The Ghosts of Altona (4 page)

They would all learn what it was to suffer.

5

Jan Fabel sat in his car with the engine running, staring at the black-overalled back, emblazoned with the word BEREITSCHAFTSPOLIZEI, of the young policewoman who had stopped the traffic. Every now and then she would check over her shoulder to see how far the tailback stretched. She was small, perhaps only 160 centimetres tall, but formless and genderless under the bulked-up, borrowed authority of body armour and uniform. Her riot gear helmet hung hooked on her waistband and she wore a standard service cap, her hair gathered back and tied neatly behind her head in plaits. But woven through the plaits was a narrow, bright red ribbon: a discreet badge of individuality that for some reason cheered Fabel. He had always noticed small things like that – but now he noticed them for their own sake, not just as fragments of a hidden history or telltales of a concealed personality. No longer just as clues.

‘Do you want me to tell her to let us through?’ asked Anna Wolff, without impatience. Even now, two years on from the shooting, Anna was different around Fabel: quieter, more cautious, less impatient; every interaction wrapped up in a tangle of unspoken thoughts. He knew, without it ever being given voice, that she felt a responsibility, a guilt even, for what had happened. There was no need, he wanted to tell her; and he would. Since the shooting, he had found that he no longer let things go unsaid. At first it had unsettled those around him, who had found him changed. People had been patient with him, indulgent, understanding, sympathetic. But with the same frankness he had told them he didn’t need their sympathy.

There had been post-trauma counselling. Psychiatric assessments. He had made clear he hadn’t needed that, either. And there had been months of gruelling physical therapy, which he had needed. Really needed.

When he had first come back there had even been a long talk with Police President Hugo Steinbach. Steinbach, who had since retired, had been sincere in his concern for his junior officer. There had been talk of a move to another department and again Fabel’s frankness had startled: he had told Steinbach that he knew full well that the Police President didn’t really want him to move – nor could afford for him to move – from the Murder Commission; that he understood Steinbach was genuinely concerned, but also simply going through the stipulated Human Resources motions. Fabel had explained that he wasn’t some kind of tortured soul, which people seemed to expect him to be, because of the shooting or because he had spent a decade and a half dealing with death. He was content. And he declared himself more than able to return to dealing with the dead.

It had never been mentioned again. By Steinbach or his successor.

Fabel would tell Anna to stop feeling bad about what happened, all right, but later. Later, when the moment was right.

He shook his head. ‘We’re in no hurry, Anna. One thing you can count on with the dead is they’re not going anywhere. Anyway . . .’ He nodded towards the fast-approaching reason for the delay: a column of heavily armoured police vehicles thundered towards them and through the junction, like a freight train at a level crossing, causing the small uniformed policewoman to take an involuntary step back. There were several buses laden with riot police, three armoured cars and a water cannon, the column topped and tailed by a blue and silver marked patrol car, blue lights flashing. It looked more like a military deployment than police activity.

‘I’m no longer sure if that’s the shit or it’s the fan,’ said Anna. ‘This is getting out of hand. You see Wandsbek on the TV last night?’

‘Yep.’ Fabel had: cars blazing; petrol bombs and police baton rounds arcing through the spring night air.

‘Battle zone. And we get stuck in the middle. But if it kicks off today, the May Day riots, Schanzenfest, Rote Flora, Wandsbek – none of that will be anything in comparison.’

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t. I live here. I don’t want to see Altona turned into a war zone.’ But it would, Fabel knew. The latest estimates were that there would be three thousand far-right extremists marching through the heart of traditionally left-wing Altona, with as many as eight thousand anti-fascists expected to mount a counter-demonstration. As Anna had pointed out, it would all end up with the Readiness Police in the middle and in the spotlight. The Polizei Hamburg’s public image was always the first casualty.

And here, in Altona, it all conjured up a distant memory. A very German kind of memory: distant but undimmed. A memory forbidden to be forgotten.

The column passed and once it was completely out of sight, the little policewoman turned and waved them on.

*

One thing Jan Fabel had learned over the years was that the dead waited to be found on pleasant late-spring days like this just as they did in the cold and rain. He had seen blood shimmer in summer sunlight and blot dark in winter snow. There was, he knew, no meteorology for violence. No season for murder.

