The Ghosts of Altona Read Free Page B

illuminated towns and villages.
    Again there was a sense of rapid and accelerating motion, of colour and light. Hamburg was no longer below him. Once more, nothing of the world he had known remained. He knew he was back in that place where the laws of physics were completely altered and again Time rushed by and Time stood still. The moment he occupied was both fleeting and eternal.
    He was accelerating towards the light that was more than a light. It was the purest white, yet he could distinguish every colour that combined in it. He moved ever faster, yet as he travelled, his entire life played out for him. All of it, every encounter, every sight, sound, smell, touch. He rewitnessed everything he had ever done, everyone he had ever known, every wrong and every right.
    As the light grew close, Jan Fabel again felt the most profound joy. It suffused him, filled his being. Dying was beautiful. The most beautiful part of life, he realized, was its end.
    His father was waiting for him. His grandparents.
    Paul Lindemann, the young officer he had lost to a gunman’s bullet and who had haunted his dreams ever since, was there too; but unlike in the dreams, Paul’s forehead was unblemished by a bullet wound. Fabel saw little Timo Voss, whose knowing smile made Fabel feel that it was he who was the child and Timo the carrier of great wisdom. There were countless others long gone and Fabel recognized some of them as those he had come to know so well, but only after their deaths: the victims of the murders he had investigated. They all welcomed him, and without speaking – without the machinery of speech – Fabel told them how happy he was to have joined them. And all the time the light that was more than a light grew brighter, warmer, more joyous.
    *
    Something burst deep inside him: a hot, burning intense explosion. A vast shadow, like the beat of some broad dark wing, flickered across the light.
    ‘What is happening?’ he asked his father.
    ‘It’s not time yet. Don’t worry, son. It’s just that it’s not your time yet . . .’
    Another burst. This time it came with a surge of intense, searing pain. The light around him dimmed once more. Those who waited for him became shades.
    Again. Another searing pain.
    Everything around him was gone. A dark rushing. A falling back into the world.
    He was back in Hamburg.
    Once more Jan Fabel looked down on his body. He knew where he was: the Emergency Room of the Asklepios Hospital in Altona. From somewhere near the ceiling, he watched as a team of four worked on his body. Three stood back as the fourth applied the defibrillator paddles to his chest.
    Another burst of dark energy and pain as the current arced up and reconnected him to his body.
    The scene he looked down on dulled. The superhuman clarity and range of his vision were gone. The peace and joy he had felt dimmed.
    Jan Fabel sank back into the darkness of life.

Part One
    Two years later

3
    His first thought when he woke was that his wife had left the curtains open, as she preferred to do. His second was that the night sky beyond the window must have been clear of cloud, because a toppled slab of grey-white moonlight lay angled across the carpet beyond his bed. His waking had been into confusion and he raised himself on one elbow and took in the moonlit room, analysing an unfamiliar geometry of shadows, trying to remember if he knew this room, where it was, what he was doing in it.
    He struggled to make sense of the dark rectangle in the shadows on the far wall. A painting? And out of the darkness next to his bed, numbers glowed a malevolent red: 01:44. What was this place?
    The panic fell from him. He remembered. I remember it all. I remember everything and I remember that I will soon forget .
    The glowing numbers came from a clock. That’s how clocks were made, now. The painting on the wall wasn’t a painting but a television set. These days, they could make them as thin as a picture frame.
    These days.
    He remembered