The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  Brüggemann shrugged. ‘Or just someone who has done their homework really well.’

  Fabel looked down at the dead man’s face. Death had washed expression from it, but Fabel knew that while the angling of the head and the gaping mouth seemed to speak of the terror the man must have experienced as he died, his very last moments would have been almost peaceful. The hours leading up to those last moments, however, would have been filled with unimaginable terror. There would have been intense panic, then, as the oxygen in the coffin was replaced by carbon dioxide, he would have started to hyperventilate – speeding up the process – felt dizzy, disorientated and confused. Then, when the critical tipping point in the balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide had been reached, he would have lost consciousness within thirty seconds. Then death.

  Some of the earth that had tipped across the upper part of his body had spilled into the dead man’s open mouth and a woodlouse crawled over the broad, pale brow. Fabel resisted the temptation to brush it away. ‘People don’t just allow themselves to be buried like this,’ he said. ‘We need to get toxicology as soon as possible. My bet is he was drugged before being placed in here. And he must have been brought here in a vehicle.’ Fabel nodded across to where a closed circuit television camera was angled to take in the atrium. ‘And we need the tapes from that for the last thirty-six hours.’

  Brüggemann shook her head. ‘I’m way ahead of you, Jan. I checked: the security camera system isn’t operational yet. One of the last jobs still to be done before completion.’

  ‘Damn it.’ He looked up again at the vault of the atrium’s ceiling. He imagined the hypoxic death of the victim turning from terror to euphoria and wondered if, in those last seconds, he too had experienced the illusion of floating free of his body and looking down on where he lay. ‘It would have taken him hours to die. Maybe a whole day – and all in earth so shallow that if he had broken through the lid he would have been able to stand up with his head above ground.’

  ‘But he wasn’t to know that, poor bastard,’ said Brüggemann.

  Fabel climbed back down the ladder. ‘We need to get him ID’d as soon as possible.’

  40

  Another briefing. Another reallocation of the Murder Commission’s teams. Before the briefing, Fabel had been up to the fifth floor to ask for additional resources which had been agreed without debate. Fabel suspected the lack of resistance was due, at least in part, to the fact that the murder in the Bruno Tesch Centre had been splashed all over the media. It was hardly surprising that it was considered sexy news: the building had just been opened by Hamburg’s principal Bürgermeister and the press incorrectly speculated that the victim may have been fighting for breath and trying to claw his way out of his coffin even while Uwe Taubitz had been making his speech and declaring the building open. And, of course, it had been murder by burying alive, which appealed to the ghoulish imagination of the tabloid-reading masses.

  There was also a discussion about progress, or the lack of it, in the hunt for the escaped Frankenstein Hübner. He had so totally dropped out of sight that it was now believed he had had an accomplice who was hiding him somewhere.

  Fabel had already cancelled one of the Living Dead group sessions because of the pressure of work, and now he called Lorentz’s secretary and told her he would miss the next. He was surprised when he got a call back almost immediately from Lorentz himself.

  ‘I’m afraid I have too much to do with work,’ Fabel said, a little annoyed at having to explain himself twice. ‘I am sorry, I do get a great deal out of the sessions. But you do know what I do for a living, Herr Doctor. I’m afraid that always must take priority.’

  ‘I understand that, but I really think you should try to make it, Herr Fabel,’ he said. ‘This is a very important study. As you say, I knew from the start that your job is very demanding. But I also made it clear that if you were to commit to the study, you had to commit fully to it. Group studies, and group therapy, for that matter, is all about the dynamic of the group. Once that dynamic has been established, if one person isn’t there, it changes how everyone else interacts with each other. I’ve already lost a subject and I would really appreciate it if you could find the time . . .’

  Fabel sighed. ‘I’ll do what I can, Dr Lorentz. But no promises.’

  *

  After he put the phone down, Fabel sat in his office and tried to work out what it had been that Lorentz had said that was causing an itch somewhere in his mind. He picked up the phone again and called Nicola Brüggemann, asking her to come into his office and to bring Anna with her.

