The Ghosts of Altona (42 page)

‘And that’s what you think is behind it all? And I’m guessing you have suspicions as to who this avenger would be.’

‘I have a couple of ideas.’ Fabel paused, little more than a heartbeat. ‘But it could be the opposite. It could be that Monika’s killer is behind these other deaths.’

‘Why?’ Kerstin frowned. Beautifully. ‘I mean, why now, after all this time?’

‘I have this odd feeling that whoever killed Monika believed their identity was safe as long – as you put it before – as the box remained unopened and no one knew for sure what had happened to her. It could be that each of these four suspected each or all of the others of Monika’s death. Maybe these four men had to die simply because they were pieces in a jigsaw that the reopening of the case would – and has – put together.’

Kerstin Krone watched Fabel for a moment. ‘And what picture do you get from the pieces?’

Fabel gave a bitter laugh. ‘That’s the something I know . . . but can’t reach yet. But I do know it has to do with this . . .’ Reaching into his jacket pocket, Fabel took out two photographs and laid them side by side on the coffee table in front of Kerstin. One was a close-up of the monogram Traxinger used on his paintings, the other of the tattoo on the painter’s chest.

‘You’ve shown me these before,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what it means.’

‘I struggled with it myself. I mean, to start with we assumed the
DT
stood for Detlev Traxinger, but then we found the same tattoo on the others. And I assumed that when it was at the bottom of a painting it was his signature. But that was a mistake I made once before: I saw the name
Charon
at the bottom of one of his paintings and thought it was a signature, but it wasn’t. It was the subject. All of those paintings Traxinger did of Monika had that at the bottom, but it wasn’t his initials, it was the subject. Monika was “DT”.’

Kerstin made a confused face.

‘I couldn’t work out what it meant. Then someone who was
intimate
with the architect Tobias Albrecht said he had let slip the words “Silent Goddess” when referring to the paintings of your sister.
DT
stands for
Dea Tacita
, the Silent Goddess. The female personification of Death.’

‘I’m sorry, I still don’t understand . . .’

‘I think Monika lost her way. I think she perhaps went too far in finding out how much she could manipulate the men around her. Push them.’

‘So you think one of them killed her? And it has something to do with this
Dea Tacita
thing?’

‘I don’t know. But I believe the so-called Gothic set took things a little too far – with Monika the high priestess of her own little death cult. Something happened the night she disappeared, the night she called you. Something from which there was no going back. I think she made that call because she needed a way out.’

‘Why do I feel you’re skirting around something, Herr Fabel? That there’s something that you want to say, but you’re afraid to say it?’

Fabel gave a small laugh. ‘There’s this other case we’ve been working on – an old Nazi in a seniors’ home murdered an old anti-Nazi. But he killed him because he got confused – the roles became reversed. He believed his actions were justified because he was killing a man who was guilty of crimes that in truth he had committed himself. A very sad case.’

‘I really don’t understand what this has to do with Monika.’

‘Just that I think that night, the night she phoned you out of the blue, Monika would have given anything to do exactly the same thing – to slip into another life. Even into the life of her twin sister. Like you said, escape the storm of her own making. There’s another odd thing,’ he said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. ‘We’ve uncovered a link between Monika and a man called Jost Schalthoff – you’ll remember I asked you about him before. And we know she had a sexual affair with the architect, Tobias Albrecht. Schalthoff worked for the City Council; Albrecht was at that time an architecture student and had done a work placement with the City Planning Office. It’s entirely possible that, fifteen years ago, either or both men could have known about the development and building work on the site where the remains were buried.’

‘So that makes them suspects?’

‘In the original killing, yes. But, as I know only too well, Schalthoff died two years ago – and unless he has risen from the grave, there’s no way he can be behind this current spate of killings. And Albrecht has ended up a victim himself.’

‘I don’t understand your point . . .’

‘Simply that Monika perhaps knew about the site herself.’

‘What?’ Kerstin frowned to emphasize the effort of following Fabel’s logic. ‘She went there, committed suicide and lay down where she knew her body would be hidden? That’s absurd.’

‘Absurd and physically impossible. Monika lay in tight-packed clay. She was buried after her death. Deliberately and by someone else.’

