The Ghosts of Altona (17 page)

There were clothes neatly folded on the bed: a pair of jeans, four shirts, two sweaters as well as underwear and socks, still in their plastic store packets. A huge pair of boots sat in front of the bed.

‘I got all of this stuff on the internet,’ explained Zombie. ‘I didn’t want to arouse suspicion by going in person into a store where it would be obvious they weren’t for me. I hope everything fits.’

Frankenstein nodded. ‘Thanks.’

Zombie ran through the house rules. Like everything he had asked of Frankenstein, they were requests, not demands, but he had made it very clear that every rule was there to prevent Frankenstein’s recapture and the consequent collapse of Zombie’s plans.

With a whole house lying empty, Frankenstein did not understand why he insisted he spend almost all of his time in the cellar. But that was the way Zombie wanted it, so he complied. It was a new experience for Hübner: to have someone whom he respected, whose bidding he was happy to do. Zombie had explained to him that once he had done what he asked of him, he would be given his turn to wreak revenge on those who had wronged him. Zombie would do everything he could to help him but, he had explained, he might not be able to as the police would probably have him by that time.

‘You should be comfortable,’ said Zombie. ‘It’s only temporary, but necessary. No one will find you here and without any sightings of you, the police will assume you have escaped the city, perhaps even Germany. The most important thing is that you stay out of sight. Only go up to the hall when you need to use the toilet and even then you’ll need to check there’s no one walking nearby. This house is supposed to be unoccupied. Dark and silent.’

‘I’ve got it,’ said Frankenstein. Then, after a moment: ‘They will question you about the escape, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I know that. I’m prepared for it. They’ll question any of the staff at the prison who had regular contact with you. Because I was only there two days a week, it’ll take some time before they get to me.’

‘And what you’ve said you want to do – you understand you won’t get away with it. They’ll catch you, eventually. You know that too, don’t you?’

‘I know they will,’ said Zombie. ‘In fact that’s what I’m counting on.’

Part Two

27

She had been found. After all these years, she had been found. The thought had haunted him every day and every night since the news had dropped into his world, shattering it. And, tonight, it had echoed its way through a bottle and a half of red wine and an empty stomach.

Detlev Traxinger drank alone. His partner and business manager Anja Koetzing had left for the evening, having gone through the coming week’s viewings and arrangements for the new exhibition at the end of the month. All through the briefing, Traxinger had sat there nodding, taking in nothing, agreeing to everything. All he could think about was the fact that they had found her, after fifteen years.

After Anja had left him alone in the studio, he had opened up the wine and assiduously applied himself to the task of getting as seriously drunk as possible as quickly as possible. Now, Traxinger stood in the centre of his vast studio, converted from an old machine works, and felt more alone than he had ever felt, even during the last fifteen years. He stood and drank, willing himself into a drunken oblivion where he might, just might, be able to stop thinking of her.

They had found her.

He put the glass down and looked at his hands. They were farm labourer’s hands: big, thick-fingered, clumsy. Not the hands of an artist. It had been God’s joke – God or Fate or Genetics or Nature – to give him the eye and soul of an artist and the ham fists and sausage fingers of a farm labourer. And now, even though he was only forty-one, years of drinking and drug-taking had added an old-man tremor to the clumsy hands.

What he saw in his artist’s mind, the farmworker’s hands failed to execute. It wasn’t as if the art he generated was bad, and it certainly had attracted both a following and a handsome income; it was just that it never quite matched the perfection of image he had in his mind.

Traxinger looked up from his hands and stared out through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the converted factory, out over the water of the Elbe that glistened like wet oil paints in the early evening light. A ship drifted by: a dark silhouette against the curtain of a deepening sky. Without seeing it, he watched it slide past and finished the glass of wine in two deep draughts. He was somewhere else, his mind removed from the present. A dark place of broken stones; that night, fifteen years before.

They had found her.

