A Fear of Dark Water (22 page)

There was a pause and an exchange of looks between Steinbach, van Heiden and Werner. Fabel made an exasperated face.

‘Müller-Voigt is dead, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘He was found by his cleaner in his living room first thing this morning. That’s where Anna was headed when you came in.’

Fabel sat stunned for a moment. Then, as if a current had been switched on, he stood up suddenly. ‘I’m going out there …’

‘That would be inadvisable, Fabel,’ said Steinbach. ‘You can see that yourself, given the circumstances.’

‘You can’t seriously be suggesting that I am a suspect?’

‘No one is suggesting that,’ said van Heiden in a vaguely offended tone that still did not convince Fabel. ‘But you are
compromised
as far as both of these murder investigations are concerned. You simply cannot be seen to be heading up an enquiry in which you feature. You must understand that.’

‘So what happens? Am I suspended?’

‘Of course not,’ said Steinbach.

‘Then I insist on leading the Müller-Voigt case.’ Fabel still could not believe he was referring to the man he had sat and talked with just two nights before as a case. ‘That
is
my job, after all. And I have a personal stake in this …’

‘But that’s exactly the point,’ said van Heiden. ‘It’s precisely because of your personal involvement that we have to place the case in the hands of another officer.’

‘I suggest we all head out to the crime scene,’ said Menke. ‘There’s clearly more to this than meets the eye. And, in my opinion, Herr Fabel hasn’t compromised himself: someone else has deliberately gone out of their way to remove him from the investigation.’

Fabel looked at Menke: he was surprised that the intelligence man had spoken up for him.

‘I agree,’ said Werner. ‘This is all crap, the thing with the text messages and this woman with a victim’s identity. It’s all engineered to get Jan off the case. Unless you really believe that he
is
a suspect. In which case you can suspend me as well.’

Fabel shot Werner a warning look: Van Heiden, who now glowered at Werner, was by-the-book enough to take him up on his suggestion.

‘You lead the investigation, Werner,’ said Fabel. ‘The Criminal Director is right. I’m too close to all of this.’ He turned to van Heiden. ‘But I still want to see the Müller-Voigt murder scene.’

Fabel sat in the back of the Mercedes that took them out to the Altes Land. Werner followed. Stuck in the back of the car next to Menke, watching a huge sky above a billiard-table landscape slide by, Fabel still felt more than a little like a suspect and found himself resenting the intelligence man’s presence.

‘What did Müller-Voigt say to you about this supposedly missing woman?’ asked Menke.

Fabel remained quiet for a moment. Long enough to make the point that he resented Menke questioning him.

‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Menke into the void.

Fabel sighed. ‘She’s not just supposed missing, she’s a supposed woman. Müller-Voigt told me that he said that he could find no trace of her existence. He asked me to investigate because he felt that if he were to go through official channels he would look like he was losing his mind.’

‘You do realise,’ said Menke, ‘that this all ties up. Your encounter with a woman who shows you identification that belongs to someone already dead, your problems with electronic messages disappearing.’

Van Heiden twisted around in the front seat, edged his broad shoulders so he could turn to Menke. ‘If you have some information we should know, Herr Menke,’ he said, ‘then I strongly suggest you share it with us.’

Menke shrugged. ‘I was just making an observation, that’s all.’

Holger Brauner and his team had been at the Müller-Voigt murder scene for some time and when Fabel entered the house with Menke, van Heiden and Werner, Anna Wolff was standing in the lounge, talking to a uniformed officer. She came over and spoke directly to Fabel, pointedly ignoring van Heiden.

‘Müller-Voigt is over there …’ She indicated the seating area where Fabel had talked with the politician two days earlier. Fabel could see a scattering of books and magazines on the floor next to the coffee table. Müller-Voigt’s feet were just visible: he had obviously fallen between the sofa and the coffee table. There was an arc of blood spatter visible on the leather of the sofa. ‘You want to see?’

