The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  ‘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.’

  ‘My God,’ said Fabel. ‘You’re right. It is a personal statement . . . Look, it’s Traxinger. Just some kind of withered, old, diseased Traxinger.’

  ‘You think . . . ?’ asked Glasmacher, clearly dubious.

  ‘No . . . no . . . I see it now,’ said Dirk Hechtner, looking from the dead man’s face to the painting and back. ‘It’s him all right. But why on earth would he do a self-portrait like that?’

  ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray . . .’

  ‘Come again?’ said Hechtner.

  ‘Never mind, just a reference I think he was making,’ said Fabel. ‘The real question isn’t why he painted it, it’s why did the killer place this picture here? What’s he trying to say?’

  *

  Once he was back at the Presidium, Fabel set in train the machinery of investigation. A current case always took priority over a historical one, so Traxinger’s murder took precedence over the Monika Krone case. Glasmacher and Hechtner would need to pull in resources. Henk Hermann would be working the old people’s home case, such as it was, on his own, but would have access to the new guy, Sven Bruns, whenever he needed an extra pair of hands. There was something about the Traxinger case that troubled Fabel. He couldn’t place exactly what it was, but something turned in his gut when he thought of the artist’s style of painting. Added to that, Traxinger’s name still seemed familiar, but Fabel was convinced it wasn’t because he had heard of him as an artist.

  Working late in his office, Fabel had an idea that compelled him to go and look at the Monika Krone inquiry board. He was standing staring at it when Anna Wolff came into the Commission.

  ‘I didn’t know you were working late tonight, Chef,’ she said.

  Fabel turned. Anna was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a leather jacket. It cheered him to see her dressed casually: she had taken to more formal outfits for work and this casual outfit, though more expensive and tasteful, reminded him of the punky look she had had when she had first joined his team. Anna had grown, matured, during her time at the Murder Commission.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t think you were rostered for duty tonight.’

  ‘I’m not. I was just on my way home. What’s up?’

  Fabel looked back at the incident board, then shook his head. ‘Nothing. I just had this weird idea that Detlev Traxinger was one of the people at the party the night Monika Krone went missing.’

  ‘And is he?’

  ‘No. I’ve been through all the names. He isn’t there.’

  ‘It would be a hell of a coincidence if he were.’

  ‘If he were, it wouldn’t be a coincidence, it would be a connection. But you’re right, it doesn’t make sense and anyway he’s not on the list of names.’

  ‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  After Anna left, Fabel looked again for a man who wasn’t there on the Monika Krone inquiry board.

  ‘I’m getting too old for this,’ he said to himself before turning from the board, grabbing his jacket from the chair back he’d hung it on, and heading for the door.

  30

  Werner Hensler sat in his car, parked across the street from the bookstore, and stared at his cell phone. Like everything in Hensler’s life, the phone was the most expensive you could buy. The car he sat in cost more than many people would pay for a house; and the house he had driven from to come to the bookstore cost more than some people made in a lifetime. These were the things that defined him, that filled what he knew was an otherwise empty life. No wife, no family, no close friends. There were women – there were always women – but Hensler seemed incapable of forming anything more than the most casual relationships.

  Maybe that was why he spent more than half his life being someone else: an assumed identity and an assumed life that perhaps offered more hope of connection with others. This was the life he had now.

  He stared at the phone. Do I call or not?

  Despite its flaws, despite the deficits filled by expensive toys and dressings, it had been a good life. Or at least a better life than he had hoped – because in Hensler’s past sat a dark mass so dense that it had taken him more than a decade to escape fully from its gravitational pull.

  Do I call or not? He had seen the crowds arrive at the bookstore and there was still a queue outside the door, slowly shortening as his fans squeezed into the venue. Werner knew he had to decide, and decide now, whether he was going to call one of the others.

  For fifteen years, he had put the past firmly behind him. All that had changed. The darkness from his past had come crashing back into his life, spilling ghosts out into his perfect present.

  He continued to stare at the blue screen of his phone, still undecided about his next step. Should he call? If he did, it would be breaking a promise. More than breaking a promise, it would be betraying a solemn oath. They had all sworn that they would have no direct personal contact with each other from that night on. Obviously, there was always the chance that they would encounter each other professionally or socially, and it would probably be unavoidable, but it was agreed any future acquaintance would be by accident, not design. They must never seek each other out. But Detlev was dead. And the papers suggested that his death was suspicious. It had been a month of shocks, starting with the discovery of Monika’s body, or what there was left of it after all these years. And then Detlev had been found dead. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?

