The Ghosts of Altona (27 page)

He saw his mother again. She was beautiful. She smiled at little Jochen and held his cheek in her soft, cool palm and talked quietly to him about his toys.

It wasn’t that the scene changed, it was more that another level of time and place superimposed itself. It was now his fourteenth birthday. There was piano music, soft and echoing, a slow, sad waltz, and Jochen danced with his mother. Already he was big and clumsy, but his mother didn’t seem to notice. He had been so happy that day and she had said the strangest thing to him: that she would always be there to look after him. To make things right.

There, in the dark cellar now and in the bright room where they danced then, two moments that occupied the same space, Jochen forgave her. He forgave her for her lie: she had left him alone. Two years later she went away and even that day when they had danced she would have known about the disease growing inside her, spreading. Taking her away from him by degrees. But he forgave her.

The experience lasted hours, maybe even a full day, most of it spent with his mother and others he could not quite see. Then Zombie guided him back, slowly, gently, as the DMT started to wear off.

When he was fully back in the now, Frankenstein checked his watch. The whole experience had really only lasted about fifteen minutes.

Afterwards, he thanked Zombie for being his guide and guardian once more, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

44

It took less time than Fabel had imagined it would. It was like triangulation on a map: they now had three landmarks, reference points: Monika Krone, Werner Hensler and Tobias Albrecht. All three had been at the party the night Monika had disappeared, but Detlev Traxinger had not. But their relative positions gave Fabel’s team the coordinates they needed.

He phoned Susanne and told her he’d be late, which turned out not to be a problem because she was working late herself at the Institute for Judicial Medicine. He sat in his office examining the connections the team had made that day and going through fifteen-year-old statements, letting the past come to life in his head. It was something he was good at, a natural at. Fabel had always considered that he had become a policeman by accident: he had been a gifted History student at the universities of Oldenburg and Hamburg and had always seen his future mapped out for him as a historian. But then a girl, a fellow student he had been having a casual relationship with, had been abducted, raped and murdered. Suddenly his relationship with her had no longer seemed casual and his future less clear. He became obsessed with trying to understand what had happened to his girlfriend and what led people to commit acts of violence on others. The day he finished his studies, he applied for officer-level entry into the Polizei Hamburg.

But the instincts and skills that would have guided him as a historian instead guided him as a detective – and now he used them to force an event from the past to come back to life in the present.

Going through the fifteen-year-old statements from the partygoers, he saw that three girls who had been friends with Monika had previously dated Tobias Albrecht, then an Architecture student. One of them had also dated Werner Hensler, the future horror writer. Another couple, who probably had long since parted and married other people, had attended the party together and had both mentioned in their statements that Hensler and Albrecht had been friends of sorts.

And all five referred to someone who had not been able to make the party that night. It was a detail you had to be looking for to find. Two partygoers referred to the missing person as a friend of Hensler, one stated that it had been a friend of Albrecht, and two witnesses indicated he had been a friend of both men. It had been, in the original investigation, less than a footnote. All named him as Detlev Traxinger.

During the original investigation, Traxinger hadn’t even made it onto the list of Monika’s acquaintances. He had been identified as an absence, rather than a presence. Was Traxinger, Fabel wondered, the ghost whose presence he had sensed in his rereading of the files?

At the end of a three-hour session of referencing and cross-referencing, Fabel set the members of his team their respective tasks. Tobias Albrecht was someone Fabel wanted to talk to personally and he asked Anna to fix up a time for them both to interview the architect.

‘And Anna,’ said Fabel, ‘be insistent. Herr Albrecht is connected to two murder victims, one of whom was found in a building he designed. Until we can ascertain otherwise, he’s a potential suspect. Explain to him his full cooperation is in his best interest.’

*

Throughout his career, Jan Fabel had always tried to keep personal feelings out of how he treated a witness or a suspect. Sometimes, he knew, you took a like or dislike to someone on first meeting and it was very difficult to keep those feelings from colouring your attitude. The guilty, Fabel had learned, could be likeable and charming; the innocent could be arseholes.

