A Fear of Dark Water (33 page)

Fabel frowned, then, after a moment said: ‘Yes. I understand.’

The phone went dead.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Fabel knew he was not going to get a warm welcome. He had phoned to arrange a meeting with Tanja Ulmen, the first of Föttinger’s alleged victims, and she had asked if they could do it on the telephone. She was happily married with children and living in Bad Bramstedt, a small town between Hamburg and Kiel. Her family knew nothing of the incident when she had been a student with Daniel Föttinger. This was part of a murder enquiry, Fabel had explained, so a telephone interview was not an option. The truth was that Fabel disliked anything getting between him and the reactions of the people he questioned. Tanja Ulmen reluctantly agreed to meet with him after she finished work. She was a teacher at the local high school, she explained. He had been slightly taken aback when Ulmen had insisted that he bring a female colleague.

It took forty minutes for Fabel and Anna to get to Bad Bramstedt and another ten to find the rest area off the 207 route to the west of the town. During the journey Anna had noticed Fabel checking his rear-view mirror more than usual.

‘Is it there again?’ she asked. ‘The four-by-four?’

‘No. I thought maybe it was … but no. Maybe I’m becoming paranoid in my old age.’

‘If you really think you are being tailed, especially with all of the crap that’s been going on with emails and texts going missing, then I think we should visit this Seamark International and get a few answers.’

‘It’s maybe nothing,’ said Fabel. ‘It could be coincidence or maybe I’ve mistaken two or three different cars as the same one. I want to be sure before we show our hand. Anyway, it’s not there now.’ He paused for a moment, then said uncertainly: ‘There’s something else, Anna. I mean, as well as the texts and stuff. I got a call last night. An anonymous call from someone who claims to know all about what happened to Meliha Yazar and Müller-Voigt.’

‘And you believe them?’ Anna sounded incredulous. ‘I mean, after everything else that’s been going on, don’t you think it’s likely to be the same lot playing games?’

‘I thought that, too. But, I don’t know, there was something about this call. He said they would find him and kill him and I believe he meant it. Maybe he is an ex-member or has some other kind of connection to them.’

‘So you
are
convinced it’s the Pharos Project behind this?’

‘More than that, Anna, I’m beginning to get an idea about what’s really happened. Look, there she is …’

It was the only car in the rest area: an elderly Citroen. The rest area was screened from the road by a thick curtain of trees and there was an even deeper wedge of forest to the other side. Frau Ulmen had insisted that they meet there: it was far enough out of town but close enough for her to get back home without causing too much suspicion.

‘I’ve told my children I’ve got shopping to do but I’ll be back in an hour,’ she said bluntly in greeting as she got into the back of Fabel’s car. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me about Daniel Föttinger?’ Fabel knew from the report that Tanja Ulmen was in her mid-thirties, but she had a weary look that would otherwise have made it difficult to guess her age on first sight. She had untidy blonde hair heaped on her head and held in place by a large wooden hair clasp patterned with a Celtic bow. Her clothes were baggy and vaguely bohemian. She looked every bit the eccentric art teacher, but Fabel knew that the subject she actually taught was information technology.

‘Yes, Frau Ulmen,’ said Fabel. ‘We’d like to talk to you about Daniel Föttinger. You know that he’s dead?’

‘Yes. I read about it in the papers.’

‘So you know how he died?’

‘Yes. Painfully. And I was glad. I hope it took him a long, long time to die.’

‘It did, I’m afraid to say,’ said Fabel. ‘I can’t imagine a worse way to go.’

‘So you’re here to accuse me of having something to do with it?’ Ulmen’s face was set hard. Defiant. Fabel guessed that she wished she really could feel good about Föttinger’s death, but could not.

‘No, Frau Ulmen. Why I asked to talk to you was because I’m trying to build up a picture of Föttinger. I wanted to ask you about what happened between you and him.’

‘Nothing happened
between
us. The bastard raped me.’

