The Ghosts of Altona (44 page)

‘What form did these rituals take?’

‘It all became about death. Instead of us making offerings to the dead, it started to involve death itself. We had to make, well . . .
sacrifices
. Birds. Small animals. It got sicker and sicker . . . We resisted at first, but everyone wanted to please her. And between Monika’s manipulations and the effects of the peyote or whatever the hell it was she had us drink, we were all beginning to lose our minds a bit. Every gathering had to end with the taking of a life. Instead of a Roman religion or Gothic games, it started to look a hell of a lot more like Black Masses.’

‘And you never once thought that it was becoming extreme? That it was ridiculous? Mad?’

‘It was mad. But it was a creeping madness. We’d drifted out from the shore of what was sane and normal in slow centimetres. Before we knew where we were we had lost sight of what was normal, barely even remembered what was normal. All that existed for us was Monika and the storm around her. Each gathering, each ritual, became more and more extreme. We became afraid of her, afraid of each other. But the main thing was she kept mixing cocktails of entheogenic drugs into the wine. We got lost in the madness.’

He paused and again looked past Fabel to the clock on the wall.

‘I was the weakest. I would have done anything for the Silent Goddess. She said that we had all been bound together by Death, but the bonds weren’t strong enough because the deaths we’d offered weren’t big enough, significant enough. There had to be a human sacrifice. Someone had to become the husband of the Silent Goddess – had to know her true touch.’

‘You?’

‘None of us really believed she’d go through with it. We were caught up in her frenzy and half off our heads with drugs, but I think we all thought it was some kind of symbolism – or that she was just testing us all to see how far we’d go for her. We had no idea how mad she was. It was that night after the party. We had all arranged to leave the party separately and gather at the Place of Broken Stones – which was her name for the cemetery. When we got there she was wild, her eyes were insane. Like before, she made us all drink something. Again it was wine, but there was something mixed into it that was stronger than the stuff she’d given us before.’

‘DMT?’

‘No. This was different. Similar, but different. Mescaline, maybe. I suspect I was given a bigger dose than the others. Everything started to . . .
scintillate
. It was like the whole world, the entire universe was a vibrating string. But it was the real world – I didn’t start to hallucinate. The others were pretty wild on it too. But there must have been something extra in mine because my muscles went weak. I was fully conscious, but I had no control of my body.’

‘Was Jost Schalthoff there?’

‘Outside. Keeping watch. He was only allowed to take part in some ceremonies.’

‘What happened?’

Mensing paused. His dull eyes lit up with something as memories played out behind them. ‘Monika transformed. She changed. I would have sworn she truly, totally became the Silent Goddess. Death. Her eyes . . .’ He looked at Fabel as if urging him to understand. ‘Her eyes were like green fire in the torchlight. She ordered the others to hold me down on one of the broken headstones. They did what they were ordered, but I could see that Mortensen and Albrecht, despite the drugs and the excitement, were getting uneasy. I mean I don’t think any of them believed she meant to go through with it – but I did. I became scared and started to scream for help, but they still held me down. Monika slipped off her robe and stood there in the torchlight naked. She was so beautiful and so terrifying. I think it was Albrecht who saw it first – the knife. She held it above me and screamed. It was like some trapped animal screaming. All of a sudden it was no longer about anything that had brought us together, there was no hint of it being a joke. It wasn’t even about worshipping the Gothic, or a Roman goddess or even Death any more. It was sheer insanity.’

He paused again, and Fabel noticed the almost fleshless fingers shaking on the table’s surface.

‘She brought the knife down. Everybody started yelling and screaming and they let me go. Albrecht lunged at her and tried to grab the knife. He knocked her off target and she missed my heart with the first strike. The pain was incredible – more painful still when she pulled the knife out: white hot and filling my entire chest. The others wrestled the knife from her before she could strike again. But it was too late. That was what killed me.’

‘But, Herr Mensing, you are not dead . . .’ Fabel sighed. ‘What happened next?’

