The Ghosts of Altona (22 page)

Again he pushed back down the panic that had once more begun to rise. It was insane. It was all insane. Why was this happening to him? What had he ever done to deserve—

Another black, cold thought took sudden shape in the dark.
No, it couldn’t be that. After all this time, it couldn’t be that
.

But the thought stayed with him. The face he thought he had seen in the seconds before he lost consciousness came back into his recall. It
couldn’t
be that. How could it possibly be to do with what happened all those years ago?

The panic bloomed in his chest. Detlev had been murdered. Monika’s body had been found and Detlev had been killed. Now it was Werner’s turn. He began to whimper behind his gag.

Calm down
, he told himself.
Think this through
. Whatever the reason, whoever was responsible, he had to get out. He had to free himself first from these bonds, as quietly but as quickly as he could – if he could – and then he would come up with a way to deal with whoever and whatever lay beyond his cell.

He had written about things like this. The dark chamber, the bound man reduced to reaching out into his darkened environment with his senses. And, of course, he had read about them too. He tried to push the thought out of his mind that for him, of all the Gothic fiction he had read, Edgar Allan Poe had been supreme. And of all the Poe he had read, that one story had been supreme. Werner had read
The Pit and the Pendulum
both in German and the original English countless times since his thirteenth year and first encounter with the tale.
Oh God no. Not that
.

The only movement he could manage was in his hands. He balled them into fists and twisted one up towards his head, the other towards his feet, as if there was a pivot through his wrists, then reversed the action: rocking motions that caused the edge of the tape to bite into his skin. The ropes that bound his arms severely restricted the movement of his hands but slowly, painfully, he managed to cause the tape to crinkle and fold back on his wrists, the arc of each rocking increasing slightly each time. The tape still bound his wrists together, but now he could move his fingers to where the rope fastened his upper arms. He couldn’t believe his luck when he felt the knot beneath his trembling fingertips. His captor had not been as thorough as he thought.

Somehow he found the patience to work gradually and methodically. His fingers alone had to work joint-achingly slowly, probing, hooking and pulling at the knot of what felt like thick nylon cord that bound him. Twice he stopped and lay perfectly still: once because of something like a noise in a room beyond, the second time because he thought he saw a dim light fleet across the ceiling above him. Were they real sensations or was it his mind seeing and hearing what wasn’t there?

Think. For God’s sake think it through. Reason
.

The room was lightproof and soundproof, he decided. Anything he thought he saw or heard was his mind desperate to fill in sensory gaps. The only thing he was certain of was the damp odour in the air. Perhaps he was being kept in a cellar like the one he had dreamt he had shared with Edgar Allan Poe.

Time was another element that had been locked out of his confinement and he had no idea how long he’d been working at the knot, but he was aware that he now felt hot and was sweating, and his breathing hissed in his nostrils, which added to his feelings of claustrophobia. The knuckles and bones of his fingers ached with the effort and he felt as if his hands were swelling. And still the knot didn’t seem to be loosening.

He decided to turn his attention to the gag.

He wriggled and shrugged, working his shoulders and upper arms in an attempt to ease the ropes up his body, even a little. As he did so he craned his neck forward, bringing his chin towards his chest and trying to slide his bound hands upwards to his face. Whoever had tied him up had done so in a way that restricted all movement, in every direction. He rested, then recommenced his wriggling shrugs, grunting behind his tape gag.

The rope nudged upward. Not much, but enough to allow him more movement. He strained forward but still could not reach the gag. More wriggling, more muffled grunting and sweating. The skin on his upper arms felt rubbed raw by the effort, but that in itself suggested movement in the rope.

Another rest. This time, before starting, he let out as much of his breath as he could, forcing it through his nostrils and deflating his chest, making its circumference smaller. He wriggled again and the rope slipped up his body, further this time. Straining his head forward and his hands up, his aching fingers found the edge of the gag. He wanted to rip it off, but his restricted movements meant he could only ease it free.

The tape was off his mouth.

