The Ghosts of Altona (18 page)

The police Presidium had also taken the precaution of issuing a very specific warning about the particular danger Hübner represented to women. Again it was a calculated move: on one hand it would spread alarm, perhaps disproportionate alarm, on the other hand it would increase vigilance and that might just save another woman from the kind of ordeal Hübner’s previous victims had endured.

Everyone in Hamburg would now be on the lookout for Frankenstein, not least every woman who had to walk down an empty street or turn a dark corner.

But no one had seen him. Not a single authenticated sighting since his escape. There had, of course, been a dozen false alarms: a jumpy Hamburg saw a hulking menace hidden in every shadow, around every street corner. But the fact remained that Jochen ‘Frankenstein’ Hübner had simply disappeared.

A force-wide briefing was given, but Fabel had also gone through the significance of the giant’s escape with his team. Beyond the Presidium’s windows, the sky had turned to slate and brisk wind drove globes of viscous rain against the glass. As Fabel ran through the information about Hübner’s escape, the massive, rough-hewn face of the serial rapist glowered out from a prison identification photograph. The inappropriate thought occurred to Fabel that all they needed was the brooding weather outside to deliver a few flashes of thunder and lightning for the sake of effect.

‘This,’ he said in conclusion, ‘is a bad, bad bastard. He might just become our property if the young officer he attacked doesn’t make it.’

‘What’s the news on him?’ asked Nicola Brüggemann.

‘He’s in a medically induced coma,’ said Fabel. ‘There’s a chance he’s going to die, in which case Hübner becomes our meat, and an even greater chance that if he does come out of the coma, he’ll be permanently brain-damaged. Added to that we have four other people injured and traumatized. Hübner will kill without thought to stay on the loose, and may start hunting women for sport at any time. We have to get him back into custody. Whatever else you’re doing, whatever the inquiry, I want you to flash his face and description to everyone you meet. We desperately need sightings, and so far there hasn’t been a single one.’

After the briefing, he called Nicola Brüggemann and Anna Wolff into his office.

‘This is quite a coincidence,’ he explained. ‘And if you know me you’ll know—’

‘You don’t like coincidences,’ they said in unison and exchanged a grin.

‘I guess I’ve said that before,’ Fabel said. ‘But I don’t. At least not coincidences like this. After fifteen years, we find Monika Krone’s body. Then, soon after, the chief suspect in her murder makes a carefully planned and orchestrated escape from Santa Fu prison.’

‘I thought you didn’t like Hübner for the Krone murder?’ asked Anna.

‘I didn’t.’ Fabel frowned. ‘I still don’t. But I could be wrong – and I can’t ignore the potential significance of this.’

‘But as you say,’ said Nicola Brüggemann, ‘it looks like this was a carefully planned and orchestrated escape. Could Frankenstein have had enough time to plan and prepare for it in the time between the body being discovered and the escape?’

‘I just don’t know,’ said Fabel. ‘But even if Hübner didn’t kill Monika Krone, he’s escaped and on the loose. Like every other department in the Polizei Hamburg we’ve got to be on the lookout for him. More than every other department, we have got to hunt him down as a potential serial killer. Before he was caught fourteen years ago, the Sexual Crimes Commission evaluated Hübner as ready to escalate to killing his victims. We’ve got to make sure that he doesn’t get the chance.’

‘Do you think he will?’ asked Nicola Brüggemann.

‘Actually, I doubt it. Hübner told me that he didn’t want his victims to die, that that would defeat the point of the exercise. He gets off knowing that they will suffer psychological torment for the rest of their lives. Killing them would be cutting that short.’

For a moment, both Brüggemann and Anna, who had in their careers both seen as dark a side to the human condition as it was possible to see, looked taken aback.

‘I hope we get to him first,’ said Anna eventually.

Fabel’s desk phone rang.

*

If there was anything in his job Fabel truly hated, it was the VIP murder. He had never understood why celebrity suddenly made murder sexy in the eyes of the media. Fabel’s approach to his job had always been very straightforward: the dead deserved equal attention, equal justice, whatever their status in life had been. It was a view he knew was shared by the Polizei Hamburg as a whole, but there was no denying the extra pressure brought on the fifth-floor Presidial suite by an intrusive press if the victim had been well known.

