‘Indentured workers – basically slaves.’ Fabel recalled the Spanish term from his days as a history student. He stared at the painting. Traxinger certainly had had a particular talent for capturing cruelty. ‘What else does it say about her?’
Koetzing read for a moment, holding her phone close. ‘Well, she was quite a gal . . . apparently the nickname La Quintrala was given to her because of the colour of her flaming red hair. The name comes from some kind of mistletoe called the quintral that grows in Patagonia and has bright red flowers. She was part German, by the way, which explains the Lisperguer bit of her name, I suppose. She was a sexual adventuress – well, can’t blame a girl for that – and prolific murderer of her own family, a priest and anybody else who pissed her off, basically.’ Koetzing fell silent for a moment while she scrolled through and read the information. ‘But it was her taste for killing servants that earned her her reputation. Some say she killed forty, others say the true figure was in the hundreds. Same old story though: no one cared about the plebs, but she stood trial for the murders of her more noble victims. She got away with it all, of course.’
‘Do you think that’s really how Traxinger saw her? Monika, I mean?’
‘I don’t know. It could have been just some kind of joke. Detlev’s extremely ornate version of a caricature.’
‘And you say he never mentioned Monika Krone to you?’
‘Not once.’
As he stared up at the painting, Fabel thought about how Kerstin Krone had described her sister – the cliché of the evil twin made real. Two men dead: two men linked to a young woman who had disappeared off the face of the earth fifteen years before. Not just linked, obsessed with her. And one of them had painted her over and over again in Gothic-themed paintings: a figure of death, of sexual, physical and mental torment. A beautiful monster.
50
Sleep kept promising itself to Fabel, but stayed teasingly just out of reach. His body was exhausted but his mind flashed and fluttered with thoughts, ideas, disjointed images, fragments of things people had said. Susanne slept soundly beside him and he tried to will himself into a sleep that refused to yield. He slipped out of bed and went through to the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of milk and sitting at the small table, staring blankly at its surface, trying to shut out all thoughts of work.
But it wasn’t just Fabel’s caseload that had kept him awake: an undecided future taunted him every time he neared sleep. As Anna had pointed out, Leading Criminal Director Horst van Heiden, the officer in charge of all of the City State’s investigative branches and Fabel’s immediate boss, had been on sick leave for three months and was due to retire. The Police President had been filling van Heiden’s role as well as her own and the search was on for a permanent replacement. The rumour was that, at the moment, the search hadn’t extended any further than Fabel. The truth was that the idea of becoming Leading Criminal Director in charge of the whole State Criminal Office had started to have its appeal. The life of a bureaucrat and administrator would perhaps result in fewer sleepless nights and fewer vivid nightmares when he did sleep.
But, he told himself, the bad dreams had paradoxically become fewer since the shooting. His close encounter with death had brought him a strange peace, a contentment which he hadn’t known before. But tonight, for a reason he didn’t fully understand, that peace eluded him.
Taking his milk through to the living room, he switched on the television, the volume turned down, flicking through mute channels.
He stopped at one channel. He recognized the movie that was showing as Nosferatu. Max Schreck shadowed his long-fingered way menacingly across the screen and through the streets and alleys of a monochrome Bremen. Fabel switched it off.
Rohde had been right, he thought. If you have come close to death, then the literary romanticizing of it became vacuous. The Gothic did belong to the young, whose relationship with death was a long-distance one. When you were young you felt immortal, and when you were immortal you could play and tease yourself with the idea of death.
But, that Saturday night fifteen years before, something had happened to make Monika Krone’s relationship with Death suddenly close-up and personal. And now people connected to her were dying.
He switched the television off and went back to bed. The sleep that had eluded him claimed him and he fell into a dream he would not remember when he woke. A dream about a beautiful red-headed woman who was trapped beneath the ground.
*
Fabel called Anna through to his office as soon as she came in the following day.
‘You look like shit,’ was her opening statement.