  A few moments later, Brüggemann came in and sat down opposite Fabel.

  ‘Anna’s out of the Commission, but she’ll be back any minute,’ she explained.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘The morgue.’

  ‘The morgue?’ Fabel was puzzled. ‘Why is she at the morgue?’

  ‘She said she had something to check out. She got the preliminaries in on the buried-alive guy and said there was something she needed to double-check. But that was well over an hour ago, so she’ll be back soon. Do you want me to come back?’

  ‘No . . . no, I’m just trying to get to something. I’ve just had a phone conversation with someone who was talking about group dynamics – the way people interact with each other in social groups.’

  ‘Okay?’ Brüggemann frowned.

  ‘Stick with me here, Nicola. There was something about what he was saying, about one figure being absent from a group causing the whole inter-personal dynamic to break down. Ever since we started looking into the Monika Krone case again, I’ve had this nagging feeling that there is a ghost in the file – someone who makes a connection that would make sense of everything. Because we can’t identify that person, we can’t see the connection, we can’t make it make sense.’

  ‘And you think that ghost is Detlev Traxinger?’

  ‘I think he could be. Or it might be someone we’re not seeing yet. I need everything back on everyone who was at that party the night Monika disappeared. Instead of checking who was with who, or who knew who, I want the specific focus to be on finding out if anyone had a connection to Traxinger before or since that night. I think he’s our key.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a stab in the dark, Jan.’

  ‘With a fifteen-year-old case we’re surrounded by the unknown. Everything is a stab in the dark.’

  ‘I’ll get everyone on to it—’

  Anna Wolff came into Fabel’s office without knocking. Fabel could see instantly from her face that she had something big for him.

  She grinned broadly. ‘You are not going to believe this . . .’

  41

  Anna taped the mortuary photograph to the inquiry board for the ‘Buried Man’, as he had become known. The Buried Man was now linked to the other two murders and the three inquiry boards were standing side by side, with Monika Krone’s in the middle.

  The photograph was a close-up of the chest, cleaned of soil, of the man who had been found buried alive in the atrium of the Bruno Tesch Centre. The tattoo was clearly visible: the initials ‘DT’ were interwoven and wreathed with acanthus and ivy.

  ‘Get this sent to the whole team, Anna. I want every single tattooist in Hamburg to see this. I want to know where it was done, when and by whom. My guess is that we’re looking at something between fifteen and twenty years ago. As far as the team’s concerned, we are looking for a single killer for Buried Man and for Detlev Traxinger.’

  ‘Unless of course our unidentified guy just happened to have the same initials and this was a common tattoo,’ said Brüggemann.

  ‘He didn’t.’

  They all turned to see the bulky frame of Thom Glasmacher come into the Commission briefing room. He was carrying a hardback book, which he held up for the others to see. The title was The Satan Network and the author’s name was Alan Edgar.

  ‘Good book, is it, Thom?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Actually, it’s terrible. I’ve only
read a page and a half, but I can confidently say it’s shit. But . . .’ He flipped open the cover and held out the back flap of the dust jacket. There was a biography of the author, plus a photograph. The author was in his early forties, unexceptionally handsome, with blond hair sleeked back from a long face with strong cheekbones. Fabel recognized it instantly as the face of the buried man.

  ‘And the initials “DT” do not fit with “Alan Edgar”. Nor do they fit with his real name – Werner Hensler.’

  ‘Hensler?’ said Fabel. ‘Werner Hensler . . . I’ve heard that name before . . .’ He turned to the Monika Krone board and searched through the names, pegged and interlinked with red ribbon, of the people who had attended the party on the night Monika had disappeared. He went over to the conference table where the files had been piled up, selected one and rifled through it. ‘Yes . . . here we are: Werner Hensler, a literature student. His alibi for after the party was confirmed by a Danish national studying at the university, Paul Mortensen, and by Tobias Albrecht—’

  ‘Shit,’ said Nicola Brüggemann. ‘Let me guess, who was studying Architecture.’

