The Ghosts of Altona (25 page)

Impossibly, a vast marble block seemed to float in the air at the heart of the atrium. When he grew near, Fabel could see it was actually a huge trough filled with earth. There were two stepladders set next to it.

‘The Floating Garden,’ explained Brüggemann. ‘It’s based on some Japanese concept.’

‘Very minimalist,’ said Fabel.

‘If you ask me,’ said Brüggemann with mock seriousness, ‘the problem with minimalism is that you can get too much of it.’

Fabel smiled. ‘How’s the conjuring trick done?’

‘The trough is actually held up by a titanium support that’s shielded by mirrors. The mirrors are angled to reflect the floor in such a way that, unless you crouch down and really look, you can’t see what’s keeping it in the air. Clever shit.’

‘Your site foreman again?’

‘Yep. To be honest I think he has a bit of a thing for me. We have a lot in common. More than he realizes – mainly that we both like women. I’ll break it to him gently that we don’t have much of a future.’

Fabel laughed.

‘Anyway, the idea is that they were going to fill the Floating Garden with small trees, shrubs, crap like that, and you get the idea of it all kind of levitating above the ground. I’m sure it’ll look quite something when it’s done.’

They both donned forensic gloves and overshoes before ducking under the tape. A technician also handed them masks to prevent DNA contamination.

‘This is a really weird one,’ said Brüggemann, her voice slightly muffled by the mask. ‘The gardeners came in this morning to start planting, one of the last phases in completion. The earth was delivered and put into the planter last week. When the gardeners started digging into it, they hit something solid . . .’ She indicated that Fabel should climb the stepladder, which he did. ‘The forensics boys say we’re not to stand on the earth or even on the ledge edge of the marble. Lookee, no touchee.’

Fabel climbed to the top of the ladder and looked into the trough. It was big – he reckoned about three metres wide, six metres long and, from what he had seen from the outside, roughly two and a half deep. Looking into the trough, he could see where less than a metre of soil had been cleared to expose a wooden box, its hinged lid opened. Some of the earth has spilled back into the box and partly covered the naked body of a man. His mouth was wide open and his neck arched back as if mid-scream, but the face and the open eyes were empty of any fear, of any expression at all. His arms and hands had fallen into the pose of a dog begging and Fabel noticed the fingertips were raw and bloody. He saw scratch marks and streaks of blood on the inside of the now open lid.

‘
Shit
. . .’ he muttered in English.

‘Hell of a way to go, isn’t it?’ said Brüggemann. ‘It’s not a coffin as such, by the way. Apparently it’s a wooden tool chest that was kept on site. But it had been padlocked shut and they broke the lock to see what was inside.’

‘So whoever did this must have been familiar with the site and what was available.’

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.’