had been alive.

  Being dead, he knew he was beyond most of the passions and hungers of the living. But if there was one thing Gothic fiction and horror movies got right, it was that the dead would stir in the name of vengeance to right some ancient wrong. And, just as in Gothic fiction, there was always a catalyst: some event that revitalized long-dead anger and hatred, reawakening a long-dormant hunger for vengeance.

  Now Zombie sat in his kitchen, a pack of disposable syringes and two bottles, each containing fifty millilitres of xylazine, lying in front of him on the veneered surface of the kitchen table. It was much, much more than he would need. Picking up a bottle between forefinger and thumb, he held it to the window. His chosen tool for vengeance looked innocuous in the pale light, the clear liquid sleek and viscous in its glass capsule. This was the key that would unlock his Golem. The time would be soon.

  Two months before, Zombie had caught a fleeting glimpse sight of someone in the street. A ghost passing. A small event, but bright and impossible. And a moment around which his plans had slowly coalesced. But it had not been enough to convince him to act. The catalyst for that had been the discovery of the remains, stripped clean of their pale, beautiful flesh, under the asphalt of the mini-market car park. There were connections the police would not have even considered making; they were completely in the dark about what happened that night fifteen years ago, and before they cast light on it, before they tracked Zombie down, he would have fulfilled his mission. He would be avenged. She would be avenged.

  First he needed his Golem.

  Zombie had spent hours puzzling, calculating, researching. He needed to break his Golem free from its bonds, but that was perhaps the most difficult and complicated part of his mission. Communication was all but impossible, transporting the necessary materials was every bit as challenging. The one advantage that Zombie had was not having to worry about leaving incriminating evidence – so long as it didn’t lead the police to his door before he had completed his mission. Once he had had his revenge, then they could come for him and he wouldn’t care.

  After all, what could they do to an already dead man?

  15

  There were people who complained about the luxury enjoyed by convicted prisoners; as if TVs and Xboxes were the sole benchmarks of quality of life. Fabel was not one of those people: every time he had to interview an offender in prison and found himself encapsulated in wall, wire and mesh, he became aware of the crushing claustrophobia of statutory confinement.

  Fabel knew that, at the start of his sentence, Jochen Hübner had been an inmate of the controversial Social Therapy Prison in Hamburg-Bergedorf, which dealt mainly with those convicted of sexual crimes. But the Bergedorf facility had been closed in 2004 and the Social Therapy Prison a moved to two brick-built units close to the main prison in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel, commonly known as Santa Fu. The prison’s Social Therapy Units held some of the most violent offenders in northern Germany, including sex offenders. The units’ control and reward system was as much about tre
atment as punishment and it had seen some spectacular successes.

  But not with Jochen Hübner.

  In a population of the violent, Hübner had been the most feared. His record of violent assaults on inmates and staff, including the blinding of another prisoner, had resulted in him being transferred here, in 2005, to the maximum security wing of the main prison at Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel. He was now regarded both as an extreme danger to other prisoners and as a maximum escape risk.

  And the idea of Jochen Hübner escaping into Hamburg was the stuff of nightmares.

  It was no accident that it was Anna Wolff’s day off. Fabel knew it was wrong of him to discriminate against Anna because of her gender, but Jochen Hübner’s monumental animosity towards women would mean that Anna’s presence would dominate the interview. Instead, needing another officer to come with him, Fabel had asked Henk Hermann to sit in with him. Sit in but say nothing.

  ‘Jochen Hübner’s no genius, no evil mastermind,’ explained Fabel, ‘but he has an uncanny knack of finding ways into your head. And Jochen Hübner is not someone you want inside your head.’

  ‘Do you think he killed the Krone girl?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like I told Anna, he’s not the kind of ego to allow someone else – even an unidentified someone else – to take credit for his handiwork. But he certainly has the profile for it. I could never understand why he never killed other women.’

  Henk and Fabel were led by a prison officer to an interview room. It had one window looking out over the prison gardens and grounds, another between it and the hall they had just come along. It was a bright room, but purely functional, and Fabel could see that both windows, glazed with thick, shatterproof acrylic, were fixed into the concrete of the building and could not be opened. Confinement within confinement. Similarly, the table and benches that occupied the centre of the room were anchored and immovable. Fabel felt himself become slightly agitated but took a breath. He had to be completely relaxed for the interview to come.

  ‘Be warned, Henk,’ he said as they took their places at the table. ‘Hübner has . . . well, he has presence.’

  Henk shrugged. ‘He’s a sick fuck, is all I know, Chef.’

  Through the viewing window, Fabel saw them approach along the hall: an officer in the uniform of the Hamburg Justice Department and a man so tall only the lower part of his profile could be seen through the window.

  The door opened and the two men entered, Jochen Hübner ducking his massive head to pass through the doorway. Fabel sensed Henk Hermann tense next to him. He wasn’t surprised: even Fabel, although he had been prepared for it, was once again struck by Hübner’s appearance. Fabel reckoned the convicted rapist must have been at the very least 210 centimetres tall. Even with this great stature, his massive head looked oversized, the long black hair scraped back into a ponytail, as if to emphasize the brutality of the features. The impression was of some evolutionary clock having been wound back.

  ‘I see your little friend is taken aback, Fabel.’ Hübner’s voice was a deep, resonating but harsh baritone as he struggled to angle his legs between the fixed bench and the interview table, like an adult struggling to sit on a child’s play furniture. Once he was seated opposite Fabel and Henk, Hübner leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. In anyone else, it would have been a perfectly normal, relaxed gesture, but Hübner’s Easter Island head, with its prognathous jaw and small glittering eyes beneath bulging brow ridges, turned it into an aggression, a threatening invasion of space. He smiled at Henk, exposing gappy, little white teeth that looked intended for a smaller mouth.