He let out a moan of relief and the still muffled sound of it surprised him. There was no depth to it, no resonance, as if dampened; he had been right, the room must be soundproof. He had thought about calling out for help, but had dismissed the idea: it would only draw the attention of his captor. But if this room
was
soundproof, he could be less careful about making noise as he struggled to free himself.

Another cold, obsidian-black thought coalesced in the darkness. He was clearly dealing with a madman who had God knew what in store for him. What if his tormentor was sitting here, malevolent and silent in the impenetrable dark of this soundproof room? He lay still for a moment, straining through the black silence for any sounds. Nothing.

Keep it together
, he told himself,
for God’s sake keep it together. There’s no one here. Just get on with it and get out
.

He turned his attention back to the knot, now moved higher up his body. He ignored the pain and went back to probing it with his aching fingers. Managing to work a finger into the cord, he felt the knot loosen. He now had it between finger and thumb and pulled frantically, hoping he was loosening, not tightening his restraint. It gave way.

He was lathered in sweat. It slicked his entire body, seeped stingingly into his eyes and pooled stickily on the polished wood beneath his buttocks, shoulders and back. The room had become stiflingly hot and the air stale, but he worked on. The freedom afforded by the loosening of the first cord allowed him work on the second. This time the knot wasn’t accessible and he focused on easing the cord up over his sweat-sleeked chest and arms, pushing with his fingers and wriggling so he could shrug his shoulders free.

It took him a long time to loosen then untie the second cord. He still could not reach down to untie his legs, but as soon as his upper body was free, that wouldn’t be a problem. Similarly, he would be able to work with his teeth on the tape that still bound his wrists together.

After that, he would be able to move, to explore his cell and find where the door was. He went back to work, thinking about nothing beyond getting loose from his bonds. It took an age of gnawing at it with his teeth before he started a tear in the tape on his wrists. It was exhausting work and once he managed to get the tape off, he rested for a moment, but only a moment, before sitting up to untie the cords that bound his legs.

He hit his head. Hard. So hard that he slumped back, dazed. He had tried to sit up and his head had hit something solid and immovable, right above him. Blood mingled with the sweat that trickled into his eyes.

His consciousness had not even fully returned, his head had not fully cleared, when he worked out what it was he had hit his head on. He began to shake uncontrollably, and his fingers quivered in the lightless air as he reached them up. They found the smooth, hard surface above him. He reached out to the sides, first right, then left. A smooth, hard surface on every side.

The thought exploded in his head, surged and seared through every fibre of his being. He wasn’t in a soundproof room after all.

He was in a coffin.

This wasn’t Poe’s
The Pit and the Pendulum
, this was his
Premature Burial
.

Werner Hensler thrashed wildly, senselessly, hysterically. He was beyond logical thought and had become a creature of fear and instinct. His terror was total, primal, and he began screaming: inhuman, high-pitched, incessantly. It didn’t even occur to him that no one would hear him.

That the sounds of his screams would be suffocated to silence by the dense, cold darkness of the earth around him.

35

There was one officer left guarding the scene at Traxinger’s studio, which would be kept under lock-down until forensics had completely finished their detailed processing of the whole building. Unlike the way it was portrayed in glossy American TV series, forensic recording of a scene was a boring, dull and tedious process, and one that took a lot of time. Until it was completed Fabel, and anyone else on site, had to wear latex gloves and overshoes. He had told Anja Koetzing that she didn’t need to stay and that the studio would be secured once he left. Armed with the keys and the alarm code for the studio and gallery, Fabel worked his way through the canvases in the storeroom, pulling each vertical tray out, examining the painting it held, then sliding it back.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he was devoting so much time to the exercise, but suspected it was because the deeper into the storeroom he went, the deeper he travelled into Traxinger’s mind. It was an instinct to be followed, and Fabel had become much more a creature of instinct since the shooting.

Some of the paintings were bizarre: horrific dungeon images of ravens pecking the eyes from chain-bound prisoners, or grotesque demons twisting and reaching out from their lairs. Others were ornate, almost pre-Raphaelite depictions of women, almost all either raven- or red-headed and pale-skinned.

Fabel decided to call it a day. He was tired and hungry and Susanne would be expecting him.

