The Ghosts of Altona (30 page)

‘As far as I can see, yes. Working class, vehement anti-Nazi before the war, “inner exile” during, and lifelong SDP supporter after. Became a marine engineer, eventually. So why, in his diary, does Schmidt paint himself into Wohlmann’s picture?’

‘It’s not that surprising. Or uncommon. We are all revisionists when it comes to our personal histories, and I would think that Schmidt felt some collective responsibility for his father’s death. Being Wohlmann, and Wohlmann being him, would offer a much more attractive retrospective.’

‘But you’ve seen it,’ said Sven Bruns. ‘You’ve heard him yourself. He completely
believes
it.’

‘Again that doesn’t surprise me,’ said Gosau. ‘You clearly want my professional opinion. Well, it’s pretty straightforward: Georg Schmidt has for whatever reason – guilt, shame, desire for acceptance or simply fear of discovery – coveted his childhood friend’s blameless history. Maybe for years, for decades. But of course there was nothing he could do about it. You are who you are. But then they both end up in a seniors’ home together and the details of their previous lives have become loose and intermingled. Dementia condemns you to live in the now – a confusing now that sometimes feels more past tense than present. Our memories play us all false, at times. Georg Schmidt’s memories have become so malleable that he’s twisted them into a new shape.’

‘So there’s no truth in any of this?’ Henk held up the diary.

‘It’s all true, in its way. But objectively, of course, it’s not . . . Helmut Wohlmann was murdered for a passionately held motive that was true to Georg Schmidt but, sadly, to no one else. He died because of Schmidt’s desire to escape from one life into another.’

47

The day was undecided, trying out different seasons in turn. Between the clouds, it was quite sunny, but fresh. After attending another session of the Club of the Living Dead, Fabel needed the light and the fresh air. Before starting the session, Dr Lorentz had informed them all that Ansgar, the former medical student with the brain tumour, had suffered a major seizure that had effectively shut down all his functions and left him paralyzed, blind, probably deaf and certainly cognitively compromised. In keeping with the instructions Ansgar had given covering such a situation, no heroic measures had been taken; nourishment and hydration had been discontinued.

‘He would have drifted away peacefully,’ Lorentz had explained. ‘But it is no less tragic because of it. Such a waste of a young life.’

The rest of the session had been a subdued experience, with the absence of one of their number filling everyone’s thoughts and a single empty chair dominating the room.

After the session, Fabel felt the need to take a few minutes for himself. It was something that he had tried to do every day in the two years after the shooting.

Throughout the months of recuperation that followed Fabel’s near-fatal wounding, he had felt imprisoned by the well-intentioned company of others. There was always someone with him: first it was doctors, nurses, specialists; then therapists of all kinds; then, when he returned home, Susanne had taken compassionate leave to tend to Fabel, and there had been a constant stream of visitors and well-wishers. He had been ashamed of his hidden ingratitude, the fact that he had felt stifled, smothered by their relentless goodwill.

He had said nothing but, ever since, he set aside a few minutes each day just to be alone.

When Fabel had moved in with Susanne four years before, he had given up his apartment in Pöseldorf. That too had been a reluctant surrender of solitude, and he had missed the bars and cafés in the area; but, he had to admit, Altona had grown on him. It had a completely different atmosphere and feel, but that somehow had suited him. After the shooting, as soon as he had been free to spend some time alone, he had found this small, unpretentious café near Ottenser Marktplatz. It was the kind of place that served its immediate neighbourhood and not somewhere passers-through or tourists would have call to visit. It was small, bright and clean without being sterile. An older man, whom Fabel guessed was Turkish-German, ran it most days and was friendly and chatty without being inquisitive, which suited Fabel perfectly. He guessed that the owner, and his pretty daughter who sometimes worked with him, would have noticed Fabel to start with, but as he became a more frequent face, they would probably have assumed he lived or worked somewhere in the immediate vicinity. It was exactly what Fabel needed: here, like at the café at the Winterhuder Fährhaus, he was just the anonymous blond middle-aged guy in the English tailoring who drank his coffee by the window, idly watching the people and cars go by on Holländische Reihe.