‘Why thanks for that, Anna. As a matter of fact, I didn’t sleep too well last night.’
‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘There’s something really weird going on with the whole Gothic set thing and it just kept going round and round in my head. What do you think is going on with Albrecht?’
‘I don’t know. There’s every chance he’s been telling us the truth – that he really was with some married woman the night Hensler died. Have you checked out his alibi for Traxinger’s death?’
‘Yep, and it holds up. It’s not airtight – there are gaps that can’t be verified, but it doesn’t look likely that he could have got all the way across town, killed Traxinger and got back to where he was next seen.’
‘Mmm . . .’ Fabel sipped his coffee. ‘That would kind of rule him out. It’s pretty clear that both killings were the work of the same perpetrator.’
‘That doesn’t mean that Albrecht isn’t involved. This whole Gothic set is beginning to look like a cultish thing. A secret society or some crap like that. Maybe he’s working with a partner – or more than one.’ Anna sat down opposite Fabel. ‘Maybe Monika Krone was killed by them all. Everyone working together in some kind of secret society ritual. Maybe that’s what the whole tattoo thing is all about.’
‘Maybe. But Albrecht doesn’t have the tattoo – even if he did know where he would have it if he did – and there’s no evidence of him having had any meaningful contact with the victims since they left university.’
‘That we know of . . . The whole point of a secret society is that it’s secret. Maybe the lot of them got together every second Tuesday to prance around naked and whip each other with ivy and acanthus.’
‘Sometimes, Frau Wolff, your imagination worries me. But I take your point. And there’s his convenient mystery woman whom he claims was with him the night Werner Hensler was murdered.’
‘Who could be a lot of bollocks.’
‘Or maybe he really has been messing about with someone in the public eye who can’t be identified. Unfortunately we don’t have nearly enough evidence, even circumstantial, to push him on it. But I really do think there’s something more to Albrecht’s involvement with all of this. If you’re right and this is some kind of secret society or cult thing, then someone is killing members one by one, and the trigger has been the uncovering of Monika Krone’s body. Maybe it’s another member, or maybe it’s someone who knew about their club but wasn’t a member—’
‘And they didn’t know for sure that she was dead – that the others had killed her – until the body was found . . .’ Anna finished the thought for him.
‘Exactly,’ said Fabel. ‘So we’re left with someone on the periphery and not completely in the know.’
‘What was it Rohde said? “One of the orbiting planets, minor planets, and not one of the stars at the centre”?’
‘Rohde’s forgettable student, and maybe my “ghost in the file”. I need you to get people on that right away, finding a sociology student around the same time with the name Messing or Mesling . . . anything similar sounding.’
‘That’s if Rohde got the name right, Jan. Or if there really was such a student at all. What was his deal? Rohde, I mean?’
‘I don’t know . . . early onset Alzheimer’s, I’d guess. Poor bastard. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that biography to be finished. But if my understanding
of it is right, then it’s his short-term, not long-term memory that’s the problem. He said as much when we were there.’
‘And what about his wife? The mini-Monika lookalike? By the way, I’m going to dye my hair red – it seems to get men going.’
‘Not all men,’ said Fabel, a little awkwardly. ‘But yes, there’s something very odd going on there and I think Rohde was maybe more involved with Monika Krone than he let on. But in the meantime, let’s focus on Tobias Albrecht and this sociology student.’
‘What about Frankenstein Hübner?’
‘He has to stay in the frame too, but we still haven’t had a single sighting on him in the metropolitan Hamburg area. He could be long gone by now. And one of these murders was committed in the middle of Altona. I would have thought someone would have noticed a hulking presence like Hübner’s before or after commission. But it’s by no means certain that he isn’t involved. In any case, he’s a hidden quantity, Albrecht isn’t. I’d like eyes on our architect chum for a couple of days. Nothing round the clock, just to see what he gets up to.’
‘Or who he gets up to. You want me to take it?’
