The Ghosts of Altona (41 page)

‘Susanne . . .’

62

Susanne sat alone in her office. She knew Fabel was going to be working late so she decided to do the same and use the time to catch up on some of the case reports that had been building up.

It was late, she was tired, and every time she fixed her attention on the report she was writing, her focus seemed to dissolve and with it her professional objectivity. She was working up a background on an eighteen-year-old male who had sexually assaulted at least four girls between the ages of six and ten. Despite there being a very clear dynamic at work in the youth’s background and specific deficits showing up in the psychometrics, Susanne was tempted to fill the conclusions section with:
he’s a sick fuck and always will be
.

But it wasn’t just that it had been a long day that caused her mind to keep drifting from the task at hand: Fabel’s proposal kept creeping into her thoughts. If you could call it a proposal – it had been more a declaration of intent, which was a typically Jan Fabel thing to do. He was a good man. In fact, if she were to be asked if there was a single phrase that summed Fabel up, it would be that: a good man. Her quiet hero.

And she loved him. She had known that for years but hadn’t known just how much she had loved him until the day he had been shot. Sitting in that hospital corridor, waiting for one of two possible futures to open up, she became aware of the chasm his absence would leave in her life if he died. He had been so good for her and, if she were honest with herself, she had been good for him. But marriage . . . She knew it was just a piece of paper, a change in legal status, but it was also so much more.

She remembered how he had nearly packed it all in. A year or two before the shooting, she and Fabel had been out for dinner when they had met Roland Bartz, with whom Fabel had gone to school in Norden. Bartz, who had remembered Fabel as the brightest in the school, could not believe that his classmate had ended up a murder detective – the least likely of all possible futures. Bartz himself had become a highly successful owner of a multinational business and had, after a few discussions, offered Fabel a job. It would have meant more money, better hours and less worry – for both Fabel and Susanne. It had taken him a long while to come to a decision – so long it had tested Bartz’s patience. But, like everything else in his life, Fabel had had to think it through from every angle. Eventually, however, he had said no.

Fabel didn’t know it, had no idea, but Susanne had never forgiven him for his decision.

But then there had been the shooting and everything changed. Fabel changed: fewer nightmares, less seriousness, more ease in how he handled life.

He said she didn’t need to rush to give him an answer, or even give him an answer at all; but she knew that she would have to.

She shook the thoughts out of her head. If she couldn’t concentrate, she was as well going home. She looked at her watch: it was nearly eight.

Her office door sat open and she heard a sound from down the hall – someone else was obviously working late. She heard heavy footsteps coming along the corridor towards her office.

Her cell phone rang and the caller ID told her it was Fabel.

‘Hi . . .’ she said. ‘I’m just about to head home. How much longer—’

‘Susanne, where are you?’ Fabel’s voice was strained, anxious. Susanne could hear a siren loud in the background.

‘I’m at the institute, in my office,’ she said. ‘I was just about to leave.’

‘Is there anyone else there with you?’

‘No, I’m alone . . . Well there’s obviously someone else here working late because I can hear them.’

‘Susanne, I want you to go right now and lock your office door.’ Fabel spoke with a deliberate clarity that alarmed her.

‘Why? What’s going on, Jan?’

‘Do as I say! Right now. I’ll stay on the line.’

As she ran across to the door, she heard the footsteps in the hall louder, nearer. She slammed the door shut and turned the snib lock.

‘Jan, what is this all about?’

‘Have you locked the door?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘I want you to get the heaviest thing you can move and put it against the door. I’ll be there in five minutes, but I need you to secure that door.’

Susanne was about to protest again, but she knew that she was in a serious situation. She scanned the room. The cabinets were filled with files and too heavy to move. Her best bet was the desk itself. She grabbed it by the edge and pulled. It too was heavy and moved only a little.

She heard the lever handle angle down as someone tried to open the door. When it didn’t, the person on the other side started to rattle the handle, the lever jumping.

‘Is he there?’ asked Fabel, his tone low.

