The Ghosts of Altona (6 page)

‘It’s not at all silly,’ said Fabel. ‘I understand. I’m just sorry that we don’t have better news for you.’

‘You’re just telling me what I already knew, really. But a little self-deception is a great analgesic.’

‘Are you okay?’ asked Anna. ‘We can come back some other time.’

‘I’m fine. If you have any questions, ask them. But the answers will be the same as they were fifteen years ago. Maybe not as clear . . .’

Fabel explained, quietly and clearly, how the finding of Monika’s body not only confirmed her death, but added a dimension to the investigation. A new point of reference.

‘Someone put her body there. That means we have another location. In fact, it’s the only place and event that we can place her killer for sure. There is a history, a chronology to that event: a before, during and after. It’s something we didn’t have before.’

‘But it was fifteen years ago. Who’s going to remember where they were and what they saw so long ago?’

‘It’s a start, Frau Krone. A fresh start. A new lead.’ Fabel smiled reassuringly. ‘Can we go over it all again?’

Kerstin Krone nodded, but Fabel could see her mind was elsewhere, dealing with the new certainty of a long-suspected reality.

‘If you need time,’ he said, ‘like Commissar Wolff says, we can come back.’

‘I’m fine . . .’ She looked down at her hands again, and Fabel began the routine deconstruction of long-past events.

*

‘That all got a bit too metaphysical for me,’ said Anna when they got back to the car. ‘I never was much good at science and was always goofing around in class – one of the reasons I spent so much time waiting in a room like that for the School Director.’

‘I knew exactly what she meant by the Schrödinger’s Cat thing,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s what we do – open the box for people all the time, remove the uncertainty and with it remove the last shred of hope. I even think of it every time we question a suspect. Another box to be opened to expose someone either as innocent or as a murderer.’

Anna remained quiet for a moment.

‘What is it?’ asked Fabel.

‘I don’t know . . . I mean, I know it’s all nonsense, scientifically speaking, but the way she talked about pretending Monika was still alive. I thought identical twins had this kind of special bond. I would have thought she would have had . . . I don’t know . . . some kind of
instinctive
feeling one way or the other.’

‘Telepathy doesn’t exist,’ said Fabel. ‘Whether you’re a twin or not. She’s just like countless other victims’ relatives I’ve seen over the years, hanging on to any hope, no matter how vague.’

‘You’re probably right. I didn’t really hear anything else of much use.’

‘Like she said, they were the same answers she gave fifteen years ago. I just hoped that Monika being found might have jolted some memory into place.’

‘She’s a striking-looking woman,’ said Anna.

‘They were both beautiful,’ said Fabel. ‘Monika Krone had this amazing head of red hair, longer even than her sister’s at the time. Everyone we talked to mentioned her hair. Most of them said the same thing: that her hair, her particular type of beauty, her figure and her pale complexion all made her look like she was living in the wrong century. Maybe that’s why she was so interested in Romantic and Gothic literature. She even dressed in an odd way. Not a Goth, as such, but more authentically Gothic. Vaguely Victorian – she studied English Gothic literature at Hamburg University.’ Fabel gave a small, humourless laugh. ‘It’s the only murder inquiry I’ve been involved in where the word “pre-Raphaelite” cropped up in descriptions of the victim. In fact, it was something that stuck with me for a while. She was the kind of woman that men would go crazy for and I seriously pursued the line that she may not have been a random victim, but had been killed by some rejected lover or spurned admirer.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. Everyone checked out. She seemed to have been involved with two fellow students, but they both had alibis. And we didn’t have a body back then.’

‘You know Kerstin Krone was right, don’t you? Finding a body after so much time doesn’t give us any real new hope.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Fabel. ‘But Monika Krone has haunted me throughout my career. It’s a ghost I’d like to lay to rest.’

‘What about Kerstin? No chance she could have done her twin in in a fit of sibling rivalry?’

‘You’ve met her – not the type. Anyway, we checked her out at the time. She was living and studying at the Leibniz University in Hannover. Physics.’

‘That’s not so far away. Couple of hours by car at the most.’

‘We looked into it, of course. Kerstin was with her boyfriend in Hannover the night Monika disappeared.’