Fabel had no idea what the Turkish owner and his daughter would think he did for a living, if they even gave it a thought, but he guessed that a murder detective would be at the bottom of the list. That suited him too.

But today, this unlikely refuge was tarnished: as he had come into the café he had noticed one of the Polizei Hamburg’s posters in the window next to the door, Jochen Hübner’s grotesque face glaring out at him.

He tried to put it out of his head and, ordering a coffee, sat in his usual spot and watched the world slide past the window. Try as he might, the face of Frankenstein continued to haunt him. It chilled Fabel to think of a predator like Hübner unbound, in hiding, making plans.

An expensively dressed woman walked past on the street outside and their eyes met through the window for a second, then she was gone. He noted that he had found her instantly attractive: she had been dark-haired with blue eyes, just like Susanne. He had a thing for brunettes; always had. Why, he thought to himself, are we attracted to ‘types’? Why had he always felt drawn to dark-haired women more than redheads or the locally abundant blondes? Fabel had always had this theory that people work on the principle of archetypes: that individuals are seen, for superficial reasons, as belonging to a particular genus. In its most extreme, he had seen serial killers target victims for the most tenuous or superficial similarity. The deaths of Traxinger and Hensler seemed to be the same thing in reverse. They shared an obsession with redheads that, in turn, had stemmed from their obsession with Monika Krone. But they were the ones who had ended up dead.

He sighed in annoyance at himself: there he was again, despite his best efforts, thinking about the case in his set-aside time.

Where the hell was Hübner? There hadn’t been a single sighting since his escape. First Monika Krone’s body is found; Jochen ‘Frankenstein’ Hübner, one-time favourite suspect for Monika’s murder, escapes from Fuhlsbüttel prison; and since that escape, two men connected to the Monika Krone case are murdered. It was this chronology, this perfect syzygy of events, that gave Fabel a bad feeling. It reeked of cause and effect.

His thoughts were interrupted when his cell phone rang: it was Holger Brauner, the head of the forensics team.

‘We’ve isolated that “something” I was talking about. I could tell you that both victims had enough tranquillizer in them to knock out a horse, but you might think I was just being metaphorical.’

‘Holger, I don’t have time—’

‘Horse tranquillizer,’ Brauner said. ‘Xylazine hydrochloride, to be exact. It explains how they seem to have been killed without a struggle, or in Hensler’s case, how he allowed himself to be tied up and placed in a box without a struggle.’

‘You said both? Traxinger too?’

‘The wine glass – and what we were able to recover of the spilled wine – tested positive for xylazine. My guess is that he ingested some but not enough to flatten him. It can create a weird zombie-like state where you’re effectively out for the count but still on your feet. It would explain how Traxinger was killed with a single strike from the Empress Sisi-type weapon.’

‘So it doesn’t follow that he knew his attacker after all?’

‘That’s your province, Jan. I just do the chemistry.’

‘But would it sedate someone enough that they wouldn’t react to someone stabbing them?’

‘No problem. Like I say, it’s a very powerful central nervous system suppressor; vets use it on cattle and horses when they want to sedate them heavily but still keep them on their feet. Especially while they’re having dental work or when horses are being castrated. So yes – your painter guy wouldn’t have seen it coming. There is one other possibility, however . . .’

‘Oh?’

‘An overdose of xylazine, even a slight overdose, can bring on bradycardia and myocardial infarction. A heart attack. Maybe that’s what your killer was hoping for with Traxinger – and that it would be put down to natural causes – but ingestion wouldn’t work quickly or even that well. Could be that he realized he’d have to finish the job off with the blade.’

‘I doubt it. If he had wanted to cover up his tracks he wouldn’t have dragged the painting through from the storeroom. How easy would it be to get your hands on xylazine?’

‘Again, I wouldn’t know. It’s a restricted drug, so not that easy, but it isn’t really used illegally, except, bizarrely, in Puerto Rico where it’s known as the “zombie drug”. You certainly don’t get a high from it and God knows why anyone would want to use it recreationally. But to answer your question, I suppose if you had the right contacts, you wouldn’t find it too hard to get your hands on some.’

‘So do you think Hensler’s was slipped to him in a drink too?’

