The Ghosts of Altona (2 page)

But Jan Fabel, who had headed the Hamburg Murder Commission for fifteen years and had become the Federal Republic’s leading investigator of serial killings, knew it was a sham: a carefully constructed fence to enclose the dark, irresistible chaos that churned and roiled deep inside Schalthoff. Something that had to be contained.

One door closed.

‘Can I get you a coffee, or something?’ Schalthoff made an open-handed gesture of hospitality.

‘We’re good . . .’ said Anna.

‘Actually, I could do with a cup of tea,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s so chilly out. If it’s not too much trouble.’ He cast an eye over the books in the bookcase: horror, the supernatural, a lot of Gothic classics. A brochure for the Altona Jewish Cemetery, which was a monument maintained by the city department Schalthoff worked for, sat on top of the bookcase.

‘Not at all,’ said Schalthoff smiling. ‘Tea, you say?’

‘If you have it,’ said Fabel. When their host turned to go into the kitchen area, Fabel shot a look at Anna. She caught it and nodded: Fabel was trying to keep Schalthoff occupied.

One door closed
.

One door closed but unlocked: all Fabel would have to do was go back into the hall, turn the handle and push. But he had no warrant. And other than an instinct and an opinion that Schalthoff’s choice of art and literature jarred with his taste in interior design, Fabel had no probable cause. And that made the insubstantial panel bedroom door as secure as a moat and drawbridge.

Fabel watched as the council technician busied himself in the kitchen. In an unconscious gesture, Schalthoff wiped his palms on his overalls before taking a pale blue teapot from one of the cupboards and rinsing it out under the hot tap. Then he reached up to open one of the wall-mounted units to take out a cup. The pause had been less than momentary: a microsecond of hesitation as his hand had passed one of the drawers.

What’s in the drawer, Jost?
thought Fabel.
What is it you don’t want us to see?
Again, Fabel cursed his lack of a warrant.

‘I hope we didn’t catch you on the way out.’ Anna stepped towards the kitchen part of the open-plan living area, placing herself between Schalthoff and a clear view of the hallway.

‘Not at all, I—’

‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom?’ Fabel interrupted him. It worked. The council worker looked off balance for a sliver of a second, frowned, then wiped clean his expression with a courteous smile. Again, there had been so much squeezed into that sliver of a second.

‘No . . . please go ahead,’ he said. ‘It’s at the far end of the hall, nearest the door. To your right.’

Fabel nodded and went back into the hall. The heartbeat pulse from the upstairs music stopped for a moment, before kicking into a different rhythm. Behind him, he could hear Anna affecting a chatty tone.

‘There’s not a lot we need to ask you,’ she said. ‘You knew little Timo, I believe?’

‘No . . . who told you that?’ Schalthoff’s tone was even. ‘I hadn’t heard of him until he went missing. It’s sad, really, when you think how close by he lived – just around the corner, really. That’s city life, I suppose. Anonymous.’

Fabel knew Anna wouldn’t be able to stall him for long. He passed the bathroom, then checked over his shoulder to make sure Schalthoff was still in the kitchen and that Fabel was out of his line of sight before taking the few steps further along the hall to his goal.

He stood before the closed door. If he opened it and found Timo’s body, it would be a legally invalid search. For the search to be admissible, he would have to lie and say he thought he had heard a noise, had probable cause to believe Timo was alive and captive behind the door. Except Fabel knew he wouldn’t lie.

But if his gut feeling about Schalthoff was right and he and Anna left without looking behind that closed door, there would always be the chance they’d be leaving a still-alive Timo to his fate. He listened. No sounds from behind the door, but he could hear Schalthoff and Anna in the living room: small talk, but now the faintest chord of impatience in Schalthoff’s tone.

He placed his hand on the handle.

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

He opened the door.

There was no hint of anything amiss. No captive child, alive or dead. Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom was clean, tidy, uncluttered; on the spartan side of functional. Bland decoration.

But like the print hanging in the hall and the books on the shelves, there was one discordant note in the bedroom: the wardrobe. Too big for the room, it loomed dark in the corner that got least light, as if trying to hide its bulk in the shadow. Massive, wood-hewn and dark-varnished, it was furniture of the rustic, traditional German kind. In an apartment fitted out with modern, light pieces, the heavy wardrobe looked completely out of place, like a dark forest ghost lost and hiding in the wrong century.

Fabel listened again and could hear Anna talking, dominating the conversation; keeping their reluctant host occupied. But he could only hear Schalthoff as low tones that became lost in the throb of music from an unseen apartment.

A small room. It wouldn’t take much searching. And Fabel knew he would search the wardrobe last.

He dropped quietly to his knees and looked under the bed. Nothing. There was nowhere else for a body to be hidden, apart from the out-of-place wardrobe that loomed dark in the corner.

Please let me be wrong. Don’t let it be me who finds it
.

Three steps took him over to the wardrobe. This was where the chaos was contained, Fabel knew. This was where Schalthoff had hidden Timo’s body.

The wardrobe had double doors and Fabel placed his hand on the brass handle of the right door. Turned it.

The door creaked and he checked its opening with his other hand, standing stock-still and listening for the sound of an irate Schalthoff coming along the hall. Instead all he heard was the continuous heartbeat thudding from a flat upstairs and a universe away, and Anna’s voice as she continued to stall the wardrobe’s owner in the living room.

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.