Anna handed Fabel blue stretch overshoes and a pair of latex gloves but ignored van Heiden. The Criminal Director began to fume and Fabel shot Anna a warning look. She handed the Criminal Director a set. Anna was an officer of great ability and promise, but Fabel knew her very obvious problem with authority meant she would never be promoted much above her current rank. It frustrated him but somewhere deep inside he was heartened by these little displays: maybe her rebellion was not at an end after all.

‘Signs of struggle?’ asked Fabel as they approached the body.

‘Minimal,’ said Anna. ‘It looks like he knew his attacker. There’s no sign of forced entry and all this …’ she indicated the scattered books and magazines ‘… could have been simply when he fell, or at the most after a very brief struggle.’

Fabel nodded a greeting to Holger Brauner. ‘Can I have a look?’

‘So long as you don’t contaminate my crime scene,’ said Brauner, with a grin.

Fabel looked down at Müller-Voigt’s body and Müller-Voigt looked back at him with an unblinking stare and an expression of surprise. It was not really an expression, Fabel knew, just the slack-jawed stare of eased rigor mortis. One side of the politician’s head, above the right temple, was badly deformed, as if dented, and the hair was parted by an ugly deep laceration where he had been hit with a heavy object. There was a halo of dark, thickly viscous blood around Müller-Voigt’s head. Fabel felt something unpleasant flutter dark wings in his gut when he realised that Müller-Voigt was wearing the same clothes as he had been the last time Fabel had seen him.

‘How long has he been dead, roughly?’ Fabel asked Brauner.

‘He’s not fresh,’ said the forensics chief. ‘More than a day. Maybe two.’

Fabel tensed.

‘What did you say?’ asked van Heiden over Fabel’s shoulder.

Brauner gave a small laugh and looked at Fabel quizzically before turning to van Heiden. ‘I said the victim’s been dead for more than a day. What’s the problem?’

‘I met with the victim the night before last,’ explained Fabel in a dull voice. ‘Here.’

‘Ah …’ Brauner said and frowned.

‘Wait a minute.’ Fabel turned to where Menke was standing. ‘Didn’t you say Müller-Voigt missed a meeting yesterday but got in touch to make his apologies?’

‘Yes … that …’ Menke said ponderously. ‘The thing is, we don’t have the email any more. Or, for the moment, any of our other emails. I’m afraid your concerns about email security were right, after all. You see, the message sent from Müller-Voigt’s computer had corrupted our entire system. It would appear to have been infected with the Klabautermann Virus. And, of course, an email doesn’t mean he was still alive. His killer could have sent it from his account.’

‘Müller-Voigt told me that his computer had been infected,’ said Fabel. ‘But he had sent it off for cleaning and repair. He told me that the computer he had was new and clean. And that he was using a new account to send emails. So I’d say your infected emails didn’t come from him.’

‘Herr Meyer …’ van Heiden called over to Werner. ‘I’d like you to take
sole
charge of this investigation.’ He turned back to Fabel, ‘I think you can understand, given the position we’re in.’

‘As far as I can see,’ said Fabel, ‘I’m the only one in a
position
.’

‘You said you saw a picture of this mysterious missing woman when you were last here,’ said van Heiden. ‘Where is it?’

Fabel pointed to the digital picture frame. ‘It’s on that.’

Leaning over the sofa, Brauner reached and picked up the remote control, handing it to Fabel. Van Heiden took it instead, frowning at the images.

‘These are all scenic photographs, as far as I can see,’ said the Criminal Director.

‘It’s a digital picture frame,’ said Fabel. ‘It stores hundreds of photographs. May I?’

A new image appeared every time Fabel pressed the frame’s button. Seascapes, lots of seascapes, some images of the countryside around the Altes Land, several littoral scenes, many with lighthouses. Nothing with Müller-Voigt in it. None of the other photographs he had seen when the politician had flicked through them. Before they had viewed half of the photographs, Fabel already knew that he would not find any photograph of Meliha Yazar.