‘No . . . he was given a discrete dose, from the traces I’d say just enough to keep him under long enough to bury him. I found a puncture mark in his neck – done crudely and with enough time to cause bruising around it. Looks to me like it could have been done from behind. But that’s speculation on my part, not something I have enough evidence to put into the report.’

‘Okay. Thanks, Holger.’

‘There’s one more thing,’ said Brauner. ‘It may be nothing . . .’

‘What?’

‘You mentioned just now that the killer dragged the painting through to the studio from the storeroom. Well they didn’t – the only scratches on the floor were where the picture was adjusted, pushed into place. That was a very heavy frame on it and you would struggle to carry it all the way through. That means one of three things: either the killer was strong—’

‘Like Frankenstein Hübner . . .’

‘Like Frankenstein Hübner . . . The second option is that there were two or more people involved in the killing and they moved the painting between them. Or, the third option is that they used something in the studio to move the picture. So what we did was check everything. It’s a huge place and it’s taken until now to process it all.’

‘Just the headlines, Holger . . .’

‘Okay. The picture frame was covered in fingerprints and as you know, it’s very difficult to tell the new from the old; but there were smudges that suggested someone wearing gloves had handled it recently. Then we found a two-wheeler hand barrow right at the back of the studio, where it wasn’t normally kept, according to Frau Koetzing. My guess is that the barrow was used to shift the painting. We found no prints on it – and I mean
no
prints. Someone had taken a great deal of time to wipe it down, which doesn’t make sense if they were wearing gloves. Earlier in our sweep we had found an extraneous partial – an odd-shaped part of a thumbprint – on the reception hall door. It’s entirely possible that the killer was wearing latex gloves and they tore a little without him noticing when he was holding the picture frame. Then, when he was putting the hand trolley at the back of the studio, he saw the tear and felt the need to completely wipe down the trolley, to be safe.’

‘So you think the partial is our guy?’

‘It’s a stretch, but it’s a possibility. The problem is we haven’t got much of a pattern to go on, but we’re doing our best to see if we can get a match. Even if we do, we won’t have enough comparable points for it to stand up in court.’

‘Okay, thanks, Holger. By the way, make Jochen Hübner’s prints your first port of call.’

48

Even after two decades living in the city, Fabel could still be surprised at how quickly, driving out from central Hamburg, you found yourself in a rural environment. It had only taken him and Anna just over twenty minutes to get to Tatenberg, officially still part of the Bergedorf quarter and Metropolitan Hamburg, but a century or two distant in feel.

The house sat next to the Dove Elbe, a tranquil spur of Hamburg’s lifeblood river. Most of the area was given over to one of Hamburg’s nature reserves and everything here was green: thick swathes of broad-leaved trees, hedgerows and gently rolling fields, all dotted with ponds, small lakes and with the sedate Dove Elbe running through it.

‘It’s beautiful here,’ said Anna as they drove along the narrow ribbon of road on the Tatenberger Deich, past the yacht marina.

‘Yes it is,’ said Fabel. ‘But I wouldn’t have thought it would have been your kind of thing. I thought you were into the whole bar and club scene in the Kiez. A city girl, through and through.’

‘Maybe I’m getting old. Like you.’

‘You should be more respectful, Frau Wolff.’

‘Respectful my arse. Although I’ve heard there’s a rumour that you might be on the way up.
Capo de Capo
.’

‘Oh?’ said Fabel, although he knew very well the rumour to which she referred. ‘And the expression is
Capo di tutti capi
. I’m going to start recruiting officers with broader cultural references.’

‘It’s true though, isn’t it? You’re going to be offered Leading Criminal Director when van Heiden officially retires?’

‘No one has approached me about it at all, Anna. It’s just people speculating. Like you said, a rumour, that’s all.’

‘But it’s not groundless. Everyone knows you’re the best choice to lead the whole State Criminal Office. Frankly, I don’t see you as a paper-shuffler and pen-pusher. Are you going to take it?’

‘Anna . . .’ said Fabel, annoyed, ‘I’ve told you – no one has asked me. And Berger over at Organized Crime is as good a candidate as me—’

‘He’s an arsehole,’ said Anna contemptuously. ‘And he’s from Frankfurt. He’s an arsehole from Frankfurt . . . is that tautological?’