The Ghosts of Altona (40 page)

‘Your fifth man. I’ve got him. And this is big,
Chef
. . .’

‘You don’t look happy about it. Who is he?’

‘The reason I don’t look happy is that I’ve found a sixth man, too . . .’ She walked to the front and handed Fabel a photograph. It was another morgue shot, again a close-up of the tattoo: the DT monogram circled with acanthus and ivy.

Fabel looked up and across to Anna, shrugging.

‘Jan . . . I checked this out on a hunch. Trying to find a connection. That photograph is from the autopsy of Jost Schalthoff – the man who shot you two years ago.’

59

It wasn’t yet full evening, but the dense trees around the old forester’s house were already blotting out the light. Zombie had arrived twenty minutes before and had sat in the cellar, in that motionless way he had, and had quietly gone over what was to happen, how it was to happen and when. As he described the horror to be unleashed, he did so without emotion, without passion. Nevertheless a dark excitement had still risen in Frankenstein’s chest. Now, their plans agreed, they stood in the dusty hallway.

‘It’s nearly time,’ said Zombie. He handed Frankenstein a photograph and the keys to the white van. ‘This is the revenge we’ve waited for. They will take me now.’

‘I know,’ said Hübner.

‘They’ll catch you too, you know that?’

‘I won’t let them. I’ll kill as many as I can before they kill me.’ Frankenstein turned his eyes, small and black, almost lost in the huge architecture of his face beneath the bulging brow. He rested his too-heavy hand on Zombie’s too-light shoulder. ‘Thank you. For everything.’

Zombie smiled. ‘We’ll both be free now.’

After Zombie had left, Frankenstein stood alone in the gloom of the dusty hallway and looked down at the photograph Zombie had given him.

He would wait until dark. Until the exact time he had been given.

60

‘Jost Schalthoff?’ Fabel stared at the photograph as if it could yield the answer. The briefing room was silent.

‘It explains why we found that print – the one of Traxinger’s painting – in his apartment.’ Anna still looked worried. ‘Are you okay with this?’

‘What?’ Fabel looked up, frowning. ‘Sure . . . I’m fine. Yes, it explains the painting but nothing else. I just don’t understand . . . Wait a minute.’ He beckoned over to Sven Bruns. ‘Sven, the architectural drawings I asked you to look for in Albrecht’s apartment. Did you find them?’

‘Yes,
Chef
, I put them on your desk.’

‘And the book I asked for?’

‘The dictionary . . . yes, it’s there too.’

‘Anna, Nicola – come with me. The rest of you wait here. I need to get something sorted out, then I’ll assign duties.’

Once they were in the office, Fabel pulled the drawings from their cardboard tube.

‘Birgit Taubitz told me about these.’ He unrolled them flat on his desk. The top drawing was of a fountain. The style was totally different from that which Fabel associated with the architect: ornate, rich in detailed flora. Gothic. He shuffled through the drawings until he came to the one he wanted. It was the mausoleum-cum-memorial that Birgit Taubitz had described.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Nicola Brüggemann.

‘A bit overdone for me,’ said Anna.

Fabel stabbed his forefinger at the legend at the bottom of the page. It read: PROPOSAL FOR MEMORIAL AT JEWISH CEMETERY, ALTONA. He went through his desk drawers, almost frantically, until he found the file he was looking for. He placed a photograph of the painting of Monika Krone standing in a graveyard, surrounded by ivy and acanthus, on his desk next to the architectural drawing. In the background of the painting they could see tilted or broken headstones. The legend on some was in German, but in Hebrew on others.

‘This is the place,’ said Fabel. ‘Whatever happened that night fifteen years ago, it happened here. And that’s our link with Jost Schalthoff. He has absolutely no other connection with the others. He never went to university, but he did have an interest in Gothic literature. And God knows there was more than a touch of the Gothic about Schalthoff. He was all about death.’

‘I still—’ started Anna.

Fabel interrupted her: ‘Schalthoff worked for the Hamburg state monuments department ever since he left school . . .’

Realization lit up Anna’s expression. ‘And the Jewish cemetery is a Hamburg monument . . .’

‘My guess is Schalthoff was allowed into their little secret club because he had the keys to their playground. Nowhere is more Gothic than a graveyard.’ He turned to Anna. ‘So tell me . . . Schalthoff is our sixth man, but who is the fifth? Who’s my ghost in the file?’

