A Fear of Dark Water (6 page)

Fabel did not answer at once. All his attention was focused on an effort not to vomit. The source of the odour lay on the wet asphalt: a torso, the skin puckered and greenish-black in patches, violet and greenish-white in others. It had no head, no legs, no arms. The flesh where the amputations had taken place was puckered and fluffed; nauseatingly pink and raw-looking. The torso looked as if it belonged to someone morbidly obese, the belly stretched taut and the breasts pushed out sideways, but Fabel knew that it was the pressure of the gases within that had distended and bloated the body.

‘I’m doing better than she is. How can you stand the stink?’ asked Fabel between controlled breaths.

Brauner mimicked taking a deep appreciative sniff. ‘I love the smell of putrescine and cadaverine in the morning. Did you know that cadaverine is also what gives semen its smell? It’s there at the beginning and end of life.’

‘You need to get some hobbies, Holger.’ Fabel nodded towards the torso. ‘Washed up by the flood?’

‘Well, I don’t think she swam here …’ Somewhere behind his mask Brauner gave a small laugh.

‘The loss of the head and limbs … no chance that’s accidental? A boat or something?’

‘No. Clearly done deliberately. And reasonably expertly. Disarticulative amputation of the arms, transfemoral amputation of the legs. Neat job, actually.’

‘When we catch her killer I’ll pass on your appreciative critique of his work.’ Fabel’s voice was tight as he unconsciously tried to keep his breaths short and shallow. ‘Whoever it was, he clearly doesn’t want us to identify her. Or at least wants to slow us down.’

‘Yeah …’ said Brauner absently, tilting his head as he examined the severed neck. ‘
Soooo
last century. Who needs fingerprints these days? We can match her to a missing person through familial DNA.’

‘
If
she’s reported missing and we can trace a relative.’ Fabel noticed what looked like a network of tattoos and then saw where some of the skin had burst, exposing slimy fat and flesh that looked like overcooked chicken. He felt a sudden strengthened surge of nausea and looked away.

‘We have
anserita cutis
. Goose skin,’ said Brauner. ‘And there is some evidence of skin maceration. But no significant adipocere in the subcutaneous layer. So I can tell you that this body has been in the water for more than one or two weeks but less than six.’

‘Are those tattoos on the skin?’

‘No, those lines are the work of our old friends
bacillus prodigiosus
and
bacillus violaceum
. Nature’s tattooists … chromogenic bacteria that pigment the skin red and purple respectively. It’s a sign of lengthy immersion in water.’

‘Any idea of the cause of death?’ asked Fabel.

‘Having her head cut off would have done it,’ said Brauner. ‘Didn’t they teach you anything at murder-detective school?’

‘Very funny. I’m guessing that the removal of the limbs and head were post-mortem. Any signs of violence on the body?’

‘Sorry, Jan, you’ll have to wait for the autopsy. With a ripe floater like this, it takes close examination to sort out what’s been done pre- or post-mortem. There could be bullet holes in there, but closed up and hidden by the swelling. And water corpses like these get buffeted about, hit by boats and nibbled at by all sorts in the water. The autopsy will also establish if decomposition is exclusively due to aquatic bacteria, so we’ll know if she spent any length of time on land after she died.’

‘Thanks, Holger. Give Anna Wolff your report when it’s ready.’ Fabel turned to leave the tent.

‘How is Anna, by the way?’ asked Brauner. ‘I mean, how is she coping?’

‘Fine. She’s fit and she’s been back on duty for six months. You know Anna.’

‘What d’you reckon?’ asked Anna when Fabel emerged from the forensics tent. ‘Dismemberment like that suggests an organised killer.’

‘Could be anything,’ said Fabel. ‘It
could
be our guy, but it could also be an organised-crime killing, a sex murder … or just a disgruntled husband with a meat saw and a rowing boat.’ He paused and they both turned to look back at the tent: there was the sound of whistling from inside.