He had lost count of the number of dead bodies he had seen over the years. There had been those that looked deceptively lifelike: as if sleeping, not dead. There had been the sad and pathetic, bodies foetus-coiled in terminal fear and pain. There had been the gut-turning: those pulled out of the Elbe after a week in the water, the foul-smelling flesh fragile and slick like overripe chicken. And then there were those like the one he now gazed down on: the fleshless; the jumbles of bones and the naked grins of skulls. For some reason, despite the skeleton and the skull being the universal symbols of death, Fabel could seldom connect them with anything human, dead or alive, as if their identities had fallen away from them with their flesh. They seemed more objects than anything once animate; anything once a person.

‘It’s a female, adult.’ Holger Brauner grunted as he clambered out of the excavated area. ‘Somewhere between sixteen and thirty.’

‘Any idea how long the remains have been here?’ asked Fabel. Brauner snapped off a latex glove and shook Fabel’s hand. The Murder Commission leader and the forensic pathologist had been friends for as long as they had been colleagues. Brauner had found time every day to visit Fabel in hospital in those first crucial weeks of recovery.

Brauner jutted his chin towards a building site across the road. ‘There’s a new development going up over there. They had to cut this trench here because they needed to reroute the water supply. Just half a metre either way and she may never have been discovered.’

Fabel nodded. The bones lay in a narrow trench that had been cut at an angle across one corner of the car park.

‘And I can be very specific about when the body was buried here.’ Brauner smiled broadly, which was his habit. Before the shooting, Fabel had always wondered how someone who dealt with the physical reality of death every day could be so cheerful. After the shooting, he understood it perfectly. ‘The car park was laid fifteen years ago, and this soil was infill, laid down in preparation. I suspect that the killer knew about the site, dug out the grave, put her in and once he’d covered her up, I reckon he smoothed it all out so no one would notice before finishing the job for him by laying the asphalt. So we have a very clear window . . . March to May 2000.’

‘What is it?’ Anna Wolff had clearly read Fabel’s expression.

‘She was twenty-five,’ said Fabel. ‘Just turned.’

‘I’d say there or thereabouts, maybe younger,’ Brauner said. ‘From the leg bones I’d estimate she was somewhere around one hundred and seventy to one hundred and seventy-five centimetres tall.’

‘One hundred and seventy-four.’

Now Brauner looked at Fabel with the same puzzlement as Anna. ‘You know who this is?’

Fabel nodded. ‘Was she killed by that?’ He jutted his chin towards where the skull was caved in on the left side.

‘No,’ said Brauner. ‘That’s fresh . . . damage from the digger’s shovel. Without soft tissue it will be impossible to pinpoint an exact cause of death, unless we find fractures or blade marks on the bones.’

‘Who is she, Jan?’ asked Anna.

‘Monika Krone. The first case I worked on in the Murder Commission. She was a post-grad literature student. An exceptional student . . . twenty-five years old, beautiful – strikingly beautiful – and fiercely intelligent. She had a great future ahead of her but she walked out of a university party and fell off the world. We never did get her killer. Or find her body, until now.’

‘It’s a bit early—’

‘It’s her.’ Fabel cut Anna off. ‘She went missing from the party on a Saturday night in March, 2000. The eighteenth of March. Like I said, just vanished clean off the face of the Earth.’

‘Suspects?’

‘Plenty – almost anyone who was at the party. But once we had a chronology worked out, we reckoned she’d been picked at random. Our only solid suspect was a serial rapist on the loose at the time – Jochen Hübner. When we caught Hübner we were hot for him for this, but there was nothing conclusive or even circumstantial to connect him to her disappearance. And there was no evidence that he had ever killed a victim.’

‘So why was he at the top of the list?’

‘The Sexual Crimes Commission had been after an unidentified serial rapist for a while. He’d been christened “Frankenstein” by the press.’

‘Frankenstein?’

