The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  Taubitz was a balding blond man in his late forties, prematurely portly and wearing an expensive Italian suit that would have looked more than just expensive if its wearer had been a few kilos lighter. No one in the audience appreciated Taubitz’s skill as a speaker as much as he did himself.

  He continued: ‘We have seen our beloved old Hamburg become an exciting new Hamburg. Through the bold visions that developed the HafenCity and the waterfront, and other bold steps forward such as this magnificent Albrecht-designed building – the Bruno Tesch Centre – Hamburg has taken the shape the twenty-first century, and beyond, will demand.’

  ‘This speech is going to go on to the twenty-third century,’ Tobias Albrecht said under his breath to the beautiful woman with flame-red hair sitting next to him on the improvised stage of the top step leading into the building’s atrium. They sat to the side and slightly behind Hamburg’s Principal Mayor, who stood at the podium making his speech. ‘If he goes on much longer he can segue straight into a speech celebrating the building’s tenth anniversary.’

  The woman beside Albrecht applauded at another pause. She turned and leaned towards him, pushing a smile into place. ‘He’s singing your praises – you should learn to be gracious. Why don’t you try designing a building to match your ego, Tobias? It would be monumental.’

  Albrecht laughed and exposed the bright white teeth of a predator. Despite the sharp, almost harsh geometry of his features, he was an exceptionally handsome man. Tall and lean, with thick, very dark hair swept back from a widow’s peak, there was a careless, unintentional wickedness about his expression and the way he moved. Sitting there on the stage, his posture arrogantly relaxed, he looked like a very well-tailored devil.

  ‘If you hate me so much,’ he said through his smile, and without malice, ‘how come you’re fucking me, Birgit, my darling?’

  ‘I ask myself that question all the time. Now shut up and for God’s sake try to look modest.’

  Hamburg’s Principal Mayor finished his speech and Tobias Albrecht and the woman stood up. One of Albrecht’s assistants came forward and held out a velvet cushion to Uwe Taubitz. The Bürgermeister took the ceremonial scissors from the cushion and cut the ribbon strung loosely across the glass entrance to the building.

  ‘I declare this fine building – the Bruno Tesch Centre – open.’

  More applause.

  As previously arranged by the Hamburg Senate’s press office, a half-dozen photographers came forward and, issuing carefully deferential instructions, took pictures first of Taubitz on his own, then of the Bürgermeister shaking hands with the much more photogenic Albrecht.

  ‘Could we perhaps have a couple with Frau Taubitz?’ asked one of the photographers.

  The beautiful, flame-haired woman who had been sitting next to Albrecht took her place for the photo-call, between her husband and her lover.

  17

  It was a dark house. Dark, large and forbidding. There was also something of the graveyard about it. The old forester’s house, two storeyed with a windowed attic, stood on the edge of the Stadtpark woods and was as remote as it was possible to be so close to the heart of Hamburg. The house had stood empty, close-shuttered rather than boarded up, for a year and a half and, as if trying to reclaim it, nature had begun probing with dark green fingers the drive, the paths, the fabric of the house itself. The trees that surrounded all but the road-facing aspect threw the house into shadow.

  No one had tended it while the old man had been in the Alte Mühle Seniors’ Home which also, ironically, was on the edge of the park and would have been just visible from the house had it not been for the dense, screening swathe of trees. Zombie had not known that his uncle, whom he had never visited and barely knew, had become so old and senile that he’d been moved out to the seniors’ home. He had only found out when the old man had eventually died leaving Zombie, as his only surviving relative, to inherit the house.

  A property of the size of the old forester’s house should have been worth somewhere around half a million euros, and would have been valued significantly higher in a different location, but a challenge to the tax office’s generalized valuation, which had been done without an inspection, brought the value down to €350,000.

  Zombie had inherited the property six months before but had never moved into it. His initial intention had been to sell it as soon as possible: because he was just a nephew, his inheritance tax allowance was only up to €20,000 and not the €400,000 he would have been allowed – and which would have covered the house’s total value – if he had been a son. That left him with seven per cent inheritance tax to pay on the majority of the value of the house. He had explained to the tax office that he simply did not have that kind of money and they had come to an agreement that, so long as he did not move into or rent out the property, he could settle the tax due on sale of the house.

  But no one had bought it. The tax office had constantly to be provided with evidence that Zombie was making a genuine effort to sell the house, but its location and forbidding appearance had clearly put buyers off.

  It hadn’t taken long for the idea to form in Zombie’s mind.

  The house was perfect. While its unusual, out-of-the-way position had prevented its sale, that same unusual position now safeguarded it against intrusion. It wasn’t visible from the main highway unless you had turned into the road leading to the seniors’ home, and only one of the minor and less used paths through the Stadtpark ran directly behind the rear garden, which Zombie had deliberately allowed to become overgrown to add to the screen of trees.