He refilled the drained glass, emptying the bottle and opening a new one, preparing for a continuous drift into drunkenness. He left the freshly opened bottle sitting on the studio table, next to carefully arranged paints, linseed and turpentine, and taking the refilled glass with him, made his way through the studio, the entrance hall and the exhibition space. When he reached the storeroom, he unlocked the door, reached in and switched on the lights. Canvases were arranged in double-height, slide-out storage racks. So much work. And so much of that work would never be seen by anyone else. He didn’t even let Anja Koetzing come in here alone.

He made his way to the far end of the storeroom, past the rows of work that would eventually be displayed, to the last ranks – the work that would never be displayed.

Setting his wine glass down on the concrete floor, he reached up to the rack on his left, to the canvas stored at the very back, and pulled it out. He tugged at the sheet covering it and it slid free.

She gazed down at him. Beautiful, cold, cruel, magnificent. It had been the best painting he had done of her, and it caught so much of her essence, but again the thick-fingered farmer’s hands had let down the perfect vision, the complete and faithful recollection of her that lived in his head.

His secret, hidden muse. His goddess.

She stared down at him from the canvas, silently mocking the emptiness of the last fifteen years of his life. He reached up to the rack opposite, pulled out a second canvas, and the two pictures sat side by side but a universe apart. The second painting was his self-portrait. His hands hadn’t failed him here: a perfect reflection of hidden stains, marks and scars. His corruption, his venality and the wastefulness of fifteen empty but soiled years returned his gaze with rheumy eyes.

Traxinger sat down next to his wine glass on the concrete floor and stared at the side-by-side portraits. He started to cry.

After a while, when his tears and his wine glass had both been drained, he pushed the paintings back into place, locked the storeroom and made his way back through to his studio. It was the only place in his life that had any order, an island of organized thought in an ocean of chaos. But tonight, he would break a rule and get drunk there and sleep on the dust-sheet-draped couch.

He refilled his glass to the brim and again drained it as if drinking water. The extra alcohol hitting his system muted the feeling that there had been an odd aftertaste, despite it being the same wine as the last bottle.

He heard a noise behind him.

28

Birgit Taubitz watched him sleep. The bastard even did that handsomely. She had met Tobias Albrecht at a Hamburg Senate official dinner, held in the restaurant in the cellar of City Hall. The second she saw him, she loathed him; she also wanted him with a hunger she hadn’t known before. He had been polite, charming and respectful, but she had seen the same hunger, and the same loathing, in his eyes when he looked at her. Two of a kind.

Tobias was the kind of man that had never known a woman to turn him down, much in the same way that Birgit was the kind of woman who could make a near slave of any man she chose. There were other men more handsome, and other women more beautiful, but they both, in very different ways, had something extra in their looks: a classical, dark wickedness that the good were invariably drawn to. But they had been drawn to each other, and it was the kind of volatile, unstable but delicious chemistry they both knew could not last and would probably end very badly. And it was that very danger that added to the intensity of their lovemaking.

Birgit had been married to Uwe Taubitz for ten years. She had seen in him the kind of bland, generic appeal that Germans liked in their politicians. To start with, she had seen Taubitz as a potential Chancellor, and he had become Hamburg’s Principal Mayor at only forty-three, but it soon became clear that his political ambitions extended no further than Hamburg’s city limits. Some blandness, it appeared, was more than skin deep.

Tobias, on the other hand, was the type of man she had always kept at arm’s length. There was nothing bland about him: he was egotistical, arrogant, and probably genuinely bad. His jet-black hair with its widow’s peak, his aquiline, predatory good looks and his tall lean frame had defined him: his conceit was at times astounding and as she got to know him, as much as anyone could get to know Tobias Albrecht, she realized he had styled himself as some kind of latter-day Byron. Self-consciously, deliberately and occasionally tediously wicked.

But he was also the best lover she had ever had.

She had been sleeping with Albrecht for eighteen months, their relationship carnal: purely, simply, deliciously carnal. There was never any talk of Birgit leaving her husband for Tobias; such ideas would be ridiculous, if they ever were to occur to either of them at all. Theirs was a relationship that had no future. It was about their bodies, their youth and their sexual vigour. There was no talk of love. There would be no growing old together. No companionship.