‘I did a search for the guy Professor Rohde said was always loitering in the wings of the Gothic set. Well, the name wasn’t Messing or Mesling – it was Mensing. Martin Mensing.’

‘Do we know where to find him?’ asked Fabel.

‘Oh yeah . . . and this is where it gets really good. He studied sociology, all right – then he worked for Hamburg state as a social worker but had some kind of breakdown which was attributed to post-traumatic stress. I checked out what the trauma had been and was told that Mensing had been stabbed, near fatally, in a street attack. I dug out the records. Guess when he was stabbed? Fifteen years ago, on Saturday, eighteenth of March. The exact same night that Monika Krone went missing.’

Fabel stared at Anna for a moment. ‘Shit . . . that was quite a punchline, Anna.’

‘That’s still not the punchline. There was a mystery as to how he had ended up dumped outside the main entrance to the Asklepios Klinik Altona – especially because it looked like someone with at least some medical expertise had tried to patch him up long enough to get to the hospital without bleeding out. But after the attack Mensing was in a coma and in no condition to talk for weeks. Then his statements about the attack were so garbled and contradictory that no one knew where to start looking – they put his confused state to him having been in a coma. Anyway, there were never any arrests and Mensing made a recovery, at least physically. He went back to work for a while, but there were continued problems and he had a complete nervous breakdown. Started to believe he wasn’t really alive – that he had died during the attack and was a walking corpse—’

‘Cotard’s Delusion?’

Anna looked surprised. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact that’s exactly what was diagnosed. Anyway, he made a recovery, went back to work and he retrained in a speciality within social work. And this is where we hit the jackpot. He became a social therapist for serious and sexual offenders. He has a two-day-a-week placement at Fuhlsbüttel prison. And I think you can guess who one of his clients there was . . .’

‘Shit . . .’ Fabel unfolded his arms and straightened up from where he’d been leaning against the wall. ‘Jochen Hübner?’

‘In one.’

‘All the pieces are finally beginning to fall into place,’ said Fabel. ‘But the picture they’re making still doesn’t make any sense.’ He looked at his watch, it was eleven thirty a.m. ‘Get on to Santa Fu, Anna – tell them that Mensing is not to leave the prison until we get there.’

‘I’m way ahead of you – today isn’t one of his consulting days. He’s not due in until Thursday and has been off sick for the last week. That’s not an unusual event, apparently. He still has health issues – both physical and mental – mainly as a result of his stabbing. But despite that, the JVA investigators don’t like his absence this time – they were already getting twitchy about him after Frankenstein’s escape. When I phoned they were already trying to find him to interview him. Mensing seemed to be the only person in the whole system, staff or prisoner, who Frankenstein seemed to get on with. But I’ve got an address for him.’

‘Let’s get the team briefed . . .’

61

All the vehicles pulled up out of sight of the apartment’s windows. Fabel had three Murder Commission teams with him, but had also arranged for an MEK mobile support unit to deploy with them. It wasn’t that they expected much resistance from Mensing, who had been described as physically very frail, although there was always the possibility he would be armed. But the real threat – and the real prize – would be Jochen Hübner. And Frankenstein would take a lot of bringing down.

They moved in single file, pressed against the wall of the building as if magnetized by it, the MEK team in their heavy black body-armour leading the way. An old woman walking along the pavement froze at the sight of the officers and their weapons and the MEK commander gestured with a gauntleted hand for her to move on. Henk Hermann broke rank and dodged over to the woman, taking her by the shoulders and reassuring her quietly as he guided her past the officers.

The apartment, they knew, was on the third floor and the tactical officers moved swiftly and quietly up the stairwell, two men flanking each side of the door while the commander assessed its strength. He pointed to two spots on the door and a sixth MEK officer swung a small black ram where the commander had indicated. The locks shattered and the door burst inwards.

Fabel and his team followed up the stairwell but were stopped from entering the apartment by the MEK commander.

‘Wait until we give the all-clear.’

There was shouting. The tactical team barked orders, yelling at someone inside the flat. Fabel rested his hand on the handle of his gun. Shouts of ‘Clear!’ from different parts of the apartment, then one of the team re-emerging from the doorway.