‘If you ever came face to face with him, you’d understand. And trust me, you never want to come face to face with Jochen Hübner. It was actually his unusual appearance that got him caught in the end. Hübner was –
is
– a monster on the outside and on the inside. He’s an offender of breathtaking malice: his hatred of women was astonishing and the Sexual Crimes Commission had red-flagged “Frankenstein” to us as someone whose offending was clearly set to escalate – that it was simply a matter of time before he was going to kill a victim. When we identified Jochen Hübner as “Frankenstein”, it seemed reasonable that Monika Krone was that landmark victim marking his switch from serial rapist to serial killer.’

‘So do you still think it could have been him?’

‘I don’t know. Truth is, I have my doubts. Always did. He swore he didn’t do it and Hübner was the kind of sociopathic egoist to be proud of his work. Once he was caught, he admitted to all of the rapes, with relish. The lead SCC investigator was a woman and Hübner told her exactly what he had done to each victim in forensic detail – what each had said when they were begging. After his conviction she had to take a leave of absence.’

‘Sounds to me like it could easily have been him,’ said Anna.

‘Perhaps.’

Fabel stared down at the bones in the shallow grave, white against the red-black of the earth, numbered orange forensic markers scattered around her like ancient grave goods. He knew who she was, knew she had lain beneath this grubby mini-market car park for fifteen years, her beauty and her flesh falling from her bones while the living had bustled back and forth with trolleys and carrier bags stuffed with groceries, had squabbled over parking spaces, had shouted at children to be quiet, had cursed as shopping bags had split and spilled, had conducted the meaningless rituals of life. He knew it was Monika Krone in the shallow grave before him, but somehow still could not connect the bones with the person.

The sun broke through from behind a cloud and Fabel turned his face to it.

‘I suppose we had better see the next of kin.’

6

The movie was not like the book.

Zombie sat alone in his row. He sat alone because, although this art house movie theatre in Rotherbaum was usually well-patronized, there was a limit to the audience in Hamburg for silent Expressionist movies; alone because he was sitting perhaps a little too close to the screen and should have been three or four rows further back. But this was a monument of a movie and he wanted it to fill his vision; for the slow-moving tectonic plates of Paul Wegener’s face, all sharp angles and flat planes, to command his eyes; alone because he didn’t want anyone to smell him.

Death, he knew, had a unique odour.

Zombie was not a nickname: a nickname was something given you by others and Zombie had no real connection to others, no solid connection to the world of the living, any more. He was compelled, by the imperatives of his continued but lifeless existence, to interact with others occasionally, but outside the forced ritual of work he kept those interactions to the absolute minimum. Zombie was not even a name: it was a description, a statement of taxonomy. Just like a shark was a fish, like a rat was a rodent, he was a zombie. He had died, but was unburied and did not yet belong with the dead; he was animate, but did not belong with the living. He continued to walk the Earth but was no longer connected to it. And all the time he sought meaning, to understand why he had been condemned to this state of conscious non-being.

He still had favoured places, however. Zombie liked to come to this cinema, he liked the dark and the quiet of his room, and, most of all, he liked to be around graveyards: the homesick pull every unwilling traveller feels.

He still remembered what it was to be alive, though; what it had been like to have had senses: the sight, smell, taste, touch and sound of the world.

When he had been a boy, his family had spent holidays in an aparthotel next to the sea at Cuxhaven. He remembered his excitement – the almost unbearable anticipation – as they had walked along the path to the dunes, and how the sea had promised itself through every sense before yielding to sight: the ozone fuming in the air, the path edged with windswept sand, the sound coming over the dunes of an unseen sea moving against the shore. That was what it had been like to be at the centre of a nexus of senses. To be alive.

He even remembered what it had been like to love; faint echoes of longing, desire, jealousy. The face of the woman he loved, the only woman he had ever loved, remained clear in his recall and the pain the memory brought was the closest thing to an acute feeling he still had.

It was these memories he used to disguise himself when he moved among the living, affecting the empty expression of vitality.

Zombie did still have senses, of a sort. He still saw the world, but it was through the lens of a dead eye, everything muted, dull, vapid. All his other senses were turned down even further: to the dead-but-walking Zombie the world was an insipid place devoid of taste or odour, except when he caught the occasional whiff of his own corruption, the stench of his rotting flesh seeping through his clothes.