The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

Fabel placed a mortuary photograph of the tattoo on the desk in front of Birgit Taubitz. She stared at it for a moment.

  ‘Do you recognize this tattoo?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘This can’t be from Tobias’s body – he didn’t have any tattoos.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked you. This isn’t Albrecht. Do you recognize this tattoo?’

  ‘No . . . but I recognize the motif.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It was used as a monogram at the bottom of that God-awful painting. The one he had hanging in his apartment despite the fact it didn’t go with anything else. The Silent Goddess.’

  ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

  ‘The Silent Goddess. That’s what he called the painting. Or at least he called it that once.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The strange thing about Tobias was that he was moderate in most things, apart from sex. He wasn’t a big drinker, but one night he’d had a little too much. Not drunk, really, but he let his guard down so I asked him about the painting. You know the one I’m talking about – have you seen it?’

  Fabel nodded.

  ‘Anyway, I hated that picture and I asked him what the hell it was meant to be, and he said it was the Silent Goddess. Then it was like he instantly felt he’d said too much and he dropped the whole thing.’

  ‘Why did it annoy you? This particular painting?’

  ‘I was jealous of her . . .’ Birgit Taubitz shook her head, as if annoyed with herself. ‘The woman in the painting. I was aware of the similarity with me and I often suspected that she was the great love’ – she exaggerated the phrase and crooked her fingers in the air to mime quote marks – ‘of Tobias’s life and that he had chosen me as some pale substitute. She made me feel like second best. That’s not an emotion I’m used to.’

  ‘But he never told you the identity of the woman in the picture?’

  ‘He never even admitted that she was a real person, or anything other than an artist’s idealized creation. But every painting has a model, someone real on whom the fantasy is based, and I knew that it was someone Tobias had some kind of connection to.’ She shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me how, I just knew.’

  ‘The artist who painted the picture – Detlev Traxinger – did you know him?’

  ‘I bumped into him once or twice at functions, that kind of thing.’ She made a disgusted face. ‘And I mean bumped into him. He was a fat pig and a creep, always pawing at women. And a drunk.’

  ‘Did he ever try to paw you?’

  ‘No . . . but he still gave me the creeps. Every time our paths crossed he would stare at me. Not leer, just stare. I wondered even then if it had something to do with my similarity to the woman in the painting.’

  ‘And you never got a hint from Albrecht who the Silent Goddess was or why she was called that?’

  ‘No . . .’ Taubitz frowned. ‘What is it? Is it significant?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel, but there was a beat’s pause before he asked his next question. ‘Before his death, Herr Albrecht was a suspect, albeit not a leading one, for the death of Werner Hensler. He claimed he was with you all that evening, but wouldn’t give up your identity. Is it true – was he with you?’

  ‘Yes, we talked about it afterwards. He seemed genuinely upset. I had no idea that he knew Werner Hensler, but then he told me he had gone to university with him.’

  ‘Did he say they were close?’

  ‘No, just that they were contemporaries. But I got the feeling he was understating it. Like I said, Tobias seemed very upset by Hensler’s death.’

  ‘Were you ever aware of Albrecht having an interest in the Gothic – in Gothic literature or art?’

  Birgit Taubitz looked taken aback for a moment. ‘It’s odd that you should say that. As an architect, Tobias was a modernist – which I believe is paradoxically considered old-hat these days. All of his buildings were about clean lines and geometry, some of them almost minimalist. But one day he had some drawings out on his desk – you know, the mini-studio in his apartment. They were beautiful, pencil and ink, as if they’d been done on a drawing board, rather than on a computer. I asked him about them and he said they were stuff he had done when he had been an architecture student. It’s odd, he seemed embarrassed by them, but they really were beautiful, in a dark sort of way. Anyway, they were all Gothic. There were designs for a fountain, a mansion of sorts and then some kind of ornate building that looked like a cross between a mausoleum and a temple.’

  ‘And these were just studies – not for any planned real building?’