However, one of his instincts beckoned. Something urged him to give up his methodical process and go right to the back of the rack. He was leaving and it did no harm for him to see if the paintings at the back were the same kind of stuff as those at the front. There was also the suspicion that here, in the secret vaults of Traxinger’s creative consciousness, may be some greater truth about the artist that could perhaps lead Fabel to his killer.

The last sliding unit was much heavier and it took Fabel more effort to pull out. The reason was that instead of two separate upper and lower trays, a single double-height tray held a massive canvas draped in a cloth. As he pulled it out, he could see, close-up, one exposed corner of the painting. Traxinger had monogrammed the picture rather than signed it and the monogram he had used was an ornate interweaving of his initials wreathed in ivy and acanthus leaves and flowers. It was exactly the same as the design he had had tattooed above his heart, and Fabel hadn’t seen it used on any of the other paintings. Maybe this painting, too, was close to the artist’s heart.

Fabel had to go to the far end of the storeroom to get a stepladder, which he used to reach the top of the painting and ease the protective cloth up and off the canvas. Climbing back down, the cloth gathered into an untidy bundle under his arm, he stood back to look at the painting, illuminated by the angled ceiling spotlight.

He took out his cell phone and once more called Anna.

‘Can you meet me back at Traxinger’s studio?’ he asked. ‘Sorry to be a pain, but I’ve found another connection that doesn’t make any sense.’

Anna agreed to come straight away and Fabel hung up.

Afterwards he stood as if hypnotized by the painting. It was a nude of a pale, breathtakingly beautiful young woman with a blaze of rich auburn and red hair. The woman stood in a graveyard, an arch of ivy and acanthus both framing her naked body and reaching threateningly towards it. Her eyes were bright emerald and held the viewer locked in a cold gaze.

This, Fabel realized, had been Traxinger’s masterpiece. His secret masterpiece.

Before turning and going to advise the uniformed officer on guard duty that Chief Commissar Wolff would be arriving soon, Fabel stood for a while longer, gazing at the beautiful face captured in the painting.

Monika Krone’s face.

36

The Running Woman was blonde, lithe and pretty. She had her hair tied back from her face in a ponytail that swung and flicked at the air as she ran with the carefree buoyancy of youth and vigour. Her legs were sleek, toned and tanned, her backside full but firm, breasts immobile in a sports bra beneath Lycra. She was the only runner who took this path, the one that ran past the back of the house. He would see her running by at the same time every day, her eyes focused on the path ahead, the world shut out by the earbuds of the MP3 player fastened to her waistband. Frankenstein could almost have set his watch by her, but there was one, always seemingly random, variation to her routine each time. The path ran through the most heavily wooded part of the Stadtpark, walled in and shadowed by the trees. It then emerged into a clearing, a small oasis of sunlight breaking the green velvet shadows of the forest. It was here that the path both turned ninety degrees and split into two for a distance of fifty or so metres before joining together again. One of the two paths again became shielded by trees, the other, running parallel, remained in the open for a while and passed immediately by the edge of the garden. Sometimes the running woman would take one path, other times the garden-side spur. There seemed no pattern to it, but simply decided on a whim.

Frankenstein knew he should remain in the cellar, and he wanted to please his guardian, but it sometimes seemed to him as if he had been liberated from one confinement merely to be delivered into another. So, for an hour each day, at a time he knew it was unlikely that Zombie would call, he went up from the cellar and into the dust and gloom of the grey shell that had once been a home. Most of the time he would simply fold his bulk into a shadowed corner and ease a shutter open just wide enough for him to watch through the window, simply to be able to look out at the forest and the sky. A couple of times he had ventured all the way up to the attic and looked out through the unshuttered windows over to where cars and lorries made their way along the distant main road. But even this he knew was a risk: if someone appeared suddenly to snoop around the house, they would be between him and the cellar, left unlocked and open to prying. Not that the idea of snapping the neck of some snooper bothered him – it was just that he knew it would disappoint his guardian. So, generally, he would come up to use the toilet, go through to one of the ground floor rooms and watch the world through a crack in the shutters.