The Ghosts of Altona (35 page)

‘Oh shit . . .’ he heard Anna say as she came to stand beside him. Glasmacher and Hechtner joined them and the four formed a row at the foot of the huge, low bed.

Tobias Albrecht lay on top of the covers. He was naked, his legs together, his hands neatly set at his sides, as if he had been laid out by an undertaker. His pale skin was even paler than it had been in life. It was normally a sign of post-mortem lividity, all of the body’s blood sinking to and empurpling the low-gravity points in the body, the rest bleached of colour. But Fabel didn’t need a forensic expert to tell him that that wasn’t the reason for Albrecht’s pallor. Arced and stretching up the wall behind the bed, like a single, wide-spanned crimson wing, a spume of arterial blood had spattered across the expensive wallpaper. The pillow and bedding on the right side of his neck was black-red where the last leachings of blood had soaked into the fabric as arterial pressure had diminished. A chilled, shuddering end.

In all of his years as a murder detective, Jan Fabel had never been able to get beyond the gut reaction to blood. Something deep in the oldest part of your brain responded to the sight of it, no matter how often you saw it. As he looked at the spray on the wall, Fabel found himself thinking back to Helmut Wohlmann, the murdered centenarian in the seniors’ home, and how little blood there had been.

But even the blood-splashed wall and bed weren’t the most disturbing aspects of the scene: a thick shaft of wood, about twenty centimetres long and eight centimetres in diameter, had been rammed into Albrecht’s chest. There was practically no blood around the stake, which jutted nauseatingly from just below his sternum.

‘Shit . . .’ Anna repeated. ‘It’s like he didn’t move. The blood’s a single spatter pattern. Unless he was restrained, somehow.’ She nodded, her face distorted in disgust, to the stake embedded in Albrecht’s chest. ‘From the lack of blood around that, I’m guessing it was done post-mortem.’

‘It’s symbolic, not the cause of death,’ said Fabel. ‘We’re supposed to derive some sort of meaning from it. Or maybe the meaning is purely personal to the killer. And my guess would be that the restraint that kept him motionless while his artery was severed was pharmaceutical, rather than physical. I’ll lay odds we find xylazine in his system.’

‘You think it’s the same guy?’ asked Glasmacher. ‘The modus is completely different.’

‘It’s the same guy – or maybe the same guys, plural. He or they maybe kill in different ways, but this is all to do with a single agenda. He kills for the same reason. And this is his third victim, and that qualifies him as a serial.’

‘But if Marco Tempel is behind this, what’s his motive for the other two killings?’ asked Anna.

‘I’d like to ask him that in person. Get in touch with the Polizei Niedersachsen in Bremen and tell them to get round to his home, just in case he heads back there. In the meantime get as many people as you need onto finding out where he’s staying in Hamburg.’

‘Yes,
Chef
.’

*

Back down in the apartment building’s foyer, the young concierge stood talking to a uniformed SchuPo. The youth was white-faced, his eyes darting in that exhausted-agitated way Fabel had seen in so many witnesses and bystanders to murder. Even though the concierge hadn’t seen the body, a murder had been committed in his building. Fabel had seen the sequence so many times before: shock causing adrenalin and cortisone to flood the system creating what felt like an inappropriate but deeply unpleasant excitement, then the withdrawal, the crash, as the initial buzz faded and the stress and the disquiet remained. Murder, he had learned, was only a concept to most people: vague, indirect. But when murder came too close, it shook the world beneath their feet.

Fabel went over to him and smiled. ‘You okay, son?’

He nodded behind a weak smile. Then shook his head, giving up the pretence. ‘I can’t believe it. Herr Albrecht was our most important resident. He designed this building. He used to talk to me whenever he passed. I just can’t believe it.’

‘I know,’ said Fabel. ‘Herr Albrecht had company this evening – an attractive dark-haired woman – you’re sure you didn’t see her?’

The concierge shook his head.

‘Did Herr Albrecht have any other visitors over the last few days? I know you said they could come and go through the basement garage, but if they came here alone – I mean without Herr Albrecht bringing them – then maybe you saw them as they passed through the foyer.’

