A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  ‘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.

  By the time Fabel walked into the main conference room at the end of the Murder Commission’s corridor, his team had already assembled. The conference room was large and decorated in neutral tones, clean but bland and somewhere between linen white and beige. In contrast, striking, vivid colours leapt from the two large frameless canvases on the side wall. The two abstract paintings were what Fabel described as ‘corporate art’: the kind of stuff you found in the reception areas of banks, insurance companies, ad agencies and accountancy firms in an effort to convince you that they were actually ‘quite edgy’.

  The conference room’s large windows looked out over the treetops of Winterhude Stadtpark. A jug filled with iced water, a white vacuum coffeepot and cups, all of which looked as if they had come from Ikea, were neatly arranged on the cherrywood table. The officers sitting around the table had all set down their clipboards with notepads in front of them, like table settings.

  Sitting there at the top of the conference table, an electronic whiteboard behind him, Fabel felt as if they were about to discuss monthly sales targets, or the launch of a new product line or ad campaign. It seemed to Fabel that the whole world was becoming corporate. Politicians, medical professionals, now even policemen, all looked as if they were about to sell you something. The business of policing.

  Fabel was only forty-eight but sometimes he felt he’d been born a decade or two too late. Everything seemed to be less real than it had been when he had started his career. He noticed that even edgy Anna Wolff was beginning to dress more conservatively. Every rebellion, it seemed, ended in resigned conformity. In addition to Fabel’s regular team, there was a tall, thin man sitting at the far end of the cherrywood table. He would have been in his early forties but had a demeanour of seriousness that, along with his conservative tailoring and a thin face that was all bony angles, made him seem older. Fabel had nodded to the visitor as he had entered the room and took his seat.

  ‘Will you work this thing for me?’ he asked Anna, dodging having to operate the electronic whiteboard himself. Technology was something else that had crept up on Fabel: somewhere along the way, murder had become digitised.

  ‘Okay …’ Fabel stood up. ‘The so-called Network Killer. We’ve got three victims and you all know the background to the murders so far. Each investigation team has been allocated a case file. But, before we get started, I have to tell you that this morning we recovered another body from the water. Or, more correctly, the water delivered up a body to us this morning: she was swept up onto the Fischmarkt by the storm.’

  There was a low groan from the team.

  ‘Great …’ It was a thickset bull of a man sitting hunched with his elbows resting on the conference table who spoke. He was in his late fifties with grey hair cropped tight to his skull and he had the look of a boxer. Senior Commissar Werner Meyer – Fabel’s deputy. ‘Another one.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Anna. ‘The stiff this morning was a dismembered torso. No head, legs or arms. If our guy is anything, he’s consistent.’

  ‘Perhaps not …’ Fabel fired a meaningful look at Anna. ‘The body found this morning certainly looks like something different, and that probably means someone different. So there’s no point in us including this body in this case until we get a full forensic and autopsy report. My main worry is that maybe we have a copycat killer. Or it could be our guy and he’s simply experimenting with his art. But, as Commissar Wolff has so helpfully pointed out, so far our guy has been completely consistent. And he doesn’t strike me as the type to play with his food: he stalks his victims, traps them, rapes them and strangles them. That’s the main event. Anything he does afterwards is housekeeping. Disposal. He’s never felt the need to dismember the bodies before. So, for the moment and until we get the reports, let’s leave this one out.’

  Fabel nodded to Anna, who hit a key on the wireless keyboard. Four photographic panels appeared. In three, the usual flash-stark scene-of-crime pictures of the young female victims. In the fourth, a sequence of photographs, all of young men, flashed rapidly on the whiteboard. Scores of them. Hundreds. In fast succession. />
  ‘We’re in a whole new area of offending here,’ continued Fabel. ‘Our killer has a familiar modus for anyone who’s worked a multiple sex-murder case before. Everyone in this room has experience in the investigative process of identifying and locating a murderer. We work with the forensic detail, the chronology of the homicide and the connections between witnesses, key events and locations. We can visit the places, we can trace witnesses, find physical evidence, gain background intelligence; and from all that we can build a picture, even get a description of our suspect. But in this case, we are not dealing with the physical world. Our killer locates his victims in cyberspace. Three women, to date completely unconnected, each of whom was lured to their death by one of these men …’ Fabel indicated the still-flickering procession of photographs.

  ‘These are the men with whom we know the victims had contact on the internet through social networking sites. Could you slow that down a bit, Anna?’ Fabel asked. Anna Wolff held a key down and the images changed less frequently. All of the photographs were amateur shots of men in their twenties or early thirties, some taken with a phone or a digital camera into a mirror. Several of the faces were indistinct: blurred or partially masked behind the reflected camera flash. There was a variety of the usual grimaces and postures, some muscled torsos shirtless, and most made the predictable, inane ‘hanging loose’ or ‘throwing horns’ hand gestures. ‘The problem we have is this. In the real world we could pinpoint a single person out of this selection who has had contact with all of the victims and put a face to him. But here, on the internet, he could be several of these faces. Or none of them. It is almost certain that he uses a different identity for each woman he “meets” on the internet, and that none of these identities are his. For all we know, he isn’t even posing as a man. It could be that he has arranged to meet his victims while posing as a female, or even a representative of an organisation.

  ‘The one thing we have to bear in mind about this environment is that, like I said at the start, none of the rules we’ve learnt over the years apply here. This is a place where anyone can be anybody or anything they want to be. Even if we find the face of the person our victims agreed to meet, it’s almost certain it isn’t the face he has in real life.’

  ‘What about forensics? There’s nothing more real-world than being raped and strangled. Don’t we have DNA from semen, hair or skin he’s left on the victims?’ asked Dirk Hechtner, a small, dark-haired detective who hadn’t been on Fabel’s team long.

