The Ghosts of Altona (38 page)

‘We need to get into the hall,’ said Fabel. ‘But everyone else has to stay out here.’

The woman nodded and let the police officers in. At Fabel’s request, she came in after them and locked the door behind her. It was a large space with seating for around four hundred with a sound stage at the front. It looked to Fabel like something more suited to a rock concert than a haematology lecture. But there had been hundreds of doctors waiting outside, so he decided that Mortensen must really be someone important in the field.

He led everyone down to the stage. It was empty. No Mortensen setting up for his lecture. He turned to the female staff member.

‘There’s a room off to the side.’ She read his intent. ‘Maybe the professor is in there. It can be used to set up audio-visual, computer presentations, that kind of thing.’

She walked them across and unlocked the side door. The room was empty.

‘
Shit
. . .’ Fabel said in English. He took out his cell phone and tried Mortensen’s number: again it went straight to voicemail.

‘Hotel?’ asked Anna.

Fabel turned to the uniformed officers. ‘I need four of you to stay here and search the centre as best you can. I’ll try to get some more bodies sent.’

Fabel led his team and the remaining SchuPos out of the hall and through the puzzled expressions of the doctors gathered outside.

‘He’s not in the congress centre hotel,’ Fabel said to Anna and the others. ‘According to Karin Vestergaard he likes boutique-type hotels. She says that Mortensen’s staying in the Hotel Kirschner, opposite the Hamburg Messe, on Schröderstiftstrasse. Let’s go.’

*

The hotel was small and sat with one aspect facing and dominated by the soaring presence of Hamburg’s television tower. Fabel told Hechtner, Glasmacher and the uniforms to wait while he and Anna checked if Mortensen was there.

‘No need for us to create a scene,’ he said. ‘Anyway, Mortensen may be between here and the congress centre. His not being there could be as innocent as a late taxi.’

The girl behind the reception desk explained that she hadn’t seen Mortensen leave and that housekeeping had told her that there was a ‘do not disturb’ sign on his bedroom door, so his room hadn’t yet been serviced. Anna and Fabel exchanged a look.

‘Get Dirk and Thom,’ he said and Anna rushed out. He turned back to the girl. ‘I need a key to get into Professor Mortensen’s room.’

The girl hesitated, looking uncertain and a little scared.

‘Now.’

She handed him a pass key from behind the desk, her hand shaking slightly.

‘It’s room thirty-two. Third floor.’

‘Thank you,’ he smiled reassuringly. ‘Everything will be fine.’

Fabel took the stairs with Anna, Glasmacher and Hechtner at his back. As the receptionist had said, a ‘do not disturb’ sign hung from the handle. Fabel knocked loudly on the door.

‘Herr Professor Mortensen? This is the Polizei Hamburg, Principal Chief Commissar Fabel. Could you open the door please?’

Silence.

As he placed the key in the door, Fabel turned to Anna. She nodded, resting her hand on the handle of her service automatic. Fabel swung open the door. The hotel room was empty. Mortensen’s bed was unmade and Fabel noticed a cell phone, watch and wallet on the bedside nightstand. A rollercase sat in the rack by the door. Mortensen’s laptop lay, closed, next to a notebook and folder on the desk under the window. The window faced out over the street and towards the trade-fair conference halls of the Hamburg Messe across the wide dual carriageway, but the feature that dominated was the Heinrich-Hertz-Turm television tower.

‘Check the bathroom,’ Fabel instructed Anna. He craned his neck to look out and up to the huge disc near the top of the tower, like some alien spacecraft permanently hovering over Hamburg.

He heard Anna open the bathroom door and draw a sharp breath.

‘Oh Christ . . .’

57

There were several guises in which the guilty dressed their culpability; Fabel had seen them all, and had seen through most of them. The most common was indignation: a bluster of overdone outrage. Feigned confusion came next, where the accused made clear his or her bewilderment at the stupidity of the police in getting it all so very wrong. Then there was the overly cooperative ‘of course I’ll do anything to help’ strategy. And there was the defiant: a stonewall challenging of the police to do all the talking and all the proving.

When he walked into the interview room, Fabel couldn’t tell if Marco Tempel was employing no guise, or a subtle combination of them all. It looked for all the world as if the doctor was genuinely at a loss to understand why he was in police custody.