  ‘That’s what he said, but I noticed that the sketch for the mausoleum-temple thing had a location written at the bottom.’

  ‘What was the location?’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t remember. It was in Hamburg though. Maybe the sketches are still in his apartment.’

  *

  They talked for another hour. Fabel went through times and dates, connections, friends and acquaintances. As the conversation went on, he got the impression that the Principal Mayor’s wife was regaining some of her previous confidence and arrogance. The suggestion that her husband could end up a suspect had been a bluff on Fabel’s part and he suspected she was beginning to see through it.

  But he was simply going through the motions now. There was one thing he was going to take away from the interview. Two words slipped between lovers in a moment of tipsy carelessness.

  Silent Goddess.

  56

  The Institute for Judicial Medicine was in Eppendorf, to the north of the city. If you died in Hamburg without an appointment, this is where they brought you. All the autopsies were carried out at ‘Butenfeld’, which was police shorthand for the institute’s morgue and referred to the street it sat on. It was also somewhere you could find an expert on almost any aspect of forensic science. Over recent years the institute had become a world-leading resource and its expertise had been sought by police forces around the world. It was, Fabel reckoned, the kind of model Petra Gebhardt had in mind for the Polizei Hamburg’s Murder Commission. Fabel had driven there straight from the Taubitz villa, stopping off to pick up coffee from a stall down by the fish market, and left his BMW in the car park in front of a double storey block. This was where Susanne worked and he had arranged over breakfast at the flat that he would call in.

  ‘I brought coffee,’ he said as he entered her office, placing two takeaway lattes on the desk in front of her. ‘Have you had a chance to do that profile I asked for?’

  ‘I thought I’d save that for pillow talk,’ she said, sipping at her coffee. ‘Nothing gets a girl going in bed more than talking about the mindset of the dead. Like I told you this morning, you didn’t need to come up, I would have emailed it to you.’

  ‘I’m in a bit of a hurry,’ he said. ‘I need to find this Dane before he gets the Gothic treatment. And the truth is I’m desperately trying to understand what the hell is going on. Whatever it is, it all revolves around Monika Krone. I’m more convinced of that now than ever. I’m not asking you for something that’ll stand up in court, I’m just trying to get my head around who and what she was.’

  ‘I’ve told you that it’s nigh on impossible to do a psychological post-mortem on someone. All you’ve given me is second-hand accounts and vague observations from her sister – who’s unlikely to be objective one way or the other – and others she encountered at university.’

  ‘Nigh on . . . but not impossible. Even I’ve been able to build some kind of picture of her from what others have said. Anyway, I can tell by the preamble that you’ve got something for me.’

  ‘I could be totally wrong, Jan. I can only offer at best a half-informed opinion.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But it strikes me, as I’m sure it does you, that Monika Krone was a highly manipulative individual. Supremely egocentric and with little or no empathy for others. She used men for sex and she used sex against men – as a means to control them. She also seemed to have had dif
ficulty balancing her highly organized scheming with her tendency to be unpredictable and impulsive. I think you know where I’m going with this . . .’

  ‘A sociopath?’

  ‘It’s the picture that’s emerging. Don’t tell me that you hadn’t already put it together yourself. Bear in mind that one per cent of the population can be classed as clinically sociopathic. And of that one per cent, the majority manage to lead normal lives without any criminal behaviour. Some say it’s even an advantage in the business world, which says a lot: the less you care about people the better capitalist you’re likely to be. And, it has to be said, it’s mainly a male thing.’

  ‘But you think Monika Krone was a sociopath. Do you think she could have been violent?’

  ‘I think there was maybe the potential for violence, considerable potential, but she wouldn’t have found it necessary. Criminal sociopaths use violence as a means of exerting their will over others. Monika Krone had other, more powerful weapons in her arsenal: she used her beauty and sex to get what she wanted. The other thing is that I’ve been through her academic records – both school and university. She had problems at the start of her school career but an educational psychologist was called in and sorted her out. Got her back on the rails, so to speak.’