‘And you say that you definitely saw the woman Müller-Voigt said had gone missing on this thing?’ asked van Heiden after they had gone through all the images.

‘Without a doubt. Someone has deleted it. And a lot of other images.’

‘Just like the text message you say you got about the location of the victim the other day.’

‘Just like …’ Fabel handed the digital frame back to Brauner. ‘You’d better bag that up. Whoever did Müller-Voigt has been playing with his toys.’

Brauner nodded. ‘By the way,’ he said, reaching down and picking up a large plastic evidence bag from the floor, ‘this would appear to be our murder weapon. Bloody ugly thing, if you ask me. Anyway, it has blood, hair and skin on the base and its weight and form seem consistent with the damage to his skull. We’ll take it back for a full fingerprint check. What’s up, Jan?’

Fabel stared at the evidence bag and its heavy, soiled contents in Brauner’s hand. In that moment he felt his career, his life unravelling.

‘It’s a bronze sculpture of
Rahab
. A Hebrew sea devil.’ Fabel’s voice was dull. Distant. He struggled for a moment to remember Müller-Voigt’s exact words. ‘
Rahab
was the creator of storms and the father of chaos. And I think I’d better tell you now that you will get a good set of prints from it. Mine.’

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

When he was eight years old Roman Kraxner’s parents had taken him to see the family doctor, who had shaken his head and frowned a lot and referred them on to a child psychiatrist who had not shaken his head or frowned at all. In fact, Roman had not noticed much of any kind of expression at all on the specialist’s face. Instead of frowning and head-shaking, the psychiatrist had discussed Roman with his parents in a disjointed, almost incoherent way. Roman recalled that about him; that and the heavy, black-rimmed spectacles he had worn. To hide his eyes, Roman had thought; to hide them so he didn’t have to look anyone else in the eye. And with this realisation, all Roman’s anxieties had gone. And so had those of his parents: the psychiatrist had reassured Roman’s parents that their son did not have any profound learning difficulty or mental instability.

‘Your son has a schizotypal personality,’ the doctor had said, fiddling with his black framed glasses and not engaging in eye contact. ‘But he … it’s not that … he doesn’t suffer from schizotypal personality disorder, or schizophrenia … no … we have also ruled out Asperger’s. But … he does … he’s got … he displays blunted affect and excessive introspection.’

‘What does that
mean
?’ Roman’s father had asked.

‘Roman … well, he lacks a developed ability to function … to, erm … he will struggle to get on well socially. He doesn’t really understand others. But all this is typical of a schizotypal personality and it does
not
mean that he cannot enjoy a full and successful life. There
are
compensations: he is clearly highly intelligent and a schizotypal personality can manifest itself in an extremely imaginative and creative mind. A great many composers, artists, writers, mathematicians, physicists … in many walks of life it is an advantage.’

Roman had sat there and wondered why the incoherent physician, hiding behind the heavy glasses, had not added
psychiatrist
to the list.

His parents had never fully understood the implications of what the psychiatrist had said. After a period of reassurance, the old doubts had begun to creep back into their heads: the psychiatrist had said
schizotypal
, hadn’t he? And that sounded a lot like
schizophrenic
. In the meantime, Roman had blossomed from a strange child with no friends into an even stranger adolescent with no friends. It was not so much that others avoided him – although that certainly was the case – it was more that he avoided others. At school, there had been only one person with whom he had anything approaching a friendship: Niels Freese. But Niels had been even stranger than Roman and had been taken out of the school for long periods of therapy. Still, when they had spent time together, they had recognised that each, in his own way, saw the world completely differently from their peers.

After Niels had been permanently transferred to a special school, Roman had shunned any kind of intimacy or contact. Not that he had to do a lot of shunning: his classmates either ignored or avoided him. Those who did not tormented him.