‘So why didn’t you pursue the case?’ asked Anna. ‘You do know that he went on to commit at least one more alleged rape?’

‘His father paid me “compensation”, as he put it. But before you think I was simply bought off, Old Man Föttinger made sure he employed a stick as well as a carrot. The Föttingers were filthy rich and very well connected. He made it very clear to me that things would go badly for me,
very
badly. They were peas in a pod, father and son.’

‘What do you mean, exactly?’ asked Anna.

‘They both thought that they could get anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. People didn’t matter to either of them.’

‘Please, Frau Ulmen,’ said Fabel. ‘It would be very helpful to me if you could tell me what happened with Föttinger.’

‘Daniel asked me out when we were both students in Hamburg. He was studying philosophy …’

‘Philosophy?’ Fabel was genuinely surprised. ‘I would have thought he would have studied some science or technological subject.’

‘Maybe he did later, but back then he was doing philosophy. And he was really into it. Anyway, Daniel asked me out. He was very charming and handsome, but there was something about him really gave me the creeps. So I said no. He couldn’t understand it. He simply could not wrap his mind around the fact that someone was denying him something he wanted. It was like it didn’t compute. That’s what I mean about him and his father being the same: neither of them could understand that the entire universe didn’t revolve around them.’

‘So he didn’t take no for an answer?’ asked Anna as gently as she could.

‘I was sharing a flat with some friends and he called around when they were out. He tried his lethal charm again, still not able to believe that someone could resist it. When that didn’t work he tried a more direct approach. A knife held to my throat.’

‘I know this is very difficult for you …’ began Anna.

‘No, it’s not. It was a long time ago and somehow I’ve managed to make it seem that it happened to someone else … make it a story, not part of reality. It was my way of coping and it worked. They say that every cell in your body is replaced every seven years or something like that. So I tell myself that what happened did not happen to this body, to the person I am now. But I never stopped hating him. Despising him for his arrogance.’

‘What I wanted to ask was how he behaved.’ Anna frowned at her own clumsiness. ‘I mean, the things an attacker says or does, the
extra
things, they can tell us a great deal about their state of mind.’

‘He just kept the knife at my throat. Otherwise he wasn’t violent. As his father made sure to point out, I didn’t have any bruises to show the police. No signs that I struggled for my virtue, as he put it, the old bastard.’ Ulmen looked through the passenger window for a moment, out to the dark green of the forest. ‘In a weird way, and I know this does sound
really
weird, but I don’t think Daniel thought for a second that he was doing anything wrong. I’ve thought about it a lot, over the years – doing what I said and imagining it was something you just read about happening to someone else … that makes it easier to be objective about it. Anyway, when I think back to the way he was, it was as if he didn’t really understand that I was there. You know, theory of mind or simulation or whatever psychologists call it. I think both father and son were sociopaths of some kind – I’m not being bitter, I really do believe that. I honestly think Daniel Föttinger didn’t understand that I had the independent consciousness to truly give or withhold consent.’

‘As if you weren’t really there?’ asked Fabel.

Tanja Ulmen stared at Fabel. ‘Yes. Yes, that’s exactly it,’ she said, animated for the first time during the conversation. ‘Like I wasn’t really there.’

On the way back to Hamburg, Fabel asked Anna for the address of the Turkish restaurant that Müller-Voigt and Meliha Yazar had dined in regularly.

‘Could you give them a ring and see if that waiter’s back from holiday?’ he asked her. ‘And if he is, could we talk to him when we get there?’

Anna phoned and confirmed to Fabel that the waiter would be waiting for them when they arrived.

‘Did you see the report that Tramberger, the Disaster Team guy, sent in?’ asked Anna. ‘It arrived this morning.’

‘What, from his
Virtual Elbe
thing? No, I haven’t had a chance yet.’

‘You should. According to his model, and he says he ran it several times, that torso was dumped three kilometres upstream, but right in the middle of the river, in the deep channel.’