  Fabel checked the file. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘The Bruno Tesch Centre, where we found our literary chum, was designed by Albrecht and Partners. Tobias Albrecht’s firm.’

  ‘Right.’ Fabel’s tone was decisive. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. That’s the focus for our search for a Traxinger connection. Thom, find out if this Dane still lives in Hamburg. If not, I’ll get in touch with Karin Vestergaard at the Danish National Police in Copenhagen and get her to trace him for us. She owes me a favour.’

  He looked again at the photograph of the tattoo. ‘If “DT” doesn’t stand for Detlev Traxinger, then what does it stand for?’

  42

  Like all such groups, the Club of the Living Dead followed the American convention of using first names only, but combined with the German etiquette of using the formal first-person form of address. This session, it was Hanne, the bourgeois woman from Blankenese, who still tried not to look too prosperous, who was the focus of Lorentz’s interrogation and, reluctantly, did most of the talking.

  ‘You think the world goes on for ever, that you go on for ever,’ she explained. ‘Everything is about expectations – what people, what the world expects from you and what you expect from people and the world. I knew who I was. I knew where I fitted in. Then, one day, I was doing the things I always did. I got home from work and started making the evening meal – my husband works in central Hamburg and I’m always home before him. Our kids are all at university or working. Anyway, I was chopping onions when I got this toothache. Bad, but vague, as if I couldn’t pinpoint which tooth was causing the pain. It just seemed to radiate through the whole left side of my jaw. So I took painkillers and just got on with stuff. But the pain didn’t go away and was now in my back – which made no sense to me – between the shoulder blades, then in the left shoulder blade itself. I was trying to work out if I’d twisted myself and could have injured my back and decided to sit down till it passed, but I didn’t make it to the chair. It was like someone had put a metal band around my chest and was tightening it, crushing it. There still wasn’t any chest pain, just intense pressure. All the pain was now in my back, jaw and arms.’

  ‘Did you know you were having a heart attack?’ asked Lorentz.

  ‘No. I don’t know why but I always thought it was men that got heart attacks and women got strokes. But I knew there was something very wrong. Like I said, I didn’t make it to the chair: I was on the floor of the kitchen, on my hands and knees, struggling – and I mean really struggling – to breathe. Then I passed out. Michael, my husband, found me on the floor and dialled one-one-two. The ambulance team worked on me, but my heart had stopped.’

  ‘And that’s when you had your experience?’

  She nodded. ‘It was wonderful. I’ve listened to you all and you all have had different experiences, and you know how difficult they are to describe. But for a lot of you, you felt the presence of God. I didn’t. Or maybe I experienced the same thing, but just see it as something different.’

  ‘What did you see, Hanne?’

  ‘Everything. The whole universe. I saw how things worked at the smallest level yet I could see into the depths of the universe, across galaxies. I saw the connection between the microscopic and the cosmic. Makes me sound like a hippy, doesn’t it? But it’s not like that.’

  ‘No one here makes any judgements about anyone else,’ said Lorentz. ‘Tell me, Hanne, if I say to you that what you saw wasn’t the universe, that you didn’t suddenly see across time and space, that everything you experienced was simply chemical and electrical activity in your brain as a result of being near death, would you find that difficult to accept?’

  ‘But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. I did see across the universe, into it. I accept that it was perhaps all just generated in my brain, but the point is it was in my brain. It’s in all of us – this enormous knowledge and capacity to understand. The only difference between us and everyone else is that we have been given the gift of seeing it. Some of you call it heaven. Okay, maybe it is . . . for you. But the fact is that we all felt there was no time in the experience. That it lasted a second, or for ever. Whether it’s paranormal or just neurochemical it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ It was the ex-medical student, who now wore a patch over one eye, who spoke. A vague slur in his speech, along with the unquestioned eyepatch, indicated to the others that he had deteriorated since the last session. Lorentz’s group dynamic, thought Fabel, was going to be disrupted by an absence sooner or later. ‘The tendrils of my tumour stimulate different areas of the brain – that’s physiology – but the result is, well, spiritual.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Hanne. ‘You could be right, Herr Doctor, that the basis of my NDE was all a neurological illusion. But the experience was real, valid. It unlocked a knowledge and an understanding I didn’t know I had. The mechanism is irrelevant.’