  Zombie had retrieved the keys from the estate agents, who had until then conducted viewings at their own discretion without involving him. He told them that he wanted to do an inventory of the furniture that was left, for tax purposes, and that from now on they should arrange viewings through him. The truth was viewers were now few and far between, but taking charge of the keys was his way of ensuring there were no unwelcome callers. His main concern now was that squatters or simply vandals would find the place empty and break in. Not that he cared about the house – it was just that, from now on, there would be something hidden in the cellar. Something he didn’t want anyone else to see until he was ready.

  He had decided that the cellar was the only part of the house he would use. It was too dangerous to use any of the rooms in the main house itself, although he switched the water back on so his guest would have access to a functioning toilet off the entrance hall. The electricity remained turned off, however.

  Zombie fitted secure bolts and a lock to the outside of the cellar door. The cellar itself he fitted out with two mattresses to accommodate the size of his houseguest, a store of food, bottled water, toiletries and batteries. Five oil hurricane lamps and four battery lamps provided all the lighting his guest would need. A ribbon of narrow windows ran along the top of one of the basement’s walls, looking out at ground level to the front garden and the road beyond it. At night any light, no matter how meagre and even masked by the overgrown garden, would shine out like a beacon in the otherwise lightless forest, so Zombie bought a heavy felt blanket and cut it into strips to black out the windows.

  It wasn’t ideal, but his guest would not have to remain there long. And, anyway, it seemed fitting that his Golem should dwell under the ground until it was time to strike.

  18

  Fabel stood at the window of his office, watching the day fade in the sky above the trees of the Winterhuder Stadtpark. He had spent three solid hours going through the file on Monika Krone’s disappearance fifteen years before. He had arranged for every witness statement, every specialist report, every photograph to be sent up from the archive. He had a lot of the information literally at his fingertips, a few keystrokes bringing the digitized versions up on his computer screen, but there were other elements he needed that were stored only as hard copy.

  In any case, he always printed out the information. Fabel needed to have the detail laid out before him, viewing the c
hronology and landscape of a case in its entirety and from above.

  Monika Krone had had the kind of beauty that seemed to transcend tastes or fashion and which perhaps blinded those who met her to the intelligence and ambition behind it. Those who had known her better had described her as cool and aloof. Her most striking feature had been a head of lustrous auburn-red hair that, combined with her pale complexion and bright green eyes, had given her a look that seemed to belong to some other time.

  And it was her remarkable appearance that had caused the greatest mystery. Monika Krone had been a woman you would notice, a face you would remember seeing, yet on the night of Saturday 18 March, 2000, she had left a student party in Altona and had simply vanished from the face of the Earth. It had led the investigation at the time to focus on the minutes immediately after she had left the party. The suggestion had been that Monika had been abducted from the street, bundled into a vehicle. It was the only explanation for there being no further sightings of her.

  But that line of inquiry had proved as fruitless as all the others.

  There was a knock at the door and Anna entered.

  ‘I heard you took Henk to interview Jochen Hübner.’ There was an edge to her voice and she sat down without being asked on Fabel’s office sofa. Fabel smiled. Anna – the real Anna – was back.

  ‘It was your day off,’ he said.

  ‘Bollocks my day off. You didn’t want me there. Do you think a freak like Hübner scares me?’

  ‘I’d be more worried that you’d scare him.’ The joke didn’t take and Fabel sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Anna, but I knew if I went with you, that’s all the interview would be about. Put a woman in a room with Hübner and he’d just focus on trying to scare her. He wouldn’t succeed with you and I wasn’t trying to protect you, I just thought it was the best way of getting the truth out of him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I’m pretty sure I believe him. I don’t think he had anything to do with Monika Krone’s murder. Which is a pity, because I’d like something to make doubly certain that that monster is kept locked up for the rest of his life.’

  Anna nodded towards the files on Fabel’s desk. ‘Why haven’t you passed that on to the teams? It would save a hell of a lot of time.’

  ‘I’m forming an overview.’ Fabel used the English phrase. ‘There’s something I’m not seeing. It’s in there and no one saw it the first time. But I can sense it.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘There’s something about the party, or after the party, that doesn’t fit. I don’t know . . .’ Fabel sighed frustratedly. ‘There were sixty-three people at that party. We have sixty-three statements, sixty-three accounts of people’s whereabouts after the party, sixty-three statements of knowledge of or relationship to the victim. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but there is a disconnect somewhere.’

  ‘What kind of disconnect?’

  ‘Like there’s a sixty-fourth person at the party we don’t know about. Or that some of these statements don’t quite gel, but I can’t identify which statements and why they don’t gel.’

  ‘So you’re focusing on the party? I thought the original investigation ruled that out and pointed to a random abduction from the street.’

  ‘And that would bring us back to Hübner, and like I say, I don’t think it was him.’

  ‘Jochen Hübner isn’t the only sex criminal or woman-hater in Hamburg. It could have very easily been someone else.’

  ‘I know. It’s just a hunch I have.’