‘It’s all clear,’ he said.

‘No one home?’ asked Fabel.

The MEK man laughed. ‘You could say that . . . but yes, we have your suspect in custody. I just don’t think he knows it yet.’

‘No Hübner?’

‘No Hübner.’

Fabel and Nicola Brüggemann went into the apartment. It looked as if it was unoccupied, with hardly any furniture, no pictures, no decoration of any kind, except that the walls had been amateurishly gone over in black paint, which had dried in streaks and patches.

The MEK officers were in the living room, again darkened by the patchily blackened walls. The only colour was a blood-red ‘DT’ that had been daubed in metre-high letters over the black paint.

‘I just love what he’s done with the place,’ Brüggemann muttered beside Fabel, and grinned. ‘Must get him round to do mine . . .’

The only furniture in the room was a single chair and a small coffee table. The body-armoured MEK men were gathered in a circle around a figure kneeling on the naked tiled floor. Martin Mensing’s appearance shocked Fabel: he was wearing only underpants that looked oversized on his frame, which was emaciated to the point of being skeletal. Mensing had large, blue eyes that seemed sunk into their sockets and his cheeks were hollow and drawn. He had a shock of thick black hair that somehow accentuated the skull-like appearance of his face. To Fabel, Mensing looked like someone in the end stages of a terminal disease, or recalled grainy black-and-white images of concentration camp victims.

And there it was, on the corrugated chest of rib and skin: the same tattoo that Traxinger and Hensler had had.
DT
.

The MEK officers had handcuffed his hands behind his back, but Fabel could see that Mensing was probably unaware of the fact. He was singing quietly – not songs or recognizable melodies, but tones, sometimes with long gaps, as if he was singing along to some radio station no one else could hear. As he sang, he swayed, his eyes following objects and movements in the room that only he could see. There was a hypodermic syringe sitting in a saucer on the floor next to him.

‘We need a doctor here right away,’ Fabel said to Brüggemann.

‘I’ll get on it. What is it? Heroin?’

‘No . . .’ Fabel watched Mensing as he swayed. A smile would break out occasionally, white and toothy in the skull face, suddenly to be replaced with a look of surprise or awe. ‘Something else – and we need to find out what. We’re not going to get any sense out of him until it wears off.’

While Brüggemann called for the police surgeon to attend, Fabel walked through to the kitchen. It was as empty as the rest of the apartment, with the barest minimum to sustain a life in the way of utensils and food. He snapped on latex gloves and opened the cupboards. Most were empty, but in one he found two rubber-capped fifty-millilitre pharmaceutical bottles. He read the label:
Xylazine Hydrochloride 100mg/ml. For veterinary use only
.

‘The doctor’s on his way.’ Nicola Brüggemann came into the kitchen. Fabel nodded towards the bottles. ‘Is that what he’s on?’ she asked.

‘No. This is what was used to sedate the victims. And from what I’ve heard, what Hübner used to fake heart failure.’

He opened another couple of cupboards. One contained a small amount of canned food, the second was again empty except for a plastic bag containing a white crystalline substance that looked almost like salt.

‘Bingo,’ said Fabel. ‘We’ll get that analysed. Whatever it is,
that’s
Mensing’s ticket to the moon.’

‘I’ll check the bedroom . . .’ Brüggemann left Fabel and he went back through to where Mensing knelt, still rapt in a universe visible only to him.

‘Can we get him up into the chair?’ asked Fabel, and two MEK officers eased the jumble of bones up and into the room’s sole chair. Seeing him there, Fabel thought back to Monika Krone’s remains lying abandoned in red clay and how hard he had found to link them with anything human. Martin Mensing, through his own devices, was well on his way to the same place.

‘Jan!’

Fabel turned and as soon as he saw Nicola Brüggemann’s face he knew something was wrong.

He followed her into the bedroom. Again there was practically nothing in the room save a single bed dressed in only a mattress with a single sheet over it. And like the rest of the apartment, there were no decorations. Except for one, slightly blurry enlarged photograph that had been taped to the otherwise naked, black-painted wall.

‘Oh no . . .’ Before he turned and charged back out into the stairwell to start barking orders at his team, Fabel stood for a moment and stared at the photograph.