  Werner liked to tell himself that there hadn’t been a day gone by that he hadn’t thought of Monika and what had happened that night, but that simply wasn’t the truth. The news that her remains had been discovered had shocked him, not least because he hadn’t thought of her for a long, long time. He had a new life – a complete and successful existence that was no longer defined by one night of madness fifteen years before. Now, everything that had happened back then had become like a dream, or even a recollection of one of his own stories. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t thought of it that much over recent years: maybe he, a creator of fiction, had come to believe that it hadn’t really happened, that it had been just one more tossed-away bad plot for a horror novel.

  But now it had all become so real again.

  The screen of his smartphone glowed up at him, the azure bloom like a swimming pool i
nviting him to dive in. But whom would he phone first? And once contact had been made, then God knew where it would lead.

  He checked his watch. He would be late if he didn’t go now.

  He switched off his phone, got out of the car and crossed the street.

  Werner Hensler stepped into the bookshop and stepped into a new identity simultaneously. An attractive young blonde woman wearing a name badge and a welcoming smile was waiting for him, looking a little too relieved to see him arrive. She shook his hand.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming, Herr Edgar. The audience is waiting . . .’

  31

  Thom Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner didn’t protest or even seem surprised when Fabel told them that he wanted personally to take the lead on the Traxinger case. They would remain the case team, he explained, and they would work it together with him.

  Officially, Fabel was always the senior investigating officer of all homicides, but his role in most was administrative, rather than investigative. The Hamburg Murder Commission’s federal-wide reputation had nevertheless been built on Jan Fabel’s very special skills as an investigator. Specifically as an investigator of serial murders. And there had been one element, pointed out by Petra Moser, the young Probationary Commissar, that had set alarm bells ringing: Detlev Traxinger’s body had been posed – his grotesque self-portrait set like a gravestone at his head. Only two kinds of killers tended to carefully arrange tableaux: suicides and serials. And if one thing was certain, it was that Traxinger’s death was no suicide. Of course, a killer was not classed as serial until he had taken three or more lives in separate events, but the posing and the unusual type of weapon troubled Fabel.

  It annoyed him that the press would probably assume his direct involvement would be because of the celebrity of the victim.

  The first task Fabel had set Thom and Dirk was the usual establishing of the victim’s last movements and contacts, as well as building a complete picture of the people in the artist’s life. The last person to have seen Traxinger alive was his business manager, Anja Koetzing. He arranged to meet her at Traxinger’s studio.

  There was still a team of forensics and police at the studio when he arrived. The body long gone, the immediate scene of death fully processed, tagged and photographed, the studio and its surroundings were now being painstakingly searched for evidence. To the rear of the studio they were looking, almost literally, for a needle in a haystack. The initial autopsy reports confirmed what Petra Moser had suggested: that Traxinger had been killed with a ‘Empress Sisi’ type weapon. So now rows of uniforms were slowly treading their way through the long, reedy grass that separated the studio from the water, looking for a thin-bladed, needle-type weapon. It had to be done, but Fabel’s guess was that the killer had either removed the weapon entirely from the locus or had tossed it as far out into the Elbe as possible. Fabel’s money was on the former – if this had been the work of an agenda or serial killer, then the unusual form of weapon would suggest they would keep it for future use. Those who set themselves up as craftsmen of death tended to treasure their favoured tools.

  Anja Koetzing was small, slender and, Fabel couldn’t help noticing, very attractive. He guessed that she was about thirty-five. She had short dark hair and deep hazel eyes and was dressed in a black skirt suit, white blouse fastened at the throat with a too-large, too-ornate Celtic-style brooch, black stockings and flat-heeled shoes. Her monochrome outfit accentuated the crimson of her lipstick and polished nails. It was a look that was at once very conventional and suited to a business environment, yet indistinctly Goth-like. Her polite smile when he introduced himself did not, as he half-expected, reveal unnaturally long or sharp canines. She stood close to Fabel, stepping into his personal space and looking up at him. He could smell a rich, earthy perfume from her. Fabel took a step backwards.

  ‘I wasn’t fucking him,’ she said in an even tone, her expression empty.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Detlev . . . I wasn’t fucking him. And I never did fuck him, ever. That’s the first thing I imagine you want to establish, isn’t it? My “relationship with the victim”? I was his partner and business manager – nothing more. We saw each other socially, but that was just because there’s a social dimension to so much of this business. Detlev was so fucking crap at that. I had to hold his hand at functions, exhibitions and stuff like that. I held his hand but never his dick. I think I’ve made that clear.’

  ‘Perfectly . . .’ Fabel gave a small laugh. ‘Thanks for that. It was certainly highly informative and very . . .’ he searched for the right word, ‘. . . succinct. I have to say, you don’t seem very upset or shocked by your client’s death, Frau Koetzing.’