Anna nodded thoughtfully. ‘We’ll never know for sure if Monika died that night or not. She could have been kept somewhere for days before being killed and dumped.’

‘She died that night.’ Fabel looked surprised by his own statement. ‘I don’t know why, but I’m sure of that.’

8

Georg wrote it all down in his notebook. He wrote all the important things he remembered, as he remembered them, into his notebook and locked it away in the desk drawer. His greatest fear was that he would forget that he had the notebook at all: it was his testimony, it was his record. It was his memory.

After he had killed Helmut Wohlmann, even if he could not explain himself, the notebook would do the explaining for him.

After writing out his plan in full, when he was going to do it, how he was going to do it,
why
he was going to do it, he placed the notebook back in the drawer. The key to the drawer was on a chain and after he had locked it, he hung the key around his neck, pushing it down and out of sight under his shirt. It had been the first thing he had worked out: even if he forgot about the notebook, forgot about Helmut Wohlmann and his crimes, he would still be puzzled as to why he had a key around his neck. He might lose his memory, but he wouldn’t lose his curiosity. He would try the key in every lock in his room – and there weren’t many – until he found it fitted the desk drawer. Then he would find the diary and read. There he would find his memory.

He went over to his wardrobe and fingered through his selection of ties. He did not usually wear a tie, but today he would. He selected one that he thought would do the job: a nylon mix in the material making it stronger. He wrapped the tie around one hand, then the other, snapping the material taut between them. He tried to imagine Helmut writhing and thrashing as Georg tightened the improvised garrotte around his friend’s throat. Helmut had been a big man, physically strong, in his youth and, in a life-or-death struggle, some of that vigour might come back to him.

The tie would be strong enough for the job, decided Georg. But would he?

9

It was such a small piece of news, almost lost, adrift on the ocean of information technologies.

With a logic that only Hamburgers could understand, the
Morgenpost
, Hamburg’s morning paper, comes out in the evening and its evening paper, the
Abendblatt
, hits the streets in the morning.

Both newspapers, as well as that evening’s edition of TV’s
Hamburg Journal
, carried a mention of the discovery of the bones beneath the mini-market car park in Altona. It was reported that the remains were suspected to belong to Monika Krone, the young literature student who had gone missing fifteen years before, although this was still to be confirmed by the Polizei Hamburg.

All the items were unsensational, almost perfunctory. A couple of centimetres of newsprint. Hamburg’s attention was elsewhere, focused on the imminent march and counter-demonstration in Altona. The television mention of the body’s discovery was squeezed in after an item about the forthcoming inauguration in Altona of a new building named after an anti-Nazi martyr and before the sports results and weather. There was nothing more the media could say until the identity had been confirmed. Brief, factual, unsensational.

But that small scrap of news reached out across Hamburg and for three men – three men leading very different lives in different parts of the city – the news had the impact of watching planes flying into New York buildings.

She had been found.

The ghost of a past that united the three men – and another two as yet beyond the scope of the news – reached out from print and screen and seized them.

The painter stood alone at his easel, a face burned into the canvas of his recall. The architect, as usual surrounded by others, hid his shock in a sleek smile and handsome isolation in a party crowd. The writer sat at his computer, staring at the item on the
Abendblatt
’s online edition, feeling betrayed that his sanctuary of a million words, which he had spent fifteen years constructing, had been destroyed in a single paragraph of disinterested journalism. The past he had spent so long convincing himself to be a fiction had now broken the surface of the real world, shattering his present.

Three men: each alone with memories he could not share with anyone. Memories they could not share with each other, even though the painter, the writer and the architect thought of each other in the desolate wake of the news. They had sworn long ago never to have anything to do with each other again. Three men haunted by the same ghosts; divided forever by the same experience.

But each, in his own way, felt the chill arrival of an overdue reckoning.

10

Hamburg’s Police Presidium on the north edge of the Winterhuder Stadtpark was exactly the same age as the Monika Krone case. Fifteen years before, Fabel had been in the middle of the Krone investigation when the Polizei Hamburg had moved headquarters from a sixties high-rise office block in Beim Strohhause to this custom-built building in Alsterdorf.