  ‘What was her problem?’

  ‘Her problem?’ Susanne laughed. ‘Monika Krone’s problem was that she had an IQ that was off the scale. Her records also note that she had an incredibly encyclopaedic knowledge. Intelligence plus knowledge plus beauty is a highly potent mix. Add sociopathic ruthlessness and it becomes explosive. But her academic performance fluctuated, as that of the highly gifted usually does. She would be able to out-think, out-manoeuvre just about anybody she came in contact with.’

  ‘Except the last person she came into contact with,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Brute strength and violence, Jan. Not the same thing. She could control everyone around her, except herself. And whoever killed her was either a complete stranger, immune to her powers, or someone whom she had pushed to breaking point. Sometimes violent passions distil down to simple violence.’

  Fabel sipped his coffee, deep in thought. ‘Would someone with the type of personality you’re describing manipulate others exclusively to get what they want – to achieve definite goals – or would they do it for its own sake? Just to see how far she could make others go?’

  ‘I’d say either . . . or both. Sociopaths like to see how powerful their wills are, compared to others’; to see just how far they can push.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘There’s one thing that came to mind: you told me what her sister Kerstin said to you – about how she suspected that Monika had maybe trapped herself. That she’d maybe built so many webs around her that she couldn’t escape and she perhaps welcomed her killer.’

  ‘I think that was just emotional talk . . .’

  ‘I don’t think it was. I know that Kerstin and Monika seem like polar opposites, but they weren’t. No twins really are. What Kerstin said about there being something missing with Monika . . . that was true too. Sociopaths don’t have something the rest of us are missing. Quite the opposite – it’s they who are missing a part. Most of the qualities you see in Kerstin as a person would have been there in Monika too, and vice versa. In Monika’s case, however, she would have greatly diminished empathy for others, or perhaps no empathy. Plus her sociopathy would deny her control of her impulses or her ego, which would have become supreme. But, contrary to what many people believe, sociopaths are capable of introspection. In Monika’s case, there would always be the possibility of self-loathing. Part of her, deep down inside, would have always wanted out, wanted to escape the vortex of chaos she had created. The only problem with that is that you can never run away from yourself.’

  ‘You seriously think that she could have been suicidal?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘It’s a trope that sociopaths don’t commit suicide because they’re too self-centred to be self-destructive. They do get depressed, and they do commit suicide – just for different reasons than normal people, mainly because they’ve lost the one thing they crave: control. More often than not a sociopath takes his or her own life because their actions, their manipulations of others have left them isolated or their situation untenable. I’m telling you, Jan, if Monika Krone’s body hadn’t been so clearly deliberately hidden, I would not have ruled out suicide.’

  ‘So you think she maybe did welcome her killer after all?’

  ‘No. Not her killer or however she met her death. But extinction – freedom from the mess she’d made of her life – perhaps.’

  Fabel was about to say something when his cell phone rang. It was Karin Vestergaard.

  ‘I got your message. You said it was urgent,’ she said. ‘By the way, I’ve got the details you wanted on Paul Mortensen.’

  ‘That’s why I was phoning. And why it was urgent. We’ve had another killing – another fellow student of Mortensen’s. I’m beginning to suspect we have a shopping list and your countryman is next to be ticked off.’

  ‘He’s in Hamburg now,’ she said. ‘His flight got in late last night. I have his cell phone number but he may have it switched off – he’s attending this haematology conference at the congress centre, and he’ll be in and out of seminars all day. I have his hotel details, I’ll text them to you, but I think your best bet is definitely to try to get him at the congress centre between events. Is there anything else I can do, Jan?’

  ‘Thanks, Karin . . . not at the moment but I’ll get back to you if there is.’

  ‘Jan?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s one of ours. Don’t lose him.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’ After Fabel hung up he leaned over the desk and kissed Susanne. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘I hope so. Thanks for the evaluation. See you later.’