‘I’ve been waiting here for nearly two hours,’ he said in an even, calm tone. ‘I have been taken away from an important seminar – arrested in plain view of my colleagues – and told I am suspected of murder. It seems to me that the only reason for all of this is that I was assaulted the other evening by one of your female officers. I think it’s perhaps time I got my lawyer involved.’

Fabel sat down opposite Tempel. He had told Anna that given her scuffle with Tempel in the bar it would be best if she didn’t sit in. He had thought of asking Nicola Brüggemann to partner him but had decided to keep his interrogation of the doctor low-key. For the moment. He switched on the recorder and stated his name, the date and time and who he was interviewing.

‘Herr Doctor Tempel, if you wish to suspend this interview until you can have your legal representative present, then you are fully entitled to do so. Your rights under Article one hundred and thirty-six of the Federal Criminal Procedure Regulations have been already been explained to you?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘Then you’ll also know that you can refuse to answer any or all of our questions and that no inference of guilt can be drawn from such a refusal. You understand that also?’

‘Yes . . . I also know that if I don’t answer, or if I wait for my lawyer, I’ll be stuck here even longer. Right?’

‘It would be good if we could get things sorted out now. I would be very grateful for your cooperation, Herr Doctor.’

‘You’re very polite for a policeman.’

‘Have you had many encounters with the police in the past?’

‘I dare say you’ve already checked that out and you’ll know that I haven’t.’

‘I’m sorry that you’ve been kept waiting. But I’ve been attending a crime scene, you see. A pretty gruesome crime scene.’ Fabel allowed a beat for a response; when there was none, he continued. ‘You’re a haematologist, I believe.’

‘That’s right.’

‘As was Professor Mortensen.’

‘He is much more than just another haematologist. Professor Mortensen is arguably the most important figure in haematology alive today. He leads the world in research into blood cancers, especially the rarer kinds. He’s one of those one-in-a-generation figures in a particular field that sets the agenda for decades.’

‘Then I’m afraid the world has just got poorer.’

Tempel frowned, then gave a confused laugh. ‘You’re telling me he’s dead?’

‘The crime scene I’ve just come from. Someone has indulged in a little poetic whimsy – the world-leading haematologist has been bled to death in the bathtub of his hotel bathroom. Do you use xylazine in your work, Doctor Tempel?’

Tempel didn’t answer for a moment, instead looked away from Fabel, his eyes focused on nothing, shaking his head. ‘Mortensen’s dead?’

‘Do you?’

‘What? Do I what?’

‘Use xylazine in your work? Medically, I mean?’

‘Xylazine?’ Tempel looked at Fabel as if he had said something profoundly stupid. ‘Xylazine hydrochloride isn’t used in human medicine. It’s a veterinary sedative. What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Just that it looks very like Mortensen was rendered incapable before someone opened up his arteries. It’s exactly the same modus employed in the killing of Tobias Albrecht, except this time there was no stake through the heart. The symbolism of that we’ll let go for the moment, but I suspect it was a reference to him being a vampire – someone who metaphorically if not literally sucked the life out of the women he used. Women like your sister.’

‘Wait a minute . . .’ More confusion on Tempel’s face. ‘Tobias Albrecht is dead too?’

‘Yes, Herr Doctor, Tobias Albrecht’s dead. That’s why you are here. We have reason to believe that you may know how he died, where and when.’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Then let me spell it out. You just happen to be in the same bar as Albrecht, who just happens to be the man your sister tried to kill before taking her own life. As if that isn’t coincidence enough, we just happen to be mounting a surveillance of Albrecht in that very bar and, somehow, out of all of the women in the bar, you hit on one of the surveillance officers. A scuffle ensues which serves to distract the two surveillance officers, while your female friend gets Albrecht on the move. Next thing, Tobias Albrecht is found drugged, bled to death and with a chunk of symbolic joinery in his chest.’

‘I know nothing about any of this.’

‘You’re denying it was you in the bar?’

‘No . . . but I’m saying that it is a coincidence. Or at least partly a coincidence. I promise you I had nothing to do with Albrecht’s death. Or the woman he was with.’