  ‘You clearly feel changed by the experience.’ Lorentz, the monastic scientist, cradled his crossed knee in his hands, leaning forward in his seat. ‘What has that change meant for you?’

  ‘I was never that bright. Or I never considered myself bright. And I was never really encouraged to have any kind of ambition by my parents. I think it was clear from a young age that I wasn’t academic. I scraped through my Abitur, but that was about as far as I was ever going to go, academically. But what I saw during my NDE . . . what I understood . . . it filled me with this deep curiosity. This need to understand more and better.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Lorentz.

  ‘I started reading. Then I did some evening classes.’ Hanne paused, looking for a moment a little embarrassed. ‘And now I’m doing a full-time MSc in Mathematical Physics at Hamburg Uni. It’s taught in English, so I’ve had to improve my level in that too.’

  ‘And how’s that working out for you?’

  ‘Surprisingly well. I mean, it’s challenging, but mathematics is the language of the universe. I’m simply learning the vocabulary to express what I saw, the answers that opened up for me.’

  There was more general discussion. It was one of Lorentz’s protocols that the rest of the group comment on the observations of the individual. Everyone had his or her own, very personal, perspective. But every contradiction came with agreement, every disagreement with consensus. Everyone agreed their experience was unique, but a uniqueness based on common elements and principles. And everyone agreed that the experience had been positive.

  ‘That, I’m afraid, is not always the case,’ said Lorentz, with a professionally troubled expression. ‘I agree with the Strassman hypothesis that the pineal gland, buried deep in the brain, is responsible for the natural production of dimethyltryptamine. This is better known as the psychedelic drug DMT. Its natural production, which tends to be linked to the amount of light around us, has a lot to do with states of consci
ousness, sleep patterns and the like. It also may be what causes us to dream. I think that dimethyltryptamine is released in massive doses at the point of death and this, combined with a lightning storm of electrical activity in the brain, is what causes such convincing hallucinations, as well as the illusion of greatly heightened senses.’

  ‘When I had my NDE, which involved a full out-of-body experience, I heard one of the nurses say something I didn’t understand,’ said Fabel. ‘But I remembered the word – kahretsin. I found out later that the nurse was Turkish-German, and kahretsin means “shit”. She remembered saying it because she knocked a tray of stuff over when they were working on me. That wasn’t a hallucination. It happened.’

  ‘I’m sure it did. And you weren’t dead. You were near death and all of your senses were still functioning. Perhaps at a different level of consciousness, but you would still process sounds, sensations, et cetera.’

  Others in the group began to chime in. They, like Fabel, protested the authenticity of their experiences. Several offered similar verifications. Fabel listened, nodded, voiced agreement, but deep inside knew that his experience had been some kind of neurological, not spiritual, episode. It was just so difficult to let it go. And maybe, as the bourgeoise Blankenese housewife-turned-quantum physicist had asserted, it didn’t really matter.

  Lorentz held up his hand to halt the crosstalk. ‘Anyway, whether you accept it or not, there is growing evidence that NDEs are effectively psychedelic experiences generated by a massive release of DMT and other neurochemicals and hormones. You all have had positive experiences because you launched into your DMT psychedelic state with a rush of euphoria-producing endorphins being released into your system. But sometimes the mix is different. Sometimes the DMT interacts with a rush of cortisol, the stress hormone, before endorphins are released. Any recreational user of DMT or ayahuasca or even psilocybin mushrooms will tell you that you have to be in a positive and relaxed mood before taking a hit. Mostly the experience is positive, but if you have a bad trip, it can be truly horrifying.’