  ‘You told me once that there are no such things as hunches, just things we already know but haven’t got round to realizing we know . . . or some crap like that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, if I remember rightly that didn’t end too well for me. But yes, there’s something in the detail here and I can’t separate it out.’ He sighed. ‘Monika Krone is this beautiful, intelligent young woman, a student first of Classical Philology, then English Gothic Literature at the University of Hamburg – a highly gifted student, by all accounts. From what we can establish, she had men worshipping her, yet there is no boyfriend. No significant relationship with anyone, not even her twin sister. She is described as distant and aloof, but in a way that seems to add to her appeal, yet her life outside the university and a few social events, like the party on the night she dies, is a blank page. The only thing we really know about her was that she had a passion for all things Gothic.’

  ‘Maybe she was just a private person. Or someone who didn’t fit in with the set around her.’

  ‘You’ve seen her sister. Imagine her at twenty-five. Women like that don’t need to fit in with a set, the set fits in with them.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ asked Anna.

  ‘I really don’t know. Maybe you’re right and Monika was just a private person, but I have a feeling that there was something else going on in her life. Something that she kept from everyone.’

  ‘And you think this something else could be linked to her death?’

  Fabel shrugged. ‘I just don’t know. Anyway, it’s getting late. You’re right, I should have more eyes on this. I’ll split the files between the team in the morning.’

  *

  So many things had changed for Fabel; they continued to change. And where he saw that change most was in his daughter’s blink-of-an-eye transition from dependent toddler to fiercely independent young woman. It was a change that both saddened him with the burden of lost time and filled him with intense pride. They had always been close, but the shooting two years before had turned up the volume on their relationship, as it had on just about everything else in his life.

  Fabel had arranged to meet Gabi that evening for dinner in the city centre. They normally saw each other regularly – at least once a week – although the ebb and flow of cases meant that some at times he was more tied up with work than at others. But he never missed their weekly meal out.

  It was uniquely their time. Gabi had always got on well with Susanne and the two had become close, but this small father–daughter ritual was unshared. Something they had always done, just the two of them.

  And this was where they usually met. It was a cellar restaurant, below street level at the Alsterarkaden. But because it sat next to the channel of the Kleine Alster, one flank of the cellar was all windows and looked out onto the water and the symbolic white Alster swans that glided across its surface.

  The restaurant had an East Frisian theme and they served beers and dishes from Fabel’s home region, along with other traditional Northern German specialities. The fact that it was very much a tongue-in-cheek theming made it all the more East Frisian. Fabel had come here often over his years in Hamburg, joking with others about it being his embassy in the Hanseatic City.

  Fabel’s usual waiter had approached him without his customary cheeriness and had explained that the decision had been taken to close the restaurant permanently. Its doors would shut for good in a couple of months.

  ‘The world moves on, I suppose,’ the waiter had said dolefully. ‘Things are changing. People aren’t interested in traditional dishes any more. They want sea bass and linguine, not eel or herring and potatoes.’

  Fabel ordered a beer while he waited for Gabi to arrive and sat watching the swans. Thinking about the restaurant closing made him much sadder than he would have expected. His patronage of this East Frisian outpost in Hamburg had been half-humorous, but the truth was he would really miss coming here. It was also true that Fabel had always had this strange resistance to change: he saw himself as a progressive, forward-looking type in many ways, but this strange attachment to regularity, an inner conservatism, annoyed him. He tended to have established patterns to his life – regular habits and set places – and found it difficult, uncomfortable, to shift from them. The odd thing was that since the shooting he had become a much more relaxed person, less rigid in almost every aspect of his life, but this strange attachment to things, places and routines had endured. Perhaps even intensified.


  A pretty girl entered through the stone arch of the doorway and waved across to him. She had auburn-red hair, a shade or two lighter and redder than Monika Krone’s had been. Gabi Fabel had inherited her hair, complexion and many of her features from her mother, Renate, but her personality was very much that of her father.

  She came over, kissed Fabel and sat down opposite him. They chatted for a while, catching up on the week, and Fabel told her about the imminent closure of the restaurant.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said. ‘I know how much you like this place. I do too. It always make me think of Gran’s.’

  ‘How are things going with your course? You said last week that you were struggling.’

  ‘I’m getting there. An existential flutter, that’s all. Just worried that I might be doing the wrong course for the wrong reasons, that kind of thing.’

  ‘And now?’

  Gabi shrugged. ‘I’m good. Like I said, just a blip. A brain fart as the Americans say.’

  ‘It fills me with such pride to see how your studies have broadened your cultural references.’ Fabel arched an eyebrow. He tried not to let his relief show too much. Gabi was into her third year as a history student, the same route his studies had taken him. There had, however, been talk of her studying jurisprudence as a route into senior officer-level entry into the Polizei Hamburg. It had been an option that had cost him more than a few nights’ sleep. The idea seemed to have faded from her mind.