‘There’s someone trying to get in,’ she said, her voice shaking.

‘Stay where you are. Block the door. I’m nearly there.’

The handle stopped moving. Susanne went back to the desk and this time managed to drag it in grudging spurts across the floor. As she did so, the cables that connected her phone and computer were pulled taut and tugged them from the desk. She heard the computer screen crack as it toppled off and hit the floor.

The door lever started to jump again, this time more agitatedly. Panting and grunting, and finding a strength she didn’t know she had, Susanne got to the other side of the desk and shoved it against the door. Another couple of heaves and she had the desk as tight to the door as she could manage. The lever of the door handle now bounced off the desk’s edge whenever it was tried, meaning the action could now no longer be fully turned.

The handle stopped moving. She could hear nothing from the other side of the door and glanced nervously around. The window. If he went outside and round the building he could maybe get in through the window.

She leaned over the desk and held her head close to the door, listening. She jumped back with a cry when the person on the other side banged on the door with their fist.

‘They’re outside the door . . .’ she whispered into the phone. ‘They’re trying to get in.’

‘Stay calm, Susanne . . . I’m nearly there.’

More thumping on the door.

‘Frau Doctor Eckhardt?’ A deep male voice from behind the door. ‘Frau Doctor Eckhardt, are you all right?’

‘Who is it?’ she shouted, trying to mask the quivering in her voice and sound authoritative.

‘Are you all right, Frau Doctor? Let me in . . .’

‘Who are you?’

‘Security . . .’ the voice boomed deep and resonant. ‘I’m Lars, from security.’

‘The police are on their way. They’ll be here any minute.’

‘The police? What’s the matter? Please open the door.’

Susanne heard the approach of police sirens. More than one car. The door shuddered as a massive shoulder slammed into it and she jumped. The desk started to move.

‘Please hurry, Jan . . .’ she breathed into the phone.

‘I’m right outside . . . I need to hang up now, but I’ll be right there.’ The phone went dead and Susanne suddenly felt completely alone. The desk budged again and the door opened a crack. Huge, thick fingers curled around the door edge and began pushing.

Voices. Commands barked out. The fingers disappeared and there was a shouted exchange between the deep voice outside and others. Then quieter talk.

A knock on the door.

‘Susanne, it’s Jan. Open the door.’

She dragged the desk only partly clear of the door, the strength suddenly gone from her arms. Fabel edged his way into the room, looked at the desk; at the shattered computer on the floor.

‘Are you okay?’ He put his arms around her.

‘I’m okay.’

He guided her out through the narrow crack in the door and into the hall. Anna Wolff was there with some of Fabel’s team and a couple of uniformed officers. A large man with a shaven head stood in the hall, looking a little stunned. He was wearing the white shirt, black jumper and trousers of a security uniform.

‘This is Lars,’ said Fabel. ‘He’s from security.’

‘I’m sorry, Frau Doctor Eckhardt, I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought there was something seriously wrong.’ He looked around at the others. ‘It’s my first day . . .’

On the way out to the waiting police cars, Susanne asked Fabel, ‘What the hell was that all about?’

‘I think that might have been a diversion. I have an awful feeling we’ve been had.’

63

Henk Hermann told Fabel that his daughter Gabi had been located, picked up from her student digs by a patrol car and driven across town to Fabel’s apartment. Two uniforms would stay there with her and Susanne until such time as Jochen Hübner was safely back in custody.

Between them, the police surgeon and forensics had identified the drug that had taken Martin Mensing temporarily off the planet: dimethyltryptamine had been found in his system at much higher than naturally occurring levels. Fabel recognized it as the same compound that Dr Lorentz had described as being involved in the creation of near-death and out-of-body experiences. As he sat in his office, waiting to get the all-clear from the doctor to interview Mensing, Fabel wondered if the DMT really had just taken him to the same place Fabel had been, two years before.

The phone rang and Anna told him that the medic had confirmed that it would be okay to interview Mensing in an hour, but that he may still be tired and unresponsive.