‘Herr Albrecht had lots of visitors. He tried to be discreet about them, but I did see them occasionally. On the monitor.’

‘I take it we’re talking about female visitors?’

‘One of the things we’re taught about in training is to be discreet. Not to pry or talk about the residents’ affairs. But you can’t help noticing things. Herr Albrecht was one for the ladies, if you know what I mean.’

‘Anyone in particular? Or anyone you could identify for me?’

The young concierge frowned. A lock of dark blond hair fell across his face and he palmed it back. Fabel knew he had something to say, but didn’t want to say it. Again, years of experience told him to be patient.

‘Yes,’ said the concierge eventually. ‘There was one woman who came often. I saw them arrive and leave together a couple of times.’ He nodded towards the reception desk. ‘On the monitor, like I said.’

‘And you know who this woman was?’ asked Fabel.

Another frown creased the girlish brow. ‘I don’t want to get into trouble. We’re not supposed to—’

‘You’ll get into much more trouble if you withhold evidence in a murder case,’ said Fabel, his tone still friendly.

‘Yes,’ the concierge said decisively. ‘I do know who she was. And I can give you her name . . .’

54

The office was the same, but the figure behind the desk was very different. Fabel had spent more time than he would have liked up in the Presidial Suite, on the fifth floor of the Presidium – but as head of a major wing of the investigative service, bureaucracy and politics were something that came hand in hand with the role.

For fifteen years, nearly all of Fabel’s service in the Commission, it had been Hugo Steinbach who had served as Hamburg’s Police President: an avuncular, open man who had started out as an ordinary patrolman and had worked his way up through every rank and every department. The fact that Steinbach, immediately before transferring to Hamburg, had been head of the Polizei Berlin’s Murder Commission had made him someone Fabel had found very easy to deal with; someone who understood the very particular pressures of Fabel’s job.

Steinbach had also been still in office when Fabel had returned to duty after his shooting and had made it clear that he would do anything to support him, including the offer to free him from his Murder Commission duties.

But now Steinbach, the bottom-to-top policeman, was gone. Negative press over a mishandled human-trafficking case, Steinbach’s often too-direct manner with media and public, political pressure from the generally hostile Principal Mayor’s office and a shot-across-the-bows minor heart attack had guided the Hamburg Police President into early retirement.

Now, in his place, someone new sat behind the huge presidial desk.

Petra Gebhardt stood up when Fabel entered the room, came round the desk and greeted him with a smile and a handshake. She was a tall, slim, unremarkable-looking woman in her early forties, with blonde hair and pale blue-green eyes. She was dressed in a dark blue trouser suit with a pink blouse: an outfit that made her look more corporate than municipal.

Not that Fabel felt there was anything wrong with Petra Gebhardt, or her appointment as Police President. She was likeable, amenable and very supportive of Fabel and his department, which was not in itself surprising: under Fabel’s command LKA411 – the official designation of the Hamburg Murder Commission – had become a resource increasingly tapped into by other state police forces across the Federal Republic. It became known that Principal Chief Commissar Jan Fabel was the
go-to guy
, as the Americans would say, if you had a multiple killer on the loose, particularly if there was some kind of complex or psychological agenda behind the murders.

Petra Gebhardt, unlike her predecessor, had joined the police at officer entry level – there again, so had Fabel. Gebhardt, however, struck Fabel as more management, more a professional administrator, than a policewoman, and much of her experience during what had been an accelerated rise through the ranks had been behind a desk. But Fabel had resigned himself to that being the way things were now, and that hers were probably exactly the skills that a modern chief of police needed.

Moreover, Petra Gebhardt, again very unlike her predecessor, had proved herself to be a very political animal: adept at dealing with politicians, the public and the media. And that was exactly why Fabel had asked to see her.

‘Sit down, Herr Fabel, please,’ she said, taking her place once more behind the huge desk. ‘I’m so glad you asked for this appointment. I was about to arrange one with you myself.’

‘Oh?’
Here it comes
, thought Fabel.

She leaned back in the leather chair. ‘As you know, Leading Criminal Director van Heiden is due to retire at the end of this year.’ Gebhardt referred to Horst van Heiden, Fabel’s immediate boss. As Leading Criminal Director, van Heiden was in charge of all officers in the LKA – the investigative branch of Hamburg’s police force.