  On the way out to the car Fabel phoned Anna Wolff and asked her to meet him at the congress centre. ‘And bring a few bodies, Anna. We need to find Mortensen quickly.’

  *

  It was a huge expanse to cover, unless you knew exactly where to find who you were looking for. The congress centre was a vast building, not in height – it was mostly over three floors with a five storey central complex – but in area. It sprawled over its city centre site, the only high rise element the soaring tower of the adjoining hotel.

  Fabel arrived on site first, but Anna arrived a minute or two later. A Mercedes Sprinter minibus and a patrol car, both in the silver and blue livery of the Polizei Hamburg, pulled up behind Anna’s car and ten uniformed officers decanted from them. It was followed by a red Opel Astra saloon and Dirk Hechtner and Thom Glasmacher joined the knot of police officers. All were armed with the photograph of Mortensen Karin Vestergaard had emailed Fabel, along with the details of the seminars he was due to attend.

  ‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘We know who we’re looking for and where he should be. There’s no way we can check every square centimetre of the building, so we just have to hope that Professor Mortensen is exactly where he’s supposed to be which is . . .’ Fabel checked his notebook. ‘The haematology conference in Hall Six, which is one floor up from the entrance level. His seminar is supposed to start in fifteen minutes. If by chance you see him anywhere in the crowds, secure him and notify me. Tell him it’s for his own protection. I want two uniforms at the main entrance. Anna – we’ll take four uniforms and go in through the west entrance. Thom, Dirk – you take the other four and go round to the east.’

  Fabel called Mortensen’s cell phone for the third time, and for the third time got his voicemail service.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, putting the phone back in his pocket. He nodded and Glasmacher, Hechtner and four uniforms headed around to the east entrance. He led Anna and the rest in through the main entrance foyer. It was a vast hall of marble floors and polished stone pillars, and it was filled with hundreds of people milling about, moving from
one hall to another, or gathered in knots, talking about whatever business they were in, whatever product they were going to hear a presentation on. There were two more levels above them. ‘This place is huge. Hall Six . . . let’s go.’

  Fabel led the way up the escalator, a dozen business-types staring at the blue uniformed SchuPos following him.

  When he reached the top, he saw Hechtner, Glasmacher and their escort emerge from the other escalator. There were throngs of people in the foyer, obviously waiting to get in for the next seminar.

  ‘Shit, that’s him . . .’ Anna said at Fabel’s side. He turned to her.

  ‘Who, Mortensen?’

  ‘No . . .’ Anna laughed disbelievingly. ‘It’s Tempel. The guy we’re looking for. The one whose sister tried to kill Albrecht before topping herself. Christ – do you think he’s here to do Mortensen?’

  Fabel looked across to where a group of men dressed in suits and wearing name badges stood talking. One of them was medium height and athletic-looking. His hair was buzz-cut and his face angular, his nose showing signs of an earlier break. Fabel could see why, in a different context, Anna had suspected him to be some kind of thug.

  Marco Tempel looked across and saw them. He seemed puzzled for a moment, eyebrows raised, then he waved to Anna who was already moving purposefully towards him, her hand resting on the grip of her service automatic. Fabel trotted to catch up with Anna and placed a restraining hand on her arm.

  ‘Take it easy, Anna . . .’ he said in a low voice. ‘This isn’t the place for a takedown. Anyway, he’s making no move to flee.’

  ‘It’s him.’

  ‘I know, but let’s get him out of here quietly and with no fuss.’ He turned to the uniformed officers and indicated with a jerk of their head that they should follow.

  ‘Hello.’ Tempel smiled at Anna when she and Fabel reached him. ‘Are you here for the seminar on blunt force trauma?’ He turned to the others. ‘Trust me, that’s her speciality.’

  Fabel took Tempel by the elbow and eased him away from the group. The doctor’s colleagues suddenly seemed to become aware of the presence of uniformed police. Fabel leaned in and spoke quietly.