‘All of the screaming and shouting brought Schalthoff running. I saw his face when he saw me lying there, dying. He grinned. He was as bad as she was. Every bit as mad and obsessed with death. He took charge of Monika while the others took care of me.

‘Because he was a medical student, Paul Mortensen did his best to treat the wound. He and Hensler kept a compress on it while Albrecht and Traxinger got me into the car. They took me to the hospital, leaving me at the emergency entrance. They begged me not to give their names, but by that time I was slipping in and out of consciousness. I heard afterwards that they supported each other’s alibis for that night.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Fabel. ‘They saved your life. Why would you want to kill them?’

‘No one saved my life. I was supposed to die that night. That was my destiny and I did die. But ever since that night I have been condemned to walk around among the living, while my corpse rots and stinks of death.’

‘So that’s why you killed them? Because you should have died? Because they denied you your peace?’

Again Zombie looked past Fabel. He was looking at the clock again. He was checking. Suddenly, an expression swept over his face, like a sudden breath of wind across a becalmed sea.

‘No, Herr Fabel, I didn’t kill them. They were my friends. They were lost in the same madness as me, that’s all, but they saw through it and tried to save me. I just haven’t been quick enough to save them.’

Fabel frowned as a thought flashed into his head. ‘If the others took you in the car, then Monika was left alone with Jost Schalthoff, the council worker?’

‘Yes.’

Fabel thought it all through for a moment. ‘So Schalthoff murdered Monika?’ he said, but the statement sounded wrong in his mouth, in his head.

‘No. Schalthoff didn’t kill her.’ Mensing checked the clock again. He smiled: an ugly baring of too-large teeth by too-thin lips. He leaned forward. ‘Time flies, doesn’t it? Time is a preoccupation with me. What happened to me that night left me dead, yet I’ve been condemned to walk amongst the living. I am, truly, literally, a zombie. It’s a state of waiting, and when you spend so long waiting, you learn to measure time.’

He knows about the clock
, thought Fabel.
He’s delayed me again
.

‘I waited all this time. I could never know for sure, but when they discovered the body – then I knew for sure. I knew who it was in the ground and why she’d been put there.’

‘Please,’ said Fabel. ‘If Schalthoff didn’t kill Monika Krone, who did? Was it Hübner?’

Mensing shook his head. ‘You’re too late. It’s all too late now.’

‘Who killed Monika Krone?’ Despite himself, Fabel was shouting. Mensing’s elaborate plan to spring Hübner, the months of preparation, the deliberate delaying tactics to keep the police occupied – it had all been leading up to this moment. Fabel knew something terrible was happening and he didn’t know what, where, or when.

Mensing smiled more broadly than ever. A victor’s smile. ‘You just don’t understand, do you? No one killed Monika Krone. Monika Krone didn’t die.’

‘What do you mean she didn’t die? What makes you think that?’

‘I saw her. Years later. Here in Hamburg. I was walking along the street and there she was: my Silent Goddess. She had changed her appearance, but she couldn’t hide her beauty. I saw her and I knew it was her, hiding in another life.’

‘No . . . that wasn’t Monika, that was—’ Fabel broke off as a thousand thoughts seemed to fall suddenly onto him. He had nearly given it voice himself: that thing he had known all along, but hadn’t realized he knew it. He felt his heart pick up a pace. He turned and looked at the wall clock behind him.

Mensing smiled his skull smile again. ‘Now you see. Now you understand. You see through the deceit. You see through the mask.’

‘Why did you help Jochen Hübner to escape?’ Fabel asked, though he already knew the answer.

‘He is my instrument. My Golem. My monster.’ Another look at the clock. ‘You’re too late, Fabel. It’s done. What had to be done has been done. It’s too late for you to stop it.’

Fabel jumped up from his seat and turned to the closed circuit camera.

‘Kerstin Krone! Get units over to Kerstin Krone’s apartment now!’

