A Fear of Dark Water (8 page)

‘Thanks,’ said Fabel. ‘Chief Commissar Kroeger will be working alongside us on this and provide the liaison with the other specialists in his unit. Anna has provided him with the full list of possible convergent identities from the social-network sites. What’s narrowed it down is that each of the victims seemed to favour a different site. We’ve found it difficult to find any points of convergence in their day-to-day real lives, and it’s proving tricky in their online activities, but we do know that all four women made regular use of social networking sites to meet men.’

‘One thing I didn’t mention,’ said Kroeger, ‘is that we have a distinct advantage in being in possession of the computers used by each of the women. We have technology that enables us to retrace their steps. We may even be able to recover a good part of their chatroom messages. And that could point us in very specific directions.’

‘Where are we with that?’ asked Fabel.

‘Not that far away. I reckon another day or two and we’ll potentially have a lot of leads from what was keyed into the computers. It’s painstaking work, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Fabel and smiled. Kroeger was all numbers and no personality. This was no game nor some kind of professional challenge. In two days another woman could be dead. She could be planning to meet her killer right now: chatting, flirting, making arrangements with an electronic fiction of a human being. ‘But, as I’m sure you appreciate, time is of the essence here.’

‘Naturally we will treat this case as an absolute priority.’ When Kroeger spoke he always said the right things. But whatever sentiment was in it never made it into his expression or his grey eyes. He was himself almost a machine, thought Fabel.

Fabel had worked with Kroeger once before, on a child-murder case involving an internet-based paedophile ring; Kroeger had all but come right out and said that he thought Fabel’s technological illiteracy compromised his efficiency as an investigator. But what had riled Fabel most of all was the way Kroeger had remained so detached from the human suffering involved in the case. Kroeger seemed as uninterested in and as uncomprehending of the fact that a child had been murdered and a family ripped apart by horror and grief as Fabel was about the difference between a kilobyte and a gigabyte. The result was a lingering mutual distaste.

But Fabel needed Kroeger on this case. There was no denying that if they stood a chance of catching the Network Killer, then Kroeger’s expertise was the most important tool they had. It was, as Kroeger had said himself, his beat.

‘Unfortunately my team is unusually stretched at the moment,’ continued Kroeger. ‘We’ve been given the responsibility of tracking down the source of this Klabautermann Virus that’s been wrecking e-comms within the state government. But, like I said, this case will naturally take priority.’

‘I appreciate that.’

Fabel spent the rest of the briefing with the usual mechanics of a major investigation. Each team of two detectives gave a report on their corner of the investigation, followed by a group discussion and the allocation by Fabel of further investigative tasks.

‘That guy Kroeger gives me the creeps …’ Werner came up to Fabel after the others had gone. ‘I’m sure I saw him in that science fiction film – you know,
The Matrix
.’

‘He’s good at his job,’ said Fabel. ‘One of the best in Europe, I’ve been told. That’s all that counts. And god knows we need him on this one.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t
The Matrix
I saw him in. I used to watch a lot of Westerns when I was a kid,’ said Werner. ‘You know … when the cavalry are in hostile Red Indian territory but they have to rely on a native tracker from the same tribe to get them through. Why do I get the feeling Kroeger is as likely to take scalps as the bad guys?’

‘He’s an odd one, that’s all, Werner. As far as I can remember I’ve never seen Kroeger wear feathers in his hair.’

‘Suppose not.’ Werner rasped a shovel of hand across his stubble-cut scalp. ‘But I have to admit to being out of my depth with all of this electronic stuff, Jan. I have never been able to understand these social networking sites. Why do people need to use computers to connect with each other, piling all of their personal stuff out there on the internet? Yet if you sit next to one of them on the S-Bahn, you can’t have a conversation with them because they’re plugged into their mp3 players.’

‘That’s the technological society for you,’ said Fabel. ‘All technology and no society.’

Most of the officers working in the Presidium took lunch in its huge canteen. Fabel frequently used it himself but often preferred to take three-quarters of an hour in the middle of the day to get out of the Commission. Thinking time, he liked to call it. He was just about to leave the building when a bleep from his cellphone alerted him that he had received a text message.

Arrived safely Wiesbaden. Weather crap. Hotel soulless. Phone tonight. Sx

He sighed. Fabel could never understand why Susanne sent him texts: she knew he wouldn’t reply to them. It took him too long to fiddle around with the phone keys and even then it was all wrong or he would accidentally delete the two-sentence reply it had taken him fifteen minutes to compose. Why didn’t people simply
talk
to each other any more? The thought hit him and he remembered Werner saying pretty much the same. Fabel resigned himself to Old Farthood.

One of the places Fabel favoured for lunch was a café on one of the dozens of canals that criss-crossed the city. This particular café was on the Alsterstreek canal, next to the Winterhuder Fährhaus, where tourists and locals would catch the red and white water buses that criss-crossed the Alster. Sitting below the city that surrounded it and tucked in tight to the bridge, the café gave Fabel an odd sense of safety. Its location made it handy for the Presidium and if the weather was half decent he could sit out at one of the tables by the railings that ran along the side of the Alsterstreek and watch the swans patrol the waterway. Being beside the water, too, comforted Fabel, calmed him; which was strange, because, as a boy growing up in Norddeich, Fabel had been just a little afraid of the water; specifically of the sea. He had always put it down to the fear of flooding that was instinctive in East Frisians and their neighbours, the Dutch. Fabel’s boyhood home had been behind a dyke and there had been nights in his childhood – not many, but a few – when he would lie awake thinking about the dark mass of sea held back by a simple man-made earthwork.