‘Whenever you get a chance, or whenever he’s capable of understanding,’ he told Anna, ‘remind Mensing that he can have a lawyer present when I question him. I want you and Nicola to observe on the closed circuit, but I’d like to fly solo on this interrogation. Can you fix everything up in an hour? I have something to do . . .’

‘Sure,’ said Anna.

Fabel hung up, one hand resting on the receiver, his other on the German–Latin dictionary he had got Sven Bruns to find for him. Another answer was in place, but the idea that had led him there now seemed too abstract, too unlikely. They had Mensing and they were hunting Frankenstein Hübner. They had found xylazine, the drug used to incapacitate the victims, in Mensing’s apartment. He had his killers.

But there was one conversation he knew he had to have.

*

Kerstin Krone sat with the same quiet grace as the last time, as every time Fabel had talked to her. It was a composure that hadn’t faltered when she had answered her door to find Fabel there. She had offered him tea, but he had declined and now she sat down facing him. Her hair had been cut since the last time he had seen her and it was now even shorter. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a blue striped shirt over it. The haircut and the clothes style were both deliberately androgynous, but again it seemed only to emphasize her femininity and the perfect, fine-boned architecture of her features.

‘There’s a couple of things I wanted to discuss with you, if you don’t mind,’ Fabel said.

‘Of course I don’t mind. I’ll do anything I can to help you find who killed Monika.’

Fabel watched her for a while, his expression blank; hers calm, patient. The ember of an idea still burned in some dark corner of his mind; a dim glow that illuminated nothing. But it was there.

‘I appreciate it.’ He smiled. ‘I need to ask you again about the phone call you got that night. The one we found on Monika’s phone records, from her cell phone to yours. It was an hour or so after she left the party and, as I’m sure you’re tired of hearing, the very last contact she had with anyone, other than her killer.’

‘Okay.’ Kerstin still made no sign of being impatient. ‘I don’t know what more I can add. I’ve gone through it so many times – not just with the police, but myself, in my head. Over and over.’

‘And you say she effectively just phoned for a chat?’

‘To talk, yes. Monika was never one for chat. But there was nothing about the conversation that suggested she was in any danger or trouble.’

‘So there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about the conversation?’

‘No, nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘You see, I find that strange. Firstly, it was a very strange time of day – a very strange time of
night
– for her to call, simply to catch up. Secondly – and I’m sure you don’t mind me saying this because you’ve said as much yourself – you and Monika were never close. You weren’t close even for ordinary sisters, far less twins. In fact, throughout her time at the university, Monika never so much as hinted to anyone that she had a sister, far less a twin sister. And you told me she had practically no dealings with you over those last two years – almost as if she was actively avoiding contact with you – and vice versa. Do you see why I find it strange that she phoned you out of the blue?’

‘Of course I do. I found it strange myself, but that’s the way it happened. Monika was a strange girl. A troubled girl.’

‘But it’s more than strange . . . To me that last call suggests a cry out – a call for help to the only person who maybe truly understands her.’

‘I’m sorry, Herr Fabel, I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

‘I don’t know if I know myself.’ He sighed. ‘If I were honest with you, your sister’s disappearance has haunted me for fifteen years. An investigation like this should be all about the facts – about information and pieces of evidence. Books and movies would have you believe we’re creatures of gut instincts and cases are solved on hunches. But it’s not like that at all. I once explained to someone that there are no such thing as hunches, only your unconscious processing data that your conscious hasn’t access to. That sometimes you know something but you just don’t know what it is yet.’

‘And what is it you think you might know about Monika’s murder?’

‘That’s what I’m still trying to work out, I’m afraid. There are events in history, in life, that are either significant or insignificant in their own right, but they set in train other events, start a sequence. The discovery of your sister’s remains seems to have been one such event. Four men dead. Four men who were closely involved with her killed almost immediately after her body is recovered.’

‘But why would Monika being found cause that?’

‘Something happened the night Monika disappeared – and these men were all involved. Maybe they acted together and, once Monika’s body was discovered, someone else is avenging her death.’