‘He was at
The Lion King
last night, apparently,’ explained Anna. ‘A sucker for a catchy tune, he tells me. Brauner’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’

‘Yep,’ said Fabel. ‘Holger’s a good guy.’

‘Yeah … but you have to admit he’s a bit weird. You know that if he wasn’t a forensic specialist I’d probably have him on a list of potential serial-killer suspects.’

Fabel gave a small half-hearted laugh. Then, looking up at the sky, took a long breath. The air felt cool and clean and fresh, but the sickly-sweet smell of death lingered in his nostrils.

‘Awful in there, wasn’t it?’

Fabel nodded. ‘I hate floaters. You smell them for a week. You and Henk take this one. Let me see the forensics and autopsy when they come in. Like you say, it’s not the Network Killer’s MO. That’s all we need – someone else dumping bodies in Hamburg’s waterways. It’ll do the tourist industry no end of good. Talking about the Network Killer, how are you getting on with possible contacts?’

Anna shrugged. ‘We’ve nailed down another thirty identities on social-network sites that the victims visited. We’ve got a court order to get the IP addresses from the site administrators. We should have them by lunchtime.’

‘Okay, good – we’ll talk about it in the office. Where’s Lars Kreysig?’

Anna pointed to a group of men at the far side of Elbestrasse, leaning against a fire appliance. Even at this distance, Fabel could see the weariness in their posture. As Anna and Fabel approached, one of the firemen straightened up and smiled weakly.

‘Principal Chief Commissar Fabel?’ The man who spoke was taller than Fabel. Lean, with lines engraved deep in a long face topped with unruly prematurely grey hair.

‘Yes. Herr Kreysig?’

‘Call me Lars. I expect you want to talk to me about the floater?’

‘You’ve given Commissar Wolff all the details of when you found the body; I wanted to ask you if you could hazard a guess as to where it came from. The direction in the river, I mean.’

‘I’m not the one to ask.’ Kreysig called over his shoulder to the group of men leaning against the fire appliance. ‘Sepp … could you come here a minute?’ Kreysig turned back to Fabel. ‘My deputy, Sepp Tramberger, is one of your colleagues. Or, at least, he’s from the Harbour Police. He’s on attachment to this special flood-response unit. I tell you,
no one
knows the way the Elbe works better than Sepp. When he’s not
on
the river in real life he’s on it virtually.’

‘I don’t get you …’ said Fabel.

‘He’s created a “Virtual Elbe”. In his free time. A computer model of the river and its currents. He’s put it together with some boffin from the university. You can see it on the internet. Or a version of it, anyway. It’s really very impressive.’

Tramberger joined them and, after introducing him to Fabel and Anna, Kreysig repeated Fabel’s question. Tramberger was a shortish, stocky, scoured-looking man with blond hair buzz-cut to a stubble and a face that looked like it had been beaten by more than weather. Fabel knew that most Harbour Police officers had their master’s tickets, meaning that the Harbour Police was largely made up of ex-sailors who had seen a fair bit of the world before patrolling the wharves and quays of Hamburg. Tramberger looked off somewhere in the indeterminate distance and screwed up his leathery face in the contemplative expression that Fabel associated with plumbers about to deliver an open-ended estimate.

‘Hard to say …’ Tramberger rubbed his chin. ‘It depends on how long the pathologist says she was in the water.’

‘More than two weeks, less than six, according to our crime-scene specialist,’ said Fabel.

More chin rubbing, more frowning into empty space.

‘The thing about floaters is that they don’t start out as floaters. They sink. Sometimes to the bottom, or they hover a metre or so above it. If the water temperature is low then they stay there. Sometimes for good. But if the water temperature is warmer, and if they’re unruptured, then they come back up to the surface and bob along. If your girl was in the water for more than a week, then my guess is she was dumped somewhere upstream. But not far. The body wasn’t too churned or chopped-up. And it didn’t look as if it had been scavenged much by fish and eels. Maybe just the other side of the river and a little upstream.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fabel.