‘Of course,’ said Fabel. ‘I’ll miss him, we have worked together for a long time.’

‘Quite. Anyway, it would be grossly unfair of me if I weren’t to offer you first refusal of the promotion.’

Fabel smiled. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it. Why do I get the idea you want me to refuse it?’

‘Because I do. I really don’t want you to move. I cannot imagine anyone else taking over from you and maintaining the Murder Commission’s reputation as a national centre of excellence. But you deserve the promotion, and I know you would do as good a job as commander of the whole investigative branch as you do in charge of the Murder Commission.’

‘Thank you,’ said Fabel. ‘But I think you’re overstating my gifts. There’s any number of very capable officers both inside the Polizei Hamburg and in other forces who could take over the Commission. Nicola Brüggemann, for example. Come to that, there are other officers who are qualified to take over the Leading Criminal Director role – like Freddy Berger from the Organized Crime Commission.’

‘I’m not sure that Herr Berger has the . . . the
people
skills for the role. He can be abrasive.’

‘He’s an excellent officer,’ said Fabel.

‘The truth is that if you don’t take over as head of the investigative branch, we’ll probably recruit from outside the force. I already have my eye on a couple of potential appointees. And as far as head of the Murder Commission is concerned, Frau Brüggemann would perhaps be my first-choice replacement if you
do
take over as Leading Criminal Director. But you know as well as I do that you have a very special level of experience and set of skills that would be hard to match. And anyway it’s more than that – you have this unique understanding of what drives and motivates a killer.’

Fabel smiled. ‘Thank you, but I’m really not that special. People always seem to be surprised to find out that I’m a very ordinary kind of guy – that I’m not some tortured soul struggling from one existential crisis to the next because of my job. And that I don’t have any special gifts or insights.’

‘Come on, Jan,’ said Gebhardt. ‘Enough false modesty. You know you’ve got something special going on.’

‘Not really. In many ways, my job is very straightforward. And if you’re working a difficult case, you use the skills you’ve got. Adapt them. As you know, I studied history – if there’s no easy solution to a case, I start to think like a historian. A murder is an event, a point in time, with a chronology before and after. All I do is examine that history. It’s a process, a technique, not some deep, nearly psychic attribute. Others have their own routes to it. Far be it from me to say, but I’m not as indispensable as you think.’

‘Are you saying you want to make the move? As I remember, you were pretty emphatic with Herr Steinbach that you wanted to stay at the Murder Commission when he offered you the chance of a transfer before.’ Gebhardt paused for a moment, reaching into a desk drawer and taking out a file. ‘Like I said, it would be unfair of me to hold you back, so the Criminal Director’s job is there for the taking. However . . .’ She handed the file to Fabel. ‘This is my counter-proposal. Right at the start when it was suggested that the Commission took on a consultative role with other forces, the proposal was that you be promoted to the rank of Criminal Director while still staying in charge of the unit. It was never followed through, mainly because of your concerns about the Commission becoming swamped with outside cases.’ She nodded to the file in Fabel’s hands. ‘That proposal includes your immediate promotion not just to Criminal Director but to Leading Criminal Director while still remaining head of the Murder Commission. You will be equal, and not subordinate, to the new Leading Criminal Director. Effectively, the Murder Commission becomes an autonomous unit with potentially a Federal Republic-wide brief. You’ll see that the proposal also gives you an additional two teams. Four new officers, whom you are free to recruit yourself from any department or rank.’

‘That is a quite some proposition . . .’ Fabel nodded as he flicked through the proposal.

‘It’s my way of keeping you where you are, while still treating you fairly. That said, I expect you to
build our brand
,’ Gebhardt used the English expression, ‘across the Federal Republic.’

‘I won’t accept outside cases if our Hamburg caseload has us fully committed,’ said Fabel.

‘It goes without saying that the Hanseatic City remains your absolute priority, but that’s why you’ll be allocated extra human resources. Take your time and think about it. But not too much time, I have to get the wheels in motion sometime next month.’