A Fear of Dark Water (5 page)

‘Maybe I should think of trading up, after all,’ he said dully, watching the slow procession of luxury marques.

‘I hope we’re still talking about cars …’ Susanne grinned at him. ‘I’ll phone you tonight from my hotel, after the seminar.’

‘I’ll probably still be in the Commission.’

‘This Network Killer case?’ asked Susanne.

‘Yep. I’ll be chasing electronic ghosts until midnight,’ he said gloomily. He was about to say something else when the buzzing of his car phone interrupted him.

‘Hi,
Chef
, it’s Anna …’

‘Hi, Anna. What’s up?’

‘You on your way into the Presidium?’

‘No … or, at least, not yet. I’m dropping Susanne off at the airport, then heading in. What’s up?’

‘You maybe want to make a diversion down to the Fischmarkt. We’ve got a wash-up.’

‘Shit …’ Fabel paused for a moment and sighed. Not another one. ‘Does this look like the Network Killer?’

‘Actually, no. Not this one. Not unless he has completely changed his modus. This is a partial body. Dismembered.’

‘But female?’

‘Yes. She doesn’t fit with the other Network Killer victims, but it still looks like it’s one for us.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘I’ll come straight there from the airport.’

Chapter Six

The man behind the desk sat with his back to the view. The wall behind him was completely made of toughened glass strengthened with pale steel: an edgeless window looking out across an edgeless expanse of sodium-grey water beneath a sodium-grey sky. It created the impression that the office was unconnected to anything; just suspended, untouched by gravity and removed from the environment around it.

In his late forties, with a stocky build and powerful shoulders, the man behind the desk was shaven-headed but his jaw was framed by a dark, trimmed-close goatee beard. He wore rimless glasses and a black suit with a dark grey, Nehru-collared shirt beneath. There was an unnatural neatness to him, to the order of his desk, to the layout of his office. Even his movements seemed unnaturally methodical, as he inserted the memory stick into the laptop computer and clicked his way through the images stored on it.

‘There is no doubt about this, then?’ He spoke to the tall, thin, grey-suited man, pale-faced under short but starkly black hair, who stood in front of the desk.

‘I’m afraid not, Herr Director.’

‘How the hell could we have missed this? How could an outsider uncover all this … this
chaos
, and our own Consolidation and Compliance Office be totally unaware of what was going on?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. Obviously, this is beyond anything we could have imagined. I mean, this behaviour is so extreme, particularly from one of our own members. I know it’s no excuse, Herr Director, but we weren’t looking for something like this, whereas the woman infiltrated the Project specifically to find something she could use against us. I’m guessing that even she didn’t expect to uncover something of this magnitude. But I can assure you that the instant this came to light … when I realised who it was in the file, and knowing his position in the organisation, I put my best security and surveillance officers onto tracking his every move, twenty-four hours a day. Ever since then we have been monitoring all his internet, email and cellphone activity, as well as tracking his movements and contacts. Our surveillance confirms what is in the USB stick we found on the woman.’

‘And there is no way she could have communicated any of this to someone on the outside?’

‘I cannot say with certainty, Herr Director, but I believe not. It’s my opinion that she intended to sell this information to the press, or to expose it on a website. She would not have told anyone who might have compromised her scoop. And she would be aware of our reach, so she would not risk exposing herself until publication.’

‘She was a journalist, you think?’

‘I can’t say. And she wouldn’t say. She was
unresponsive
to questioning. However, there is, we believe, a cellphone unaccounted for.’

‘What do you mean, “unaccounted for”?’

‘Simply that we can’t find her cellphone. A Nokia 5800. But we’ve got a tracker on it. It’ll be found, Herr Director.’

‘I sincerely hope so. I don’t need to tell you how much data can be stored on a hand-held.’ The man behind the desk paused meditatively, then nodded towards the image on his laptop screen. ‘What about him?’ Does he know he’s been found out?’

‘Absolutely not, Herr Director. I get the feeling that he believes he is immune from detection. His actions suggest a certain arrogance. And my Consolidators are expert at covert surveillance. He doesn’t know he’s being watched, that I’m sure of.’

‘Have you heard of the Observer Effect, Bädorf?’

‘I can’t say I have, Herr Director.’

‘It comes from quantum mechanics, from the observation of subatomic particles. The act of observation itself changes the behaviour of the observed particle.’ The Director examined the image on the screen for a long time. ‘It is imperative that he does not know we are onto him. And no one outside your immediate team must know about this. You realise the danger his actions have placed us in, don’t you, Bädorf? The danger they have placed the entire Project in?’

‘Of course. I have told the Consolidators involved to destroy all records of the surveillance, other than those you now have. But I do believe we got to the woman before she could pass on any of this information. And we could deal with … with our
problem
… before he does anything else to compromise the Project. What are your instructions?’

Wiegand stared at the images again, clicking through them. ‘Nothing rash. This takes planning. He has to be stopped, all right, but not in a way that links with us.’

‘If I may suggest, Herr Director: perhaps
Mister
Korn should be advised.’

‘You are talking to me, Bädorf. It’s the same thing. What I want you to do is to come up with something discreet and effective. Something
innovative
. Can you manage that?’

‘Of course, Herr Director. We have various resources at our disposal that cannot be linked directly to us. I will examine our options and report back to you.’

After Bädorf left the office, the Director swung his chair around to face the glass wall. The sky’s colour had shifted subtly to a more glaucous grey and now hinted at turbulence. Perhaps there was another storm coming.

Chapter Seven

A moment’s calm before the storm.

Sitting quietly in his car, Fabel listened to his music and watched the rain through the windshield as it eased to a drizzle. He knew what was coming.