‘When you get more info from the pathologist,’ said Tramberger, ‘why don’t you let me know? I could run the data through the computer and see if we can back-trace it. I’d be able to give you a more accurate location for her being dumped in the river.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’

‘Is this another victim of that internet killer you’re looking for?’ asked Kreysig with dull curiosity. He looked exhausted to Fabel.

‘Maybe,’ said Fabel. ‘But I doubt it. Our guy doesn’t dismember his victims – but who knows?’

‘It’s quite apt, isn’t it?’ said Kreysig.

‘What?’

‘The name they’ve given this storm.’ Kreysig’s weary expression suggested that his comment should have been obvious. ‘The storm … the federal weather bureau has given it the name Störtebeker.’

Fabel made a puzzled face.

‘It’s apt that a storm named
Störtebeker
,’ said Kreysig, ‘has given up a headless body.’

‘Oh … I get you. Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘What was all that about?’ asked Anna as they left the firemen and headed back to the scene of crime. ‘All that gobbledegook about Störtebeker.’

Fabel stopped and turned with an expression of mock shock. ‘First you call my music crap and now you tell me you don’t know who Störtebeker was?’

‘Of course I know. Klaus Störtebeker, Hamburg’s Robin Hood of the sea and all that crap. What’s that got to do with the floater?’

‘You obviously don’t know the legend of Störtebeker’s execution …’

Anna made a couldn’t-care-less face. ‘So demote me.’

‘Klaus Störtebeker was the greatest-ever thorn in the flesh for Hanseatic Hamburg. He and his fellow
Victual Brother
pirates robbed only Hanseatic ships and shared their booty equally. Simon of Utrecht was made Bürgemeister of Hamburg, built a fleet of new warships and hunted Störtebeker down.’ Fabel waved his hand vaguely towards the east. ‘You know where the new Elbphilharmonie is being built? Well, it was down there that they executed them. Back then, long before the Speicherstadt was built, that was all just one long stretch of sandbank. That was where they executed all Hamburg’s captured pirates.’

‘Anyway …’ said Anna impatiently.

‘
Anyway
, when Störtebeker was due to be executed, by beheading, along with seventy-odd of his men, he asked for a last favour: that the Hamburg Senate would release as many of his men as he could walk past
after
his head was cut off. The legend is that after he was beheaded, his headless body stood up and walked past eleven of his men before the executioner tripped it up.’

‘And did the Senate release the eleven men?’

‘No. The Senate were all politicians, of course, and businessmen first and foremost … so naturally they didn’t keep their promise. Everyone got the chop. Mind you, after all seventy-plus were dead, the Mayor asked the headsman if he wasn’t exhausted after so much axe swinging. He made a joke to the effect that he still had enough strength to behead the Mayor and the entire Senate if necessary. Not famed for a sense of humour, either, are politicians or business types, so they had the executioner beheaded on the spot as well.’ Fabel smiled. ‘So, all in all, it’s appropriate that the German Weather Bureau has called this storm Störtebeker. And, like Kreysig said, it’s ironic that
Störtebeker
has delivered up a headless corpse.’

‘What can I say,
Chef
?’ said Anna dully. ‘It’s always an education …’

Chapter Eight

It was shortly after lunchtime when Fabel sat down with his team.

Just before he went into the briefing, he got a message on the Presidium’s internal email system that Criminal Director van Heiden, chief of the investigative branch and Fabel’s boss, wanted to see him at around three-thirty. After several years working with van Heiden, Fabel knew that
around
three-thirty meant three-thirty on the dot. As he was only too willing to admit, Fabel himself had a tendency to be punctilious about punctuality, but his boss’s timekeeping made the average atomic clock look sloppy. Fabel could guess what van Heiden wanted to see him about. The Criminal Director was as scrupulous about being kept informed of every development in every case that was remotely in the public eye as he was about timekeeping; he would no doubt have already been briefed about the body down by the Fischmarkt.