  Fabel looked across to the prison officer and nodded.

  ‘Press the buzzer when you want him taken back,’ the guard said and left. ‘Remember, I’ll be right outside the door.’ There was a metallic clunk as the door locked automatically behind the guard when he left.

  ‘Not what you expected?’ Hübner held Henk in his gaze, tilting the mass of his skull and smiling maliciously. Henk said nothing.

  ‘Acromegaly,’ Hübner explained, keeping Henk locked in his gaze. ‘Maybe Fabel here has already told you. Fucked-up pituitary gland. A benign tumour called an adenoma. It switched my growing back on but for a while slowed down my production of testosterone. They stuck a knife up my nose and cut the fucker out though. Wanna know the funny thing? A real freak this – afterwards I started to produce more testosterone than before. Way too much. The opposite of what usually happens. Something to do with what they call the luteinizing hormone. Anyway, that’s what gives me my sunny disposition. Turned me into a fucking and fighting machine.’ He widened his grin. ‘Got a girlfriend?’

  Henk bristled and Fabel cut in before he had a chance to answer. ‘We’ve found Monika Krone,’ he said and shot his junior officer a look that echoed his earlier warning about allowing Hübner into his head. The giant across the table caught the look and laughed a deep, cavernous laugh.

  ‘Did you hear me, Herr Hübner? I said we’ve found Monika Krone.’

  ‘So fucking what?’

  ‘I thought you’d like to know. We’ve reopened the case.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘You know what it has got to do with you. You killed her and put her there.’

  ‘Sure I did. I fucked her, strangled her and buried her under a fucking mini-market. There you go, there’s your confession. Now fuck off.’ Hübner’s stone-hewn features twisted in contempt.

  ‘If that’s supposed to be a fake confession,’ said Henk, ‘how do you know that we found her near a mini-market?’

  ‘I follow the Principal Chief Commissar’s career with interest.’ Hübner turned to Fabel as he answered. No smiling. ‘Real close interest. We do get papers in here, you know. I read about it. Just like I read about you getting shot. Nice one. I heard you nearly died. I hope you were scared. Were you scared, Fabel?’

  ‘So you’re saying you didn’t kill Monika Krone?’ asked Henk Hermann. Hübner ignored him, instead splaying his massive hands with their too-long, too-thick fingers on the metal surface of the tabletop and looking at them.

  ‘We placed you in the area of the party the night she disappeared,’ said Fabel.

  ‘We went over all this before. You bore me, Fabel.’

  ‘But you were there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Like I told you before, I was in the area, yes.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’ asked Henk. Hübner looked at him with penetrating contempt, then turned back to Fabel, ignoring the question.

  ‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you think it was me. You’re just going through a hoop, aren’t you, Fabel? You and the midget here out on a fishing trip.’

  ‘You were there, weren’t you?’ Fabel asked. ‘Watching the party . . . listening to all of that laughter. All of those student girls, laughing and joking and flirting with boys. You don’t like clever women, do you, Jochen?’

  Hübner deep-rumbled a laugh again. ‘Is this the penetrating insight that I’ve heard so much about, Fabel? Making out I’m intimidated by clever women? Okay, you’re right – I hate clever women. I fucking loathe and despise them. I want to make them whine and scream and beg, to do things that make them sick just because they think there’s a chance I’ll stop hurting them and maybe let them live. Yep . . .’ he held the vast shields of his palms up, ‘you’ve got me. I’m a fucking inadequate who makes up for a tiny dick and a small brain by hating college girls.’

  ‘You were there that night, in that area,’ said Fabel. ‘We know that. I think you were there hunting. You heard the party and you waited until a girl came out on her own. That girl was Monika Krone. You followed her and when you got your chance you snatched her off the street. When you were finished with her you killed her and dumped her body. It’s what you had been building up to all that time.’

  ‘This is all you had fifteen years ago. It was fuck all then and it’s fuck all now. The only new thing you’ve got is a body and I’m guessing not much of
a body after all this time. Truth is, you never did understand me, did you, Fabel? You still think that I started to kill my victims . . . either this one or others.’

  ‘I know you think you’re unique,’ said Fabel, ‘but you’re anything but. There’s a pattern to people like you, to your behaviour. A predictable pattern. You would have started killing if we hadn’t caught you. What I need to know is if you had already started. So what do you say, Jochen? Did you kill Monika?’

  The massive head shook, not in denial but as if in disappointment. ‘You don’t get it, do you? I didn’t kill her or any other bitch. Don’t you understand? What I did to them – what I put them through – I don’t want them to die afterwards. I want them to live. I want them to live long, long lives. Because every day, every single day they live when I’m finished with them, they will remember what I did. What they became. What was done to them. You’re too stupid to realize that the worst thing I did to them was to let them live . . .’

  16

  ‘Hamburg, throughout its history as a Hanseatic League city, has had an identity unique in Germany. We are, and always have been, about the world, about looking outward instead of inward. About cosmopolitanism, internationalism and global trade. Where we stand now, here in Altona, was for centuries Danish soil. One could argue that Hamburg is as Scandinavian and as Anglo-Saxon as it is German. Traditionally, we have found trading partners in every compass point. In an increasingly globalized marketplace, no city is better placed or has a more appropriate history to seize every opportunity that new technology and new markets offer . . .’ Uwe Taubitz, the Principal Mayor of Hamburg, paused for the on-cue ripple of polite applause.