‘Then why were you in the bar, Herr Doctor Tempel?’ asked Fabel. ‘I’m sure you can see that that stretches coincidence beyond credibility . . .’

Tempel sighed. ‘Lara – my sister Lara – was a troubled woman. She was bipolar and had episodes of paranoid schizophrenia. That doesn’t mean I don’t hold Albrecht responsible for his actions – he treated her terribly and caused her to do what she did. But the truth is it could have happened with someone else, sometime else. The man was a shit, but he learned his lesson when Lara tried to kill him.’

‘That still doesn’t explain your presence in the bar.’

‘I know this doesn’t sound good for me, but I followed him there. I don’t mean that I came all the way to Hamburg to find him – I was going to be here anyway for the haematology conference. It’s just that while I was here, I wanted to see him. Maybe even talk to him. I’ve had a hard time coming to terms with Lara’s death . . .’

‘I see,’ said Fabel. ‘You’re right to say that that doesn’t sound good for you. Basically, you came to spy on and possible confront Albrecht and within a matter of hours he’s found dead.’

Tempel shrugged, an expression of hopelessness on his rugged face. ‘I had no intention to confront Albrecht. Or at least I think I didn’t – I just didn’t know how I’d react to seeing him. But the truth is I
didn’t
confront him. And I certainly didn’t kill him or act as an accomplice to the woman he was with.’

Fabel leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, his expression thoughtful. ‘After your encounter with my officer last night . . . where did you go?’

‘Back to the hotel. I really did need to get a cold compress on my . . . on my
injury
. No witnesses, I’m afraid.’

‘Did you see Professor Mortensen at all?’

‘No, of course not. He only arrived late last night – or early this morning.’

‘And you know that how?’

‘Through his schedule.’ Tempel’s tone was shifting: moving through the impatient to the indignant. He was either genuinely blameless or a skilled actor. ‘The details of his lecture tour have been publicized through the medical journals. I travelled from Bremen to hear him – of course I knew when he’d be here.’

‘Where were you this morning?’

‘The hotel and then the conference centre.’

‘And people can verify that?’

‘Obviously. But maybe not down to every last second.’ He sighed. ‘Let me get this absolutely straight: you think I killed both Tobias Albrecht and Paul Mortensen?’

‘We’re just trying to make sense of what is happening. You’re the only person we can link to both victims, at the moment. Plus you have a motive to murder Albrecht – he drove your sister to suicide.’

‘And Mortensen? Why on earth would I want to kill him?’

‘What we’re looking at is a series of murders that seem to be linked to a fifteen-year-old case. We also may be looking at more than one killer. It’s entirely possible that you’ve made some kind of deal: someone has helped you do your killing on the understanding that you help them with one of theirs. Maybe more than one.’

‘Are you insane? Don’t you see, it’s my job to save lives, not take them.’

‘I am something of a specialist in serial murderers,’ said Fabel. ‘If you break down serial killers by occupation, by far the largest single group is the medical profession. Your business, it could be argued, is as much about death as it is about life. Unfortunately, for some of your colleagues, observing and experiencing the moment of death of others becomes an obsession. Gives them a feeling of power.’ Fabel gave a small laugh. ‘It’s funny, since I’ve been working these cases the Gothic keeps cropping up. It’s amazing just how Gothic the concept of medical profession serial killers is: Angel of Death nurses, doctors taking lives for the sense of power it gives. Death with a capital “D”, as someone said to me recently.’

‘And you think that’s the type of physician I am: some kind of Doctor Death?’ Tempel seemed genuinely angered by the suggestion. ‘You don’t get it at all, do you? Whoever killed Mortensen took more than one life. Because Paul Mortensen is no longer in the world, research into the whole spectrum of blood cancers had been put back years. Not many years: others will pick up his research and develop it – it’s all there in the academic record. But even if it takes only, say, two years to regain his insight – that’s two years’ delay in research, two years’ delay in development and testing. Two years’ delay in bringing new treatments to the medical front line. Do you have any idea how many people will die in those two years? Professor Mortensen’s killing wasn’t murder, it was mass murder, and if you think I could ever have had anything to do with it you’re mad.’ He stood up. ‘You know what? I’m finished with this. Either you charge me with something or let me go. And if you’re not letting me go, I want my lawyer right now.’