‘If you don’t mind. No more than two teams tied up on it – and make sure you stay out of sight. He’ll recognize you if he spots you.’
‘Not if I become a redhead.’
‘I think that’s exactly when he would notice you . . .’
51
The sharks were circling.
Men could be pathetic, thought Anna Wolff as she sat at the bar sipping her tomato juice. She had dressed appropriately for the venue: a skirt short enough to show off her legs but not so short as to look desperate, and a blouse that fitted snugly at the waist and accentuated the swell of her breasts. Her short, thick dark hair was styled more softly than usual and she had spent more time than usual applying make-up.
It was like tossing raw chum into the water.
One of the circling sharks – fat, middle-aged and wearing a grey business suit and a few too many Scotches – decided to try to take a bite. Anna smiled sweetly and declined his offer of a drink politely but firmly, explaining she was waiting for someone. It was the way Jan would want her to do it, so she did it his way instead of hers, which would have been to ask the business-type how he could think she could possibly be interested in a fat pig like him and to tell him to fuck off.
Instead she turned back to her drink and, with a shrug of his shoulders, he swam back through the shoals of singles in the bar to try his luck elsewhere. To be fair to him, almost everyone there other than Anna was there to get laid.
The wine bar in Ottensen was a moderately glitzy place and probably had evolved into a singles bar, rather than that having been the original intent. It was ideal for the job, though: the decor trendy, the furnishings plush, the music smooth, and the lighting soft enough to give the homely a fighting chance. There remained, however, a lingering atmosphere of quiet desperation.
It was a large space to cover. From where she sat at the bar with her back to the lounge, Anna could see most of the seating and standing area reflected in the smoked glass behind the bar counter. Occasionally people would stand between her and her target, but she couldn’t risk making herself too obvious by turning around. After all she had, as Fabel had pointed out, been there when they had interviewed Albrecht and she was counting on him not recognizing her in this get-up. However, it was best to stay inconspicuous. Added to which, she didn’t need to take risks: she was the team leader, not the close surveillance.
She turned around, keeping her back to the booth in the furthest corner of the bar where Albrecht sat. At the opposite end of the lounge, standing near the door at a chest-high table, the tall, muscular Thomas Glasmacher was almost unrecognizable. For Anna, the almost perpetually scruffy Glasmacher had always brought to mind some non-urban type – a Kiel trawlerman or a fruit farmer from the Altes Land. He habitually dressed with no coordination in jeans and battered-looking T-shirts or sweaters, to the point of being teased about it by his partner, the small, dark and impeccably tailored Dirk Hechtner; but tonight Glasmacher was wearing a grey sharkskin suit that emphasized the breadth of his shoulders, with black shirt open at the neck; he had gelled and combed his thick, curly and usually unruly blond hair back from his face. He had already, that Anna had seen, been approached by three women. Another case of too much raw chum in the water.
From where he was standing Glasmacher would have a clear view of Albrecht, who had arrived alone but now sat in the far booth with a tall, slender woman with black hair. The woman’s skin had a dark tone and from her brief glimpse of her Anna wasn’t sure if she was of mixed race. The relief team had arrived: Dirk Hechtner, who looked very much as if he was in his natural environment, was immediately behind Anna and stood talking to a younger, attractive blonde, Sandra Mau, who was one of the Commission’s junior officers. Anna realized she should have teamed Glasmacher up with a female undercover officer too, and the idea of Thom as a babe-magnet made her smile.
‘You look happy . . .’
Anna turned to see a man at her side. He was attractive: reasonably good-looking in a rough-at-the-edges kind of way and, like Glasmacher, had the kind of breadth across the shoulders you only earned at the gym; his nose and cheeks had the kind of geometry you only earned in a boxing ring. Or some less legal context. He was reasonably well-dressed, his shirt and suit well cut and not cheap, but not top-designer expensive. An instinct told Anna he was some middle-rank thug. This was a diversion she could do without.