It was a damp, grey Tuesday, the kind of monochrome day Fabel hated because it brought back bad memories of a different season and a different year. The call would not have come in when it did and the sudden death of the painter in his waterside studio would have gone unrecognized as a murder until the autopsy, had it not been for the sharp eyes of a female uniform who had clearly taken her scenes-of-crime training more seriously than most.

*

Detlev Traxinger’s studio and gallery was down by the docks, across the Neue Elbbrücke bridge, looking back across at the city. This was a part of the riverfront still dedicated to industry, heavy and light, and the bright sky was pierced by the up-reaching latticed arms of cranes. It was a resolutely, self-consciously industrial location for Traxinger to have chosen: his declaration of painter as artisan, as manufacturer of art. Fabel decided to assign the case to Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner, but drove down to the scene with them. He also called the Presidium’s Press Division and gave what details he could. Detlev Traxinger, it appeared, was a Hamburg artist of some importance and Fabel knew that, before long, the press would be all over the case.

But as he drove with Glasmacher and Hechtner, there was something else troubling Fabel: a vague feeling that he had heard of Detlev Traxinger, but not as an artist; in a completely different context. He parked in the large square of asphalt in front of the building, next to the clutch of marked police vehicles.

‘Very post-industrial,’ said Fabel as he entered the studio with Glasmacher and Hechtner.

Despite the large size and airiness of the studio, the air seemed fumed with the rich, oily odours of paint and turpentine. Fabel found it a strangely appealing smell. The studio was a vast space and Fabel reckoned it had once been some kind of machine hall. The art of engineering had obviously needed just as copious amounts of light as the art of painting, it would have seemed, and the wall facing the Elbe was almost completely glazed: a web of modernist steel-mullioned windows and transoms holding vast sheets of glass in place. Above them the roof was tented with steel-boned skylights and the light inside the building felt more like outdoor light. Like so much commercial architecture in Hamburg, the converted factory had been the kind of self-consciously modernist cathedral to industry that had sprung up in the fifties, filling the spaces razed by British firebombs. It had been Hamburg’s typically restrained expression of West Germany’s post-war
Wirtschaftwunder
commercial and industrial boom. Even that bright new life, however, had passed and buildings like this were now being demolished to make way for glitzy palaces of sunrise technologies and global trade.

But the rejuvenation and gentrification of the shorefront and the gleaming futurism of the HafenCity development were yet to finger their way this far and the old factory had survived. It made, Fabel thought, a fine and impressive artist’s studio.

The studio was one of two halves to the building, divided by the double-height entrance hall. The other half of the building was given over to an informal gallery. Before leaving the Presidium, Fabel had been told that Traxinger had a manager who occasionally arranged private viewings of his work there for clients who felt it too crudely mercantile to bid for art in auction halls or buy it off the wall of a public gallery. The side of the building now entered was Traxinger’s painting and sculpture studio. It was there that the forty-one-year-old artist had been found lying dead.

Everything in the studio other than the grey concrete floor was white: the walls whitewashed and the wooden shelves holding materials recently painted, making the various colourful, easel-mounted canvases stand out in vivid contrast. From what Fabel could see, Traxinger had several works in progress on the go at the same time, each at a different stage of development. There was only one completed and framed painting in the studio. And Detlev Traxinger’s body lay in front of it.

Fabel’s first impression when seeing the body was that it would have been very easy to believe the artist had simply fallen down drunk. Detlev Traxinger was lying on his back at the foot of the huge canvas, eyes closed, one arm flung out wide, the other resting on his belly. A wine glass lay shattered where it had dropped from the outstretched hand and the spilled wine had stained the concrete floor black-red. Ironically, the most conspicuous thing about the scene was the painting standing tombstone-like at his head. It was so striking it drew Fabel’s attention away from the body: it was a life-size portrait of a grotesque, deformed, withered old man who stared out malevolently from the canvas. It wasn’t just the disturbing subject of the painting that caught his eye, but the artist’s style, which looked vaguely familiar.