‘I still don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

Fabel paused. There was the sound of a car passing along the street outside, the ticking of the clock out in the hall. He remembered sitting in another room full of expectant silences, fifteen years ago.
This is mad
, he told himself,
the parents must have known. She couldn’t have hidden it from them. They would have been able to tell
.

‘I had an experience,’ he said eventually. ‘A couple of years back. And it involved Jost Schalthoff. He shot me before he was gunned down himself.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She sounded genuine.

‘The fact that Schalthoff was involved isn’t the point. The point is that I came as close as you can come to death and still come back from it. I saw things, experienced things. I went through the whole near-death experience. When I go back to the Presidium, I’ll be questioning a man we’ve been looking for in connection with this most recent spate of killings. Martin Mensing. Is that name familiar?’

Kerstin shook her perfectly sculpted head.

‘Mensing knew Monika at university and was a member of the
Dea Tacita
crowd along with Traxinger, Hensler, Albrecht, Mortensen. The very same night that Monika went missing, he suffered a near-fatal stab wound to the chest, missing his heart by millimetres. And if our chronology is right, he was stabbed sometime shortly before the time you had that telephone conversation with your sister. His account of how he got the wound doesn’t fit with the injury itself, and he couldn’t explain how he had got to the hospital, but that was all let go. Anyway, that’s not why I’m telling you about him. My point is that Martin Mensing had a near-death experience the same way I did after I’d been shot. Except he came out of it believing he
hadn’t
come out of it – that he had really died and all he is now is an animated corpse. Cotard’s Delusion, they call it.’

‘I see . . .’ Kerstin said, still patient.

‘The funny thing is that I really can understand why he believes he’s dead. When you’ve gone through an experience like that, it changes you. Completely. It changed me – to the point that sometimes I feel like I am a completely different person to who I was before. Sometimes people close to me find it difficult to adjust – they see the
old
me, the person before the event. But inside, I know I’m different. Maybe to the extent of being someone else. And, yes, there are nights when I lie in the dark and I wonder if I really did die back then, and everything I have experienced since has just been an illusion created by the last-second flutterings of my dying brain.’

‘That’s a terrible thought.’

‘I don’t believe it, of course. I’m just saying that you have moments, when you’ve been through a life-changing experience like I have. Like Mensing has . . . Like you have.’

‘Me?’

‘Losing your sister like that. Losing half of a genetic identity, an alternate you.’

She held him in her gaze. Her expression remained the same, but something changed in the eyes. An emerald glitter like the one a painter had fought so hard to capture.

‘I suppose so . . .’ she said. ‘Are you fully recovered now, Herr Fabel?’

‘I am. But sometimes I like to get away for a while. Go somewhere for a coffee or a drink where no one knows who I am, what happened to me, or what I do for a living. Just a time to be someone else, I suppose. Just for a while. Have you never been tempted to do that, Frau Krone?’

‘I can’t say I have. I’m content with the life I have.’

A silence stretched between them.

‘Anyway . . .’ Fabel stood up with a ‘that’s it’ gesture. ‘Thanks for your time. By the way, I was sorry to hear about the suicide of your boyfriend – the one who confirmed you were with him in Hannover the night Monika disappeared.’

‘Thank you, it was very sad. But we had split up by then. Is that all, Herr Fabel?’

‘It is. Thanks again. I’m sorry we’re no further forward.’ He paused, holding her gaze. ‘I want you to know that I
will
find out what happened to your sister that night. I promise you that. And I’m never going to stop looking for who killed these four men. Incidentally, have you ever met a doctor from Bremen, a haematologist called Marco Tempel?’

‘No . . . not that I can remember.’

Fabel nodded. ‘Thank you for your time, Frau Krone. I’m sure we’ll see each other again soon.’

She stood up and smiled. ‘I doubt it, Herr Fabel . . .’

64

No one was calm when they had been arrested. Not even the most experienced and hardened criminals. Arrest brought with it its own form of claustrophobia: the awareness that you were restricted, confined, stifled; not free to go about your business, to move around the world as you wanted. Added to that was the anxiety about what would happen next: dark projections into a future you could not control; imaginings of an even more claustrophobic prison cell, of the unnatural and frightening life of a prisoner.