Fabel took a profound dislike to Tobias Albrecht the instant he met him. So profound that he was surprised by the intensity of his antipathy towards the architect.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t been cooperative. Albrecht certainly hadn’t delayed seeing them, agreeing to meet Fabel and Anna at his offices the very next morning. His architectural practice, Albrecht and Partners, was located in the HafenCity, Hamburg’s twenty-first-century interpretation of its Hanseatic traditions. Albrecht had, of course, designed the building himself and Fabel was surprised to see how elegant and restrained it was in comparison to the incongruous jangle of steel and glazing in Altona where they had found the writer’s body.

Everything in Albrecht’s offices was cool and elegant, including the staff, all of whom looked as if they had been recruited from a modelling agency rather than architectural college. Albrecht’s sense of the aesthetic obviously extended into every part of his business. A tall, blonde and glacial assistant catwalked Anna and Fabel to where he waited for them.

Albrecht’s office was a huge and mostly empty space with a vast redwood desk sitting throne-like at the far end, the wall behind it a mosaic of slate shards. The architect stood up when the police officers entered, and smiled a vulpine smile. He was dressed in a pale grey houndstooth double-breasted suit and a black shirt, open at the neck. Albrecht’s hair was almost unnaturally black against his strikingly pale complexion and his strong jaw was blued with precision-measured stubble. His eyes were a piercing blue beneath the dark arches of his eyebrows. He asked Fabel and Anna to sit.

‘As Frau Commissar Wolff has already informed you,’ Fabel began, ‘we are investigating the deaths of the painter Detlev Traxinger and the author Werner Hensler, whose body was found in an incomplete building designed by you.’

Albrecht leaned back in his leather chair and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes . . . yes, it’s all a terrible business. Obviously I’ll do anything I can to help.’

‘We believe that both victims were friends of yours,’ said Anna.

‘No . . . not at all.’ Albrecht seemed surprised by the suggestion.

‘But you did know them both?’ asked Fabel.

‘Knew them, yes. But I hadn’t seen or spoken to either for years. No . . . actually that’s not correct. I bumped into Detlev at a city function, about three months ago, but we only exchanged a few words. Werner I haven’t seen for years.’

‘Since university?’ asked Fabel. ‘You were closer back then, would I be right in thinking?’

‘We certainly had more to do with each other than we do now, if that’s what you mean.’

‘What I mean is that you were friends. We know that for a fact.’

Albrecht held Fabel in his cold blue gaze. If he was rattled, he wasn’t showing it. ‘Acquaintances. Not friends. Part of the same crowd. We were students at the Hamburg Uni at roughly the same time, but studied different subjects. We went to the same social events, had friends in common, that kind of thing.’

‘And you all knew Monika Krone, didn’t you?’

‘What’s this got to do with Monika?’

‘Don’t you find it a coincidence that within a month of Monika Krone’s body being discovered, two members of
the same crowd
, as you put it, are found murdered?’

‘You can’t seriously be suggesting there’s a connection?’

Fabel didn’t answer right away, but took in the office: the wall behind Albrecht with its blue-grey shards of slate, the polished wood of the floor and the raw wood in the ceiling beams, the large windows looking out towards the elegant nineteenth-century red-brick warehouses of the Speicherstadt from one aspect, the rest of the HafenCity from the other.

‘This really is a beautifully designed office,’ said Fabel. ‘I really like the way you’ve combined the natural, the organic, I suppose, with the high-tech. I also like the way you’ve combined the past with the present, even the future.’

Albrecht didn’t answer.

‘The past and the present are always intertwined,’ Fabel continued. ‘The HafenCity has nothing to do with the Speicherstadt, really, but if there hadn’t been a Speicherstadt, there wouldn’t be a HafenCity. If Hamburg hadn’t been a medieval Hanseatic city, it wouldn’t be leading the world in trade with emergent economies today. History echoes through everything, Herr Albrecht. I’m hearing echoes with these killings.’

Albrecht pulled his handsome features into a
maybe
expression. ‘It’s a hell of a stretch. Isn’t it more likely that it’s just a coincidence? Werner and Detlev didn’t have anything much to do with each other after university either.’