This was his business. His job. Looking at death. Trying to understand it. But it didn’t matter how often you saw death – violent death – it still stirred a turmoil in you. Maybe not as big a turmoil as it had ten, fifteen years and countless cases ago, but it was still there: the vague churning in your gut triggered by an irrepressible human instinct. A natural fight-or-flight reaction firing somewhere in the oldest evolved part of your brain. Especially if there was a lot of blood. When there was a lot of blood something instinctive kicked in and overrode your reason. And, later on, long after you had left the scene of crime, the images of the dead would come back to you. Unbidden and at the most inappropriate moments: eating a meal, during sex, relaxing with friends.

So Jan Fabel took a moment and sat in the car with the wipers switched off, watching the viscous rain burst maliciously against the windshield. The day outside was grey: the sky, the water, the buildings – all tonal shifts of graphite. It was a grey peace, this moment.

The music seemed to fit his mood – and the weather – perfectly: the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, played through the mp3 player he had plugged into the BMW’s sound system.
From Gagarin’s Point of View
. A great title. A great piece for a Hamburg morning in graphite tones. Pleasantly melancholic in the way only the Scandinavians seemed able to master.

Cold, wet knuckles rapped on the passenger window and snapped him out of his grey peace. He opened the window and chilled pinpoints of rain prickled against his cheek.

‘Are you going to join us,
Chef
?’ Anna Wolff leaned over into the window, frowning against the cold and wet. Impatient. Anna had always been youthful-looking and pretty: dark eyes and dark hair cut short. Girlish. But standing there in the rain there was a hint of a future, older Anna: an Anna with the edge of her typical energy blunted. Fabel noticed the subtle change and felt bad. He also noticed her slight limp as she stepped back from the car and felt worse. His team had taken more than its fair share of casualties over the years.

‘You look full of the joys,’ she said as Fabel stepped out of the car.

‘So what have we got, Anna?’

‘Like I said, a wash-up. And be warned: it’s a stinker. It was found by the flood-defence team working here. The boss is a guy called Kreysig.’

‘Lars Kreysig?’

‘You know him?’ asked Anna.

‘More know
of
him, but I have met him. He’s a bit of a legend in the Hamburg Fire Service. A lot of people are breathing today who wouldn’t be if Kreysig hadn’t been there to pull their fat out of the fire. Literally. He still here?’

‘We asked him to hang about until you arrived. What was that crap you were listening to in the car?’

Fabel stopped and turned to face Anna. ‘You have no soul, Commissar Wolff, do you know that? No appreciation of the finer things in life. Leave me alone, Anna … Susanne’s been having a go at me all the way to the airport about my car.’

‘Really? Personally, I like antiques. Anyway, Susanne’s good for you. You’re less grumpy these days. You ready for this?’

They made their way across to where a white forensic tent had been set up, stepping over pipes and hoses and avoiding the dark rainbow puddles of oil and water and the black tangles of flotsam washed up from the flood.

‘I’ve already had the pleasure,’ said Anna when they reached the tent. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll wait for you here.’

Fabel nodded: Anna was tough, and she had seen more than her fair share of violent deaths, but her Achilles heel was dealing with a messy corpse. And Fabel knew that there was nothing messier than a body that had been in the water for anything more than a few days. In water, the processes of decomposition are greatly accelerated: the flesh softens and the body swells with trapped gases, rising and bobbing on the surface like some putrid buoy.

There was a table with forensic kits set up outside the tent. Anna handed Fabel a white paper oversuit, latex gloves, blue stretch overshoes and a cup-filter face mask. She took a perfume atomiser from her jacket pocket and sprayed a puff into the inverted cup of the mask.

‘You’ll need it,’ she said. ‘This one’s ripe. And keep your forensic suit zipped up. If that stink gets on your clothes, you’ll never get it off.’

‘I’ve dealt with floaters before, Anna. I know the drill.’ Fabel smiled as he said it: he had noticed Anna’s pale face grow paler, obviously as she recalled her time in the tent.

Fabel looked up at the sky, still steel-grey after the storm, then around the clean-up site with its temporary village of generators, cranes, trucks and fire engines. He took a long deep breath, tried to play in his head a few bars of
From Gagarin’s Point of View
to ease the flutter in his chest. Then, putting the strongly perfumed face mask over his nose and mouth, he stepped into the white forensic tent.

Even with the mask and the strong scent of the perfume, the stench hit him as soon as he entered the tent. He recognised the smell immediately; there was no other odour in the world like it: at once rancid and sour and sickly sweet. Fabel had come across it with a couple of other water-recovered bodies and a black-stage corpse found in the woods. Black was the fourth stage of putrefaction, between ten and twenty days after death. And the smelliest. Despite an extractor fan working full tilt, the air in the forensic tent fumed with the stench of putrid flesh.

Fabel often wondered how the Hamburg Harbour Police could put up with dealing with so many floaters. There was a demarcation of responsibility for discovered corpses between the Harbour Police and the ordinary Polizei Hamburg: the high-water mark. Any body found above the water mark was the responsibility of the City Police; below, it belonged to the Harbour Police. Rumour had it that more than a few bodies washed up along the shore had been given a nudge by the boot of a squeamish City Police officer and rolled back below the high-tide mark and into the Harbour Police’s jurisdiction.

‘Hi, Jan, how are you?’ Holger Brauner was a shortish, powerfully built man in his forties. From behind his mask, the head of the Polizei Hamburg’s forensic squad greeted Fabel gleefully as he entered the tent. Brauner, it seemed to Fabel, was irrepressibly cheerful. They had been friends for years and Fabel had never been able to square the
joie de vivre
of the friend with the grim task of the colleague.