  Fabel shook his head. ‘Our guy is fastidious. He wears a condom and we think he may have shaved his pubic region. To date we haven’t found a single trace of non-victim DNA. His dumping the bodies in water works against us forensically, too.’

  ‘So where do we start?’ asked Werner Meyer.

  ‘This is a good point at which to introduce Chief Commissar Kroeger, here …’ Fabel indicated the man who sat at the far end of the table. ‘Herr Kroeger heads up the Presidium’s specialist information-technology team. Herr Kroeger?’

  Kroeger nodded his long bony head. ‘As Principal Chief Commissar Fabel has pointed out, information technology has, in law-enforcement terms, presented as many challenges as it has opportunities. One of the biggest problems we face is those who exploit and abuse children. And, unfortunately, it has been in this area of offending that we have had to go through a steep learning curve; because it has been this group of offenders who were first to recognise the advantages the internet offered them. It changed the whole way they found and trapped victims, exchanged images of abuse and, most of all, developed a way of communicating with each other and exchanging information without exposing their identities. At one time, before the internet, these people acted alone and were generally isolated. On a very few occasions they would encounter like-minded individuals, more often than not meeting them in prison. Occasionally, in the pre-internet world, you would get an organised paedophile ring. But communication, far less collaboration, was reasonably rare; and when it did occur, it was within a specific geographical area. The internet changed that. All of a sudden these people could, for the first time ever, gain a sense of community. They were no longer isolated from each other and could exchange information and images, across the country and across the entire world. They could persuade each other that, because there were so many others who shared their perversions, then they weren’t perversions. That their behaviour wasn’t aberrant, sick, twisted.’ Kroeger paused. Fabel had noticed that the internet-crime specialist’s long thin face remained impassive, the bony angles lacking animation, as he spoke. The grey eyes stayed dull and sluggish. Maybe, thought Fabel, that was what happened when you worked with technology, with machines all the time: maybe you became less vital, less human.

  ‘That’s what the internet can do: offer an environment of normality for the sickest and most twisted minds,’ continued Kroeger. ‘The most important thing about the internet is that it gives these people a sense of security, of impunity. And that’s where we come in. There is no such thing as anonymity on the internet. Herr Fabel drew a comparison with real-world investigations: where you can track an offender across an environment, interview eyewitnesses, etc. The truth is that it’s wrong to think the internet is any different. It’s just that it’s a virtual world instead of a physical one. You still leave tracks everywhere you go. And no matter how hard you try to disguise yourself as somebody else, there are always clues to your identity left behind.’

  ‘How can that be?’ asked Fabel. ‘If someone claims to be a fourteen-year-old girl instead of the forty-year-old man that they really are, how can you see through that?’

  ‘Okay, let’s start with the basics. A lot of browsers offer private browsing, where nothing is logged in your internet history and your computer doesn’t pick up cookies or other traces of your excursions on the net. The truth is there is no such thing as private browsing. Your internet provider keeps a record of every site, every page you visit. And the administrators of those sites you visit similarly store your IP address. Every time you connect to the internet, you leave a trace. And if you’re dumb enough to use a computer at work or at home, then we’re just one court order away from having your name and address.’

  ‘But our guy isn’t dumb,’ said Anna.

  ‘No …’ Kroeger reached into his pocket and produced a USB stick. ‘This is a dongle. This particular type of dongle allows you to access any WiFi spot. Obviously, you still have an IP address, but if you have paid cash for a pay-as-you-go broadband dongle, then your name and address aren’t listed anywhere. My guess is that your Network Killer, if he’s smart, is using one of these. But even if he is, he’s still traceable. Whenever he is online he can’t disguise his location. Or at least he can’t without some pretty sophisticated software. We can identify the general physical location of the connection. If it’s a pay-as-you-go dongle, then he has to top it up somewhere. And that means resurfacing in the real world. The person behind the counter in the newsagent or mobile-phone store who sells him the credits is the witness that Herr Fabel talked about earlier. My point is this. My beat isn’t that dissimilar to yours. There are always tracks left behind, always something to follow. How much effort has been made, and how much skill has been employed in covering up those tracks depends on the intelligence and expertise of the offender. Just like in the real world.’

  ‘But that still doesn’t answer the question about how to see through a fake identity,’ said Werner.

  ‘I don’t know how many of you are members of a social networking site, but those of you who are will be aware of the rather disturbing phenomenon of seeing ads for things that are particularly relevant to you, right at the exact time they’re relevant to you … ads for wedding photographers just after you’ve become engaged, a restaurant ad just before an anniversary, sports stores offering you deals in your particular sport … It’s like there’s some kind of cyberpsychic reading your mind. The truth is that you have left so many details of yourself scattered all aroun
d. Because you think in terms of normal space, you think that all of these little scraps of information are so scattered that they can’t be put together. They can, and instantaneously. And you’re not even aware of having left some of that information behind: your personal data and browsing behaviour have been analysed, sometimes automatically. Nothing you do is random in the internet. You think it is – you think you jump from one site to another, from one page to another spontaneously, impulsively – but there is always an underlying logic or psychology to everything you do. The truth is that the more relaxed and free-roaming your internet exploration is, the more it reveals about your psychology, your identity. In the Cybercrime Unit we have access to all kinds of experts – IT specialists, sociologists, psychologists, criminologists. We even use linguistic experts who can analyse your vocabulary, your syntax and grammar, and who can profile your educational standards, age, etc. And, as well as the experts, we have analytical software that can give us a breakdown of a user in seconds. So, to answer your question, Herr Meyer: yes, it can be difficult to see through a carefully constructed avatar identity on the web, but we do have an armoury of weapons at our disposal and it’s much more difficult to hide behind an invented identity than you would think.’

  ‘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.’