  ‘Of course I’m upset.’ Koetzing bristled at the suggestion, her expression darkening. ‘What a stupid thing to say. I’ve lost a business partner and a friend – well, a friend of sorts. But anyone who knew Detlev knew he wouldn’t live to draw a pension. He was forty—’

  ‘Forty-one,’ Fabel corrected her.

  ‘Forty-one . . . but looked at least ten years older, he never took any exercise except the bedroom sort, drank like a fish, chain-smoked, did God knows what drugs, was overweight to the point of obesity and went to bed with any woman who was in awe enough of his supposed genius that they’d overlook the fact that he was a fat, ugly bastard. If some jealous husband or thwarted lover didn’t kill him then he’d have ended up doing the job himself.’ She paused for a moment, as if reflecting on what had happened. ‘But, truth be told, I thought it would be the drink that would get him, one way or another. Not this. Not for someone to stab him.’

  ‘I understand. So, from what you’re saying, your relationship was very . . . functional. Purely business.’

  ‘The truth is I was fond of Detlev in my own way. I believe that like most egotists, he was probably overcompensating for something. Of course I’d never admit this publicly, but he was an artist of very narrow talents, competent – and thankfully fashionable and bankable – but limited. He was just lucky that his talent fell into a spectrum that sold. He was always experimenting with new forms, but all that did was expose his limitations. He made a big deal of being the tortured artist, I think because he knew he was more tradesman than creative genius.’

  ‘Do you have anyone in mind? In the thwarted-lover-jealous-husband category?’

  ‘Nope. Outside day-to-day business or the work-related social stuff I told you about, I avoided seeing him socially. But I’d trip up over the odd conquest or two. He’d fuck them anywhere and everywhere, except here, funnily enough. A bear not shitting where he eats, I suppose. Detlev was oddly fastidious about this place. He has a place up in Blankenese, quite some shack, I believe, but I’ve never been there. That’s where he did most of his entertaining.’ She arched her fingers in the air to indicate quote marks around the word.

  ‘So how long have you worked for Herr Traxinger?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘I didn’t work for him, I worked with him. We were partners in the business. You could say he’s truly fucked me now, getting himself killed.’

  ‘A fifty-fifty split?’

  ‘Christ no,’ said Koetzing. ‘I was worth a lot to him – and he wouldn’t have sold a tenth of the stuff he did without me – but he was, after all, the “talent”, as he never tired of telling me. I got seven per cent of each sale and a salary of sixty thousand euros on top of that. But the finished paintings were the property of the business, not Detlev’s.’ She suddenly frowned.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Fuck . . . I’ve got a motive for having killed him. A really good motive at that.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Fabel laughed again. ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re fucking laughing at,’ she protested. ‘Under our business agreement, I get the whole thing. He had a couple of ex-wives who he didn’t want to get a bean if anything happened to him, so we set this all up as a business, a partnership. As I said, we both were paid
a salary from it – Detlev’s bigger than mine, obviously – but the work produced, the paintings, became capital assets of the business. Detlev is dead, but the business isn’t.’

  ‘But, if you don’t mind me pointing out, Herr Traxinger won’t be producing any more paintings.’

  ‘Exactly. Which means the value of his work will go up enormously. Or at least it will as soon as I can get the fuck in there and start raising the sticker prices. Detlev was a complete screw-up in every respect, except as a painter. He may not have been a great talent, but he made the most of the abilities he had. And he was prolific and very fussy. He would only let me sell what he thought were his best paintings. That means there’s two hundred, maybe more, canvases in there. The funny thing is a lot of them are his very best work – he had what he called “personal” canvases that he didn’t want to sell. He wouldn’t even let me see half of them – but a lot of what I did see was really good. Some of it was pure crap, though, like the one they found with his body. I mean, what the fuck was going on with the whole Picture of Dorian Gray shite?’

  ‘So that painting had been moved all the way from the storeroom?’

  ‘Yep. That was a canvas Detlev kept very private. I only saw it by chance and he didn’t even like me talking about it, but that was mainly because I kept asking him what the hell he’d been on when he’d painted it. That’s one painting I won’t be selling. The rest definitely. Now Detlev’s dead I can clear the lot and get one hundred per cent of the sale price.’ She sighed resignedly and held out her wrists. ‘Go on, slap the cuffs on me.’

  ‘I’m not quite ready to arrest you yet.’ Fabel smiled. He didn’t tell her that Glasmacher and Hechtner had already checked and double-checked her account of where she had gone after leaving the studio and her movements for the rest of the night.

  ‘Why don’t you put me in handcuffs anyway?’ she grinned, taking a step towards Fabel again.