The new Presidium – and Fabel still thought of it as the new Presidium – was a six-storey structure that had been built as a circle around a central atrium open to the sky; all the office suites, including the Murder Commission, radiated out as the arms from its circular hallways. From the air, the shape was that of a giant Police Star, the symbol of police forces throughout Germany.

Anna drove the service BMW down into the underground car park beneath the Presidium, parking in one of the Murder Commission’s allocated spaces.

‘Get everyone together for a briefing,’ said Fabel when Anna switched off the engine. ‘I need to know where we are with caseloads before I start allocating resources to the Krone case. It’s a cold case, after all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’d like to take the lead on it myself. I know you’ve got other stuff on, and you’re usually teamed with Henk Hermann, but are you okay working it with me?’

Anna turned to him. There was a cautious, compliant softness in the way she looked at him and again it saddened him. He missed the frank, defiant Anna who had always taken him to task on any decision she didn’t agree with. Rank, he had long realized, had been an abstract concept to Anna. But now she deferred to him unquestioningly. It was as if he had survived the shooting, but the old Anna hadn’t.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘No problem.’

They got out of the car. This, decided Fabel, was the moment.

‘It’s all right, Anna,’ he said.

She frowned as she looked at him over the roof of the car. ‘What?’

‘I just wanted you to know: it’s all right.’

‘What’s all right?’

‘Me. Things. Everything.’ Fabel closed his car door and leaned his elbow on the BMW’s roof. ‘I know you’ve found it hard. Since I came back, I mean. What happened . . . well, what happened was a trauma for you, too. You saw me shot and you killed a man. But I think you still worry about me and I wanted you to know it’s all right. I’m okay.
We’re
okay.’

Anna seemed to watch Fabel for a while, her expression unreadable. She sighed. ‘I go through it in my head all the time,’ she said. ‘I see Schalthoff begin to turn, like it was in slow motion. I take it apart movement by movement.’

‘That’s understandable,’ said Fabel.

‘I hesitated.’ Anna broke eye contact with Fabel, looking down for a moment at the floor of the parking garage. ‘Going through it in my head . . . taking it apart like that . . . I can see now that I hesitated in firing. I could have shot him before he got off his second round.’

‘You don’t know that, Anna. You maybe remember hesitating, imagine you hesitated, when you didn’t. You’ve interviewed enough witnesses to know that people fill in the gaps their memories leave. And what if you did hesitate? I wouldn’t want to work with an officer who didn’t think twice before ending a life. We’re police officers, not soldiers. In any case, I didn’t even have my own firearm drawn. If anyone made a mistake it was me. I let my own emotions cloud procedure. I was just so . . .’ He struggled for the right word, which refused to yield itself. ‘You know, finding little Timo Voss like that. It got to me and it could have cost both our lives.’

Another pause.

‘Listen, Anna, there are things I’ve learned because of the experience I went through. Different ways of looking at things, I suppose. You learn to appreciate what you’ve got, professionally as well as personally. I know I gave you a hard time when you first joined the team, but that was because I had to control the very energy I recruited you for. I don’t want you walking on eggshells when you’re around me – not just because it makes things awkward, but because it inhibits your effectiveness. I want you back, Anna. Completely back. If you don’t agree with something I’m doing, I want you to tell me. I need you to challenge me again.’

Anna looked at him without answering for a moment.

She nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll try. It should be easy because you can be a real arsehole sometimes.’

Fabel grinned. ‘That’s the attitude I like to see, Chief Commissar Wolff.’

*

Fabel caught up on outstanding paperwork and answered internal emails for an hour before it was time to head to the Murder Commission’s meeting room. There was a knock on the door and a woman in her forties entered. Principal Chief Commissar Nicola Brüggemann was Fabel’s deputy. A no-nonsense Holsteiner, she was at least one metre eighty tall, and her short-at-the-sides and thick-on-top dark hair added to the masculinity of her look. There was a tall, thin, blond young man with her whom Fabel recognized as Sven Bruns. Werner Meyer, Fabel’s longest standing colleague and personal friend, had retired from the police earlier that year and Fabel had had to reshuffle his team. A Frisian like Fabel, Bruns was the newest addition to the team. He had served as a Criminal Commissar with the Polizei Niedersachsen before transferring to the Polizei Hamburg.