As Hamburg’s principal Bürgermeister, Uwe Taubitz’s social duties were onerous, a burden often shared with his wife, but there were innumerable media events, dinners, openings, presentations and ceremonies that he attended alone, meaning she had all the opportunities she wanted to meet with Tobias. It sorrowed her – though not often and not much – when she thought of her husband’s genuine distress that he had to spend so much time apart from her.

Birgit slipped out of the bed and went over to the window. Albrecht’s apartment was a penthouse in a building he had designed himself. The building was only eight storeys high: Hamburg was a largely low-rise city, regulations prohibited anything near the city centre that would dominate the spires of the four churches, the Nikolai ruin and the city hall, which everyone used as landmarks to navigate by. However, Albrecht’s penthouse had a commanding view across the waters of the Elbe. The architecture and the interior design of the apartment were a perfect reflection of its designer: it was impeccably tasteful, cool, sophisticated and informed by all the right cultural influences. And, ultimately, it was soulless: as empty of any sense of being a home as Tobias was empty of any sense of being a real human being.

The living space, kitchen and dining area were all open plan, but the ceiling was double height. Original pieces of art were strategically positioned to work with the architecture and emphasize geometries, rather than for their own merit. There was one discordant note, though: the only truly personal touch that didn’t fit with the colour scheme or style theme of the apartment: a painting that looked completely out of place.

It was both well-executed and vulgar; combining a modern use of colour with a heavily Gothic reference. On first sight, the painting looked to Birgit like the kind of artwork death-metal bands would use for album covers – and totally out of keeping with Tobias’s taste. She recognized the artist as Detlev Traxinger, confirmed by the monogram ‘DT’ at the bottom of the canvas. It was a life-size nude of a woman standing in a graveyard, her pale, moonlit body framed by writhing ivy and acanthus – more than framed, Birgit realized; it was as if the dark, glossy vines and leaves were seeking to envelop her, to claim her pale flesh and pull it back into the earth. The woman in the painting possessed great beauty, but a cruel, frightening, commanding beauty – a more perfect beauty than Birgit’s. There was something about the figure that made Birgit think it had more than a little to do with death.

But that wasn’t what troubled her most. The thing that had drawn Birgit’s attention to the picture was the woman’s hair: a blaze of rich, thick, auburn-red hair. Hair exactly like Birgit’s own.

She now stood in the dark, naked at the window, looking out over the river and wondering if Tobias had only singled her out for his attentions because she reminded him of some other redhead in his past, maybe someone he had had real feelings for, or just some flame-headed ideal which she could never live up to. She would end it. She would end it soon, she lied to herself.

‘Are you all right?’ Tobias’s voice from behind her was still laden with sleep but empty of concern.

‘I’d better go,’ she said without turning.

‘I thought you could stay all night.’

‘I’d better get back. You go back to sleep, I’ll get a taxi.’

‘No, it’s okay, I’ll run you back.’

Birgit Taubitz nodded wordlessly. They had a cladestine routine: taking the private elevator down to the garage avoided her walking out through the foyer and past the concierge, who might recognize her. She went through to the bathroom and dressed, pushing her auburn-red hair back into order as she looked at her reflection in the mirror.

She repeated the silent lie to herself: she would end it soon.

29

Jochen Hübner’s escape was splashed all over the media. Despite the risk of panic, it was the most obvious strategy for getting him back behind bars as soon as possible: his physical appearance was so remarkable that it was the best available tool in recapturing him. Generally, it was difficult for any escaped prisoner to remain at large without detection, but when it was someone as easily identifiable as Hübner, getting his photograph and description into as many places as possible was essential. In addition to his massive, brooding features glaring menacingly from every newspaper, TV, computer and tablet screen, the Polizei Hamburg had run off a thousand wanted posters for display in shop windows across the city.