‘Oh?’ said Fabel. ‘And how would you know that? I mean if you had no dealings with either, for all you know they were in regular contact with each other.’

‘I told you I bumped into Detlev at a function. I asked him then if he ever saw anyone from uni, and he said no.’

‘I see.’ Fabel paused again. ‘The three of you were all involved, in one way or another, in the arts scene, you all went to the same university at the same time, and all three of you remained in Hamburg. Isn’t it odd that you never had any contact with each other, or even bumped into each other more than you did? It’s almost as if you went out of your way to avoid each other.’

‘Is it?’ said Albrecht. Another faintly amused but confused expression. ‘People go their separate ways, that’s all. Have you kept in touch with everyone you went to uni with?’

‘I’ve kept in touch – even regular touch – with the people I was friendly with. And like I said, the three of you were involved in the Hamburg arts scene—’

Albrecht laughed loudly. ‘I wouldn’t call what Werner did art. And I did tell you that Detlev and I would run into each other at the occasional function. I’m sorry you find it odd if we didn’t see each other otherwise. But that’s as far as it goes: maybe odd, but not sinister, which seems to be what you’re implying.’

‘Unless, of course, there was something, some event, that made you decide not to see each other again. Like I said, the past shapes the present. It’s almost as if the three of you made some kind of agreement fifteen years ago never to see each other again.’

‘Of course we didn’t. You’re talking utter nonsense.’

‘Did you know Monika Krone?’ asked Anna.

‘I was asked that fifteen years ago when she first went missing, so you already know the answer.’

‘That’s right.’ Anna smiled. ‘You and she were involved, weren’t you?’

‘For a while.’ Albrecht made a show of sighing. ‘But that ended months before her disappearance – again, you already know all about that. And you also know that it was a very casual involvement. She was a very beautiful girl and I had lots of relationships with lots of other female students. There was nothing deep nor special about my relationship with Monika.’

‘And you were able to account for your movements at the time of her disappearance, as I recall.’

Albrecht now held Anna in his cold, blue gaze. She showed no sign of being impressed.

‘I was,’ he said.

‘And that seems to complete the circle,’ said Fabel, ‘and brings us back to the late Herr Hensler, who happened to be your alibi for that evening, and you his. In his statement at the time, he said you and he went on from the party to a bar. Or several bars.’

‘Where we were seen by other people.’

‘Only later in the evening,’ said Anna. ‘No one can remember seeing you at the first couple of bars.’

‘I can’t help that. We didn’t go out of our way to be conspicuous. We had no idea that we should be making sure people saw us to support our alibi. And if we had, I’m sure you would have found that suspicious too.’

‘Maybe you could tell us where you were the nights Detlev Traxinger and Werner Hensler died,’ said Anna.

This time, Fabel saw something shift in Albrecht’s expression. ‘I was at a dinner the night Detlev was killed. I have a dozen or more people who can confirm that.’

‘And when Herr Hensler was murdered?’

‘I was at home,’ he said eventually.

‘Alone?’ asked Anna.

‘No.’

‘So someone can verify you were there?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

Another sigh. ‘I was with someone. A woman. A married woman. I can’t give you her name.’

‘Herr Albrecht,’ said Anna, ‘you can be assured that we are very discreet. And I have to stress that it’s in your best interests to cooperate. Anything you tell us will be in complete confidence.’

‘No it won’t – you’ll have to go and talk to her to confirm that she spent the night with me. And God knows how many people will be able to find out.’ He paused and gave a strange, small laugh. ‘She might not even back up my story. We are talking about someone with a position to think about. So no, I can’t tell you. And, to be frank, I don’t see why I have to. You are treating me as a suspect yet you have absolutely no grounds to believe that I killed Detlev. Or worse still Werner, who I probably would have walked past in the street without recognizing.’

Fabel watched Albrecht for a moment. The architect still was in control of his emotions. He nodded to Anna who reached into her bag and took out two photographs. She stood up, leaned across the desk and placed the photographs in front of Albrecht. He picked them up and examined them.