‘From a boat?’

‘Looks like. He says we should get the pathologist to check for signs that it had been weighted. He thinks that whoever dumped it there did so because it’s the deepest part of the Elbe that far upstream. Fewer big vessels, more barges and less likelihood of it being churned up. His opinion is that the torso was meant to stay at the bottom and never be found. Makes sense, Jan. My guess is that the head and limbs are scattered along the bottom as well. Whoever did this really didn’t want her identified.’

The Ottoman Palace was a lot less grand than the name suggested, but it did have a certain style to it. No clichés or walls bedecked with tourist posters of Turkey. It was a simple eatery with subtle reminders, such as the colourful kilim tapestry on the wall, of the culture behind the cuisine. While they waited for Osman, the waiter who had regularly served Müller-Voigt and his date, Fabel had a good look around the restaurant. It would not have been Müller-Voigt’s normal type of place; it was a choice, whether Meliha’s or Müller-Voigt’s, that owed a lot to discretion.

A smallish man of about twenty-five or so, with russet-blond hair, brought his eager smile out of the kitchen. He introduced himself as Osman, and told Fabel he would happily do anything he could to help. Osman was one of those people whose exuberant good nature, no matter how hard you tried to ignore it, was infectious.

‘She had an Istanbul accent,’ Osman explained after Fabel had asked him what he could remember about Meliha. ‘She sounded well educated and I got the idea she was quite rich. Her clothes were expensive. She was a beautiful woman.’

‘But the owner here said he got the feeling that she didn’t like talking about herself.’

‘That’s for sure. Naturally, when a customer speaks to me in such perfect, beautiful Turkish, I ask where they are from. As soon as I asked her I really got the feeling that I’d done the wrong thing. It’s funny with customers. You learn to drop a topic quick sometimes. The last thing you want is a patron to feel uncomfortable,’ he said very earnestly.

‘And she was particularly sensitive about where she was from?’

‘I got that idea. When I asked, she said she was from Silviri, on the coast near Istanbul, but the shutters came down, if you know what I mean. So, like I said, I dropped it quick.’

‘Did they seem happy?’

‘Very. Especially him. They were a nice couple. Good together, if you know what I mean. There was a big age difference, of course, but they seemed to be totally into each other.’

‘Was there ever any interaction between them and anyone else? Did they ever bring any friends or guests to the restaurant?’

‘No. It was always just the two of them. I don’t even remember any other diners coming up to them and saying hello in passing. That was their usual table …’ Osman pointed to the furthest-away table at the back of the restaurant, at the end of the seating arc. It confirmed Fabel’s theory about the restaurant being chosen because it offered an element of anonymity: no one would pass that table to leave or go to the washrooms. Meliha and Müller-Voigt would have had to endure only Osman’s good-natured interruptions.

‘I want you to think very hard, Osman,’ said Fabel. ‘Was there anything, anything at all, out of the ordinary that you can recall about them?’

Osman frowned as he did exactly as Fabel had asked. After a moment he said: ‘No, I’m really sorry, but there was nothing. They were just a happy couple who seemed very involved in each other. I was so upset when I heard about Herr Müller-Voigt. I really wish I could do more to help …’

‘Thank you, Osman. You have been very helpful.’ Fabel smiled; he knew the young waiter really had done his best to remember any useful detail. Fabel thanked the owner of the restaurant and he and Anna headed for the door.

‘I was surprised she didn’t come in here more often,’ Osman said as they were leaving. ‘With her living so near.’

Both Anna and Fabel froze in the doorway. They stepped back in, letting the door close behind them.

‘You know where she lives?’ asked Fabel. Something like a small electrical current tingled in the back of his neck.

‘Well … yes. I guess. Unless she was just visiting, but it looked to me like she lived there.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Anna.

‘There’s an apartment building about three blocks away. I was passing it one day – my cousin lives in the next building – and I saw Frau Yazar go in through the main door, carrying groceries.’