No one was calm. No matter how hard they tried to hide it, there was always a tell-tale fidget, a tick, a bouncing knee, restless fingers on the metal tabletop.

Except now.

The closed circuit camera was mounted in the corner of the interview room, slightly above and facing Martin Mensing, who sat at the table with complete calm, as if he were waiting for a bus or a fast-food delivery. The T-shirt and coveralls supplied by the Polizei Hamburg were loose and baggy on the prison social therapist, as almost all clothing would have been, and it made him look even more insubstantial.

As he, Anna and Nicola Brüggemann watched the unnaturally thin, unnaturally pale face of Martin Mensing on the monitor, Fabel could see that he was totally at ease. No fear, no anxiety, no impatience.

‘He’s waiting,’ said Fabel.

‘Waiting for what?’ asked Brüggemann.

‘That I don’t know, but I wish to hell I did. But I think it’s no coincidence he was off his head with DMT just as we came to arrest him, meaning we couldn’t interview him for nearly two hours. Then there was the chase across town to get to Susanne . . . It’s like he’s been playing us. Delaying tactics.’

‘There’s no one left to kill,’ said Anna. ‘At least that we know about. So why would he deliberately delay us?’

‘I don’t know. You’re right, everyone else we know about who was involved with the Gothic set is dead . . . except him.’ Fabel shook his head.

‘What is it?’ asked Nicola Brüggemann.

‘I don’t think it was him.’

‘What?’

‘I know it makes no sense, but I don’t. Just like I don’t think it was Hübner either. All we’ve got on them so far is suspicion, some circumstantials, and a sequence of events that would lead you to an obvious conclusion. We don’t have a single forensic trace or witness to place either him or Hübner at any of the crime scenes.’

‘That doesn’t mean they weren’t there.’

‘I know . . . but there were no signs of struggle at any of the scenes. The painter Traxinger was killed with a weapon that you had to get up close to use. It suggests he was killed by someone he knew. If you saw Frankenstein Hübner coming for you, wouldn’t you make a run for it?’

‘It was maybe him . . .’ Anna jutted a chin towards the figure on the monitor. ‘Traxinger knew him and he’s certainly not the type that would scare you into flight.’

‘True, but I just don’t believe he’s behind the killings. It’s like he’s deliberately stringing us along. Whatever he’s guilty of, it hasn’t happened yet.’

‘But if he’s innocent, then he has no reason to string us along,’ said Anna.

‘Yes he does. Look at him.’ Fabel nodded towards the monitor. ‘He’s waiting. He’s waiting for something to happen and he wants us to be looking the other way. And that something is to do with Jochen Hübner . . .’

Fabel watched the perfect stillness of the figure sitting at the interview table.

‘Time to commune with the dead.’

*

‘Where is Jochen Hübner?’

Zombie stared at Fabel, his drawn, pale face motionless, his eyes large and watery in their sockets. There was no hostility in the eyes; no anxiety, no impatience, no concern. No interest.

‘Herr Mensing, you work as a social therapist in prison. You know what life can be like in there. You helped Jochen Hübner, an extremely dangerous prisoner, to escape. For that alone you will go to prison. But if he kills any more people, then you’ll be spending the rest of your life behind bars.’

Zombie laughed quietly, as if Fabel had said something stupid.

‘Where is Jochen Hübner?’ asked Fabel again.

Mensing looked up, his pale, too-thin face calm, a smile on his lips.

‘Where is Hübner?’ repeated Fabel.

‘There’s nothing you can do to me, Herr Fabel. No threat you can use, no promises you can make, no deal you can offer, that will have the slightest effect on me. These are all things of the living. I am dead, I remain dead. What happens to my body is inconsequential. I don’t care if I’m in my apartment, if I’m here or if I’m in prison. It makes absolutely no difference to me.’

‘Okay, maybe you don’t care about yourself, but you know what Hübner is capable of doing – the pain and terror he’ll spread because he’s at liberty. If you have any decency left in you, you’ll tell me where he is.’