He snapped his focus back to the body. Traxinger was a large man: tall and heavily built, his mousy hair unfashionably long. As Fabel knelt down beside the body, he could see the artist must have had in life the fleshy bacchanal presence of someone of lusty appetites. Despite his relative youth, Traxinger’s physical appearance, added to the lack of any obvious signs of violence on the body or at the scene, could easily lead to the conclusion that he had simply died of a heart attack.

But when Fabel looked closer, very close, he could see a small stain, slightly darker than the artist’s dark red shirt, just above the heart.

‘Who was it that spotted this and called us in?’ he asked.

‘I did . . .’ A small, homely woman in uniform with dark hair and with the rank markings of a probationary commissar stepped forward.

‘Your name?’

‘Petra Moser, Herr Principal Chief Commissar.’

‘This is very good work, Frau Moser. Did you spot anything else?’

Petra Moser smiled and crouched beside the body, Fabel doing the same. With a latex-gloved finger she eased open the dead man’s shirt to expose an ornate, Gothic-styled tattoo on his chest. The letters
D
and
T
intertwined each other and in turn were encircled by an ornate, twisting wreath of leaves and flowers.

‘
DT
. . .’ Moser explained. ‘His initials. And it’s an acanthus plant, by the way.’

‘What is?’ Fabel frowned.

‘The leaves and flowers wreathed around his initials – it’s an acanthus plant. The Romans associated it with death.’

‘Appropriate . . .’

‘But this is what I wanted to show you . . .’ She eased his shirt open further and pointed to a small puncture wound about ten centimetres beneath the tattoo. It was perfectly round and no bigger than four millimetres in diameter. There was no more than a smudge of blood around the wound. ‘That’s the fatal wound, in my opinion. I know it doesn’t look like it, but as soon as I saw it, I thought about Empress Sisi.’

Fabel nodded. Glasmacher, who was standing behind him looming bulkily, asked, ‘Who?’

‘Empress Elisabeth of Austria,’ said Fabel. ‘She was assassinated by an Italian anarchist who used a sharpened needle-file to stab her. There was practically no blood and it wasn’t until she collapsed and died that they realized she’d been stabbed. And before that, back in the Middle Ages, assassins regularly used similar stiletto-type daggers to kill with little trace. It’s the same deal here.’

‘It looks like it would take skill,’ said Glasmacher. ‘You’d have to know what you were doing.’

‘And you’d have to get close,’ said Moser, the uniformed officer. Her enthusiasm made Fabel smile. ‘A single strike, right on target, suggests that there was no struggle. And there are no defensive wounds. Whoever the killer was, I think there’s a chance Traxinger knew him.’

‘Anything else, Frau Moser?’ Fabel stood up from the body.

The young uniformed policewoman nodded to the grotesque painting. ‘This looks too staged. Like a tableau. As if the killer was making a point.’

‘Could be sheer coincidence that he fell here in front of it,’ said Dirk Hechtner. Petra Moser moved around to the side of the painting. The frame sat directly on the concrete of the floor, its back resting against a shelving unit.

‘This is a completed, varnished and framed painting, the only one in the studio. Everything else here is at different stages of being worked on. There’s a drying rack over there, and a finishing table. Once the paintings are varnished and dried, they’re moved out of the studio and into the storeroom over in the other side of the building. I’m sure this picture was moved back here recently.’ Moser pointed to some white striations on the grey floor. ‘See . . . fresh scratch marks on the concrete just here, suggesting it was moved very recently. Added to which this is an expensive frame – when I saw the drag marks, I didn’t think Traxinger would be so careless as to just drag it across the floor, so I took a look behind.’ She shone a pocket torch onto the floor behind the heavy picture. Fabel came around and saw four or five small, dark drops.

‘Well it’s not blood,’ he said.

‘No. It’s wine. Splashes from when he dropped his glass. And unless they defied the laws of physics, there’s no way they could have got behind the painting unless it was moved here after Traxinger dropped his glass.’

‘And dropped dead.’ Fabel nodded. ‘Again, excellent work, Frau Moser.’

The small uniformed officer beamed.

‘So this is some kind of message . . .’ Fabel walked back to the front and examined the painting.

‘Call me old-fashioned,’ said Dirk Hechtner, ‘but it’s not the kind of thing I’d have up in my dining room. I’m guessing it was some kind of personal statement by the artist.’