65

She lay in the bath, allowing her headache and her tiredness to soak out of her body and into the warm water. It had been a long day. The thing about being a teacher was that your environment stayed the same, the same room, the same view through the window, but the characters who peopled it changed throughout the day: a constant stream of humanity.

Today seemed to have been more mixed than others. A boy in her first class, sixteen years old, had begun crying for no reason at all. Kerstin guessed that there must have been something wrong in his life that his classmates knew about, because there was no sniggering, no joy at his distress. Instead a couple of the girls comforted him and looked expectantly over at Kerstin.

That moment, that look, had been the most challenging experience she had faced in a long, long time. Something had been expected of her. It was a call to her, but a call in a foreign idiom. It was a language of empathetic responses she would never fully understand – even if she had studied it for so long now that she could generally answer appropriately.

She had nodded to the girls and they had escorted the boy out of the class. But it had troubled her for the rest of the day: should she have gone with them? Was that what had been expected of her?

There had been no further incidents in her other classes, but again she had found it difficult to cope with the peaks and troughs of ability; the vagaries of personality and variations in emotion. She always, however, dealt with every class and every pupil with the same equanimity. No one had ever seen Frau Krone lose her temper, or even her cool. The boys were easiest because they worshipped her. The girls did too, in their own confused manner. There was always the occasional adolescent pushing of boundaries, but she could crush those with a look. There was some instinct common to all others that recognized something to be feared in that look. Someone, a long, long time ago, had told her she was an archetype: a real person who mirrored a figure buried in the common unconscious. He had struggled so very hard to try to capture that archetype with his art.

All she wanted now was peace. Calm. A return to the dull ease of her life.

*

It hadn’t just been the school day that had tired her so.

She hadn’t come straight back to her apartment after school. First thing that morning, she had filled her car with petrol, also filling a small plastic canister. After school, instead of driving home she had followed a circuitous route through the city then, once she was sure no one was following her, out of Hamburg and along the north shore of the Elbe. She had found a quiet stretch of beach and had gathered the things she had brought – an expensive dress, a brunette wig, an empty plastic bottle that had held fake tan, a box of veterinary sedatives – and arranged them in a pile, doused them with petrol from the canister and put a match to them. There had been a long, thin needle-file too, and she had walked to the water’s edge and had thrown it as far out as she could. Afterwards, she had sat on the sand, hugging her knees, watching the pile burn. It had made her think of another beach bonfire, a long, long time ago. And a story she had once told by firelight.

Now she lay in the calm and peace of her bathtub. But she knew it wasn’t over yet.

He would be back, she knew. She may not have been fluent in the language of emotions, but no one knew how to read men the way she did. They were much simpler than they thought they were: just different variations on a handful of themes. Fabel was different because he had encountered death through his own journey, had come face to face with his own Silent Goddess. He would be persistent: he had an instinct, a suspicion he couldn’t prove. That he would never, ever be able to prove. But that wouldn’t stop him coming back.

She would transfer to another school, another city. She had done it before: the years spent away from Hamburg after that night. The falling into a new but familiar life had been easier in a distant place. Now she would again take this life with her: the life her sister had given up for her.

If only the remains hadn’t been found. If they hadn’t been found she wouldn’t have been forced to act . . . Of them all, it was Detlev’s face she remembered most: his expression on seeing her once more. She hadn’t taken his life, he had given it up.

She smiled. There was no one to speak against her now. It would only have been a matter of time before they had put it all together; before they had come out from behind their fear of exposure and realized what had really happened. But now they were all silenced. Only Mensing remained, and everyone knew he was mad. No one would listen to him.

She had got away with it, got away with it all.

The water had cooled and her skin began to prune. She rose from the bath, towelled herself dry, pulled on her robe, stepped out of the bathroom and into the hall.

He was waiting for her there, in the hall. Filling its space with his bulk and his darkness.

In the second it took for him to close the distance between them, for his oversized hands to fasten on her, the thought flashed through her mind that he wasn’t human. He was too big, too horrific.

That he was a monster she had once read about.