‘I’m waiting for someone,’ she said and turned back to her drink.
‘No you’re not,’ he said and leaned an elbow on the bar and his face close, too close, to Anna’s. ‘You’re here to meet someone all right, you just haven’t decided who. I’ve been watching you. You’ve been eyeing up the big blond guy over there by the door, but take my word for it, he’s not what you’re looking for.’
‘And let me guess . . . you are what I’m looking for?’
‘I’d like to be. Can I buy you a drink?’
‘I’ve got one.’
‘Then let me buy you another.’
‘I’m good.’
The boxer-type made no sign of moving. Instead he rested his other hand on the back of her bar stool.
‘Why are you being so stand-offish?’ he said.
‘Oh, am I?’ she said with mock apology. She let the expression fall. ‘It’s my natural demeanour with creeps. Now fuck off.’
He straightened up. Anna readied herself for unpleasantness. That’s all she needed, to have to slap this guy down, create a scene and blow the cover of the entire surveillance team. Instead, the boxer held his hands up.
‘Okay . . . I’m sorry you feel like that. I didn’t mean to bother you . . . I just thought you looked like someone who would be interesting to get to know.’
‘Oh sorry,’ said Anna, affecting the same sarcastic tone, ‘I’ve gone and hurt your pride. And you were so confident and all . . . Never mind, I’m sure you’ll find someone who’ll fall for the sensitive ape routine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a piss.’
She got up and headed to the women’s bathroom. She passed Glasmacher and they exchanged a look.
There was a hallway between the door to the main lounge and the bathroom. Anna was waiting for it and she heard it: the door had just shut behind her when she heard it open again.
‘Hey . . .’ It was the ape’s voice. And now it was his hand on her shoulder.
Without taking the time to turn, Anna cupped her right hand and swung it back and up into his groin. He doubled over and at the same time she jabbed her elbow back and upwards to meet his downward-headed face, doubling the force of the impact. She swung around and kicked out at the still bent over figure and he slammed into the wall. Anna became aware of Thomas Glasmacher coming into the hall. He drew his Glock and aimed at the boxer who had slid down the wall and now sat bent over, his nose bleeding, one hand cupping his bruised testicles. He looked
from Anna to Glasmacher and back.
‘Cops?’ he asked, his voice strained through the pain.
‘Cops,’ said Anna. ‘And you’ve probably screwed up an important operation. Why the hell couldn’t you just take no for an answer?’
He reached out his other hand; it held Anna’s clutch bag.
‘You left your purse on the bar. For a cop you’re very careless with your personal property.’ He grimaced as he eased himself up. ‘With my personal property as well.’
‘Fuck!’ said Anna. Glasmacher reholstered his sidearm and helped the boxer straighten up.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna. ‘You’re entitled to make a complaint.’ She nodded to Glasmacher. ‘Get back out there, Thom. I need your eyes on the subject.’
She took her clutch bag from him, found a handkerchief and handed it to him. ‘Are you all right?’
He wiped his face, looked at the blood on the handkerchief then back at Anna. ‘I think I’m in love . . .’
Glasmacher reappeared at the door. ‘Anna . . . he’s on the move.’
‘I’ll be right there. What’s your name?’ Anna asked the bloodied guy leaning against the wall.
‘Marco Tempel.’
‘Here’s my card, Herr Tempel. If you want to make a complaint, get in touch. Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘I’ve had worse.’ He looked at the card. ‘Anna.’
*
Back out in the bar, Anna caught up with Glasmacher.
‘They’ve left. Dirk and Sandra are on his tail. We can catch up. You okay?’
‘I’m fine. But maybe we can keep this little incident to ourselves.’
‘Okay . . . but he might make a complaint.’
‘I doubt it . . . But if he does I’ll deal with it then.’
Anna phoned Dirk Hechtner who told her they were heading south, towards the river.
*
Anna drove.
‘You know where we’re going?’ asked Glasmacher.
The Ghosts of Altona Page 26