A waiter came over to wipe down the table before taking Fabel’s order. He greeted him with a smile and asked him how he was. It was a ritual of recognition: Fabel was a known face here, but he knew that none of the staff would have any idea what it was that he did for a living, and that somehow added to his sense of comfort. It was something he had often wondered about: what people assumed about him, not knowing that his daily business was all about violence and death. Did he look like an academic, which is what he would prefer them to think, or did they take him for some kind of businessman? The latter thought depressed him.

Fabel had given a lot of thought to how people perceived him, and how they perceived each other; mainly because it was something that came up so frequently when interviewing the family and friends of murderers. Not, of course, in the majority of homicides where the murder was committed by people known to the police and to their victims as habitually violent and potentially dangerous. Most of the murders Fabel dealt with occurred within a certain
milieu
and were fuelled by drink or drugs; but there were cases – particularly with sex killings – where everyone stood open-mouthed on discovering that the murderer was someone they knew. The
I-would-never-have-guessed
killers. The bloated body washed up at the Fischmarkt, head and limbs removed, could well turn out to be the victim of just such a killer.

Over the years Fabel had become accustomed to the shock and disbelief of others: how, in so many of these cases, people who knew the killer well had to adjust their perspective on everything; had to learn to view everyone with a new element of mistrust.

We all have a face we show to the world; and we all have a face that we only allow ourselves to see
. It had been Uwe Hoffman, Fabel’s first boss at the Murder Commission, who had told him that. Maybe, thought Fabel, this Network Killer case wasn’t that different after all; maybe the internet was just a further extension of the way things had always been.

He ordered a salad and a mineral water and was watching the swans, thinking about nothing in particular, when his phone beeped again.

He read the text. It didn’t make much sense. It didn’t make any sense at all.

Chapter Nine

The house was on the boundary between the Schanzenviertel and St Pauli. It had its back to a railway line and had, at some distant point in its history, faced the world with some dignity. Now, however, that face was tattooed with a continuous, swirling band of graffiti, two metres high, and the ground-floor windows the graffiti half-framed were dark with soot and grime.

The young man who hesitated on the other side of the road, near the corner, carefully checking the street in both directions, was Niels Freese. He was checking for any hint of a police presence, uniformed or otherwise, before crossing over and knocking on the heavy door of the squat. The grimy glass of the window shadowed darker for a moment as someone inside checked out the approaching figure. They would, he knew, recognise him by his limp.

The door opened on his first knock and he slipped inside, into the dark cavern of the house. He instantly recognised the man who admitted him, a tall gangly male who was a little older than Niels, maybe thirty, and who had the kind of tough look that attracted police attention. But he did not know the man’s name. Then he realised that he had never met the man before, nor seen him. The thought flashed through Niels’s mind that the man at the door was actually also Niels, but in disguise, but he dismissed the thought by applying, as he had been taught to do by the doctors at Hamburg-Eilbek, reason and logic to an unreasonable and illogical perception. No, the man at the door was real and he was not another version of Niels. And the house was real, and not an exact replica in a carbon-copy of Hamburg created to beguile him.

He would not have known the man’s name, anyway: that was one of the rules, that you didn’t know the names of anyone outside your immediate cell. The fascists of the Polizei Hamburg or the BfV could not torture the information out of you if you did not have it to give. Niels nodded wordlessly to the man as he passed. Niels did not trust him, because Niels trusted almost no one older than himself: it had, after all, been they who had done what had been done to the world. And trust was something alien to Niels in any case. He might have got his delusions under some kind of control, but he still did not entirely trust the world he perceived around him.

Inside it was all gloom. Whereas the exterior had been run-down, the interior of the house was positively dilapidated. Large scabs of plaster had fallen from the walls and the floorboards were coated with plaster dust, grime and general filth.

A girl of about twenty, with lank blonde hair and bad skin, waited for him at the end of the hall, by the foot of the stairs.

‘He’s waiting for you.’ She tilted an acned chin up the stairwell. ‘Second door on the right. Go straight in. Were you followed?’

‘I wasn’t followed.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

The fact was that Niels did not only follow the protocols of the Guardians of Gaia regarding security, he had a routine that was ten times more elaborate than that which the Guardians demanded. He never explained his routines, because his need to defend himself against impostors sounded bizarre to others. The girl nodded and Niels made his way up the stairs. Despite having been told to go straight in, Niels knocked on the door before entering.

It had, at one time, been a bedroom. A pretty grand one. Now the windows had been boarded up from the inside, making the room a large, sealed box. But there was more light in here than anywhere else in the derelict house: artificial light from the desk lamps placed around the room. It did not have the clutter or detritus evident in the rest of the house: the floorboards had been swept clean of dust and cables taped to them; there were three workstations set against the wall to Niels’s right, each with a large computer monitor, and he could hear the distinct monotone hum of the five large hard-drives. The sight of the technology made Niels want to vomit. It represented everything that the Guardians of Gaia were fighting against, a complete negation of the organisation’s eco-anarcho-primitivism. But Niels knew, for he had been told by the Commander, that such technology, abhorrent as it was, was essential in carrying out the war against the forces of pollution and globalisation.

The theory did not help Niels with the reality: the irony was that, had it not been for the scruffy walls and boarded-over windows, this room could have been an office for any Hamburg business.

But it wasn’t. Straight ahead of Niels as he entered was a large desk at which sat the Commander, a heavyset man in his late thirties with a head of thick, curling black hair. To the Commander’s left, to Niels’s consternation, sat a couple dressed in grey business-type suits. Both the man and the woman looked as if they had walked out of a bank or insurance company and Niels noted that they shared the same expressionlessness.