A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  ‘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 g
rime.

  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.

  ‘Sit down, Freese,’ said the Commander.

  ‘Who are they?’ Niels nodded towards the couple.

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘Are they members of the Guardians?’

  ‘This is a war with many armies, Niels. Our friends here are allies. They fight for Gaia just like us, on the same side as us, but on a different battlefield. More than that need not concern you.’

  Niels stared at the couple. They stared back, but without aggression; without anything in their expression. Why were they dressed like that? Niels did not like their suits in the same way that he did not like the computer hardware in the squat. For a start, where had it come from? Where had the money to pay for it come from? There again, he thought, it could be that the Commander had had it stolen to order. The idea cheered him a little.

  ‘The Globalist-Polluters are creating their own doom,’ continued the Commander. ‘Our doom. Even their own scientists are talking about a Malthusian Cataclysm, about the Great Die-Off … so they are not blind to the catastrophe that they are shaping every day by chasing the Myth of Progress. They cannot say they don’t know the consequences of their actions.’

  ‘A Malthusian Cataclysm would not be a bad thing, Commander,’ said Niels, eagerly. ‘Humanity is a pestilence that needs to be controlled if Gaia is to survive.’

  ‘Mmm …’ said the Commander. ‘In the meantime we have to do all we can to wage this war. Our fight is the greatest battle in the history of mankind. While we sit here, Freese, our world, our ecosystem, is being raped. In the time it takes us to have this conversation, four million barrels of oil will have been pumped from the Earth. And all that carbon will just as quickly be pumped into the atmosphere.’ The Commander paused to allow Niels to process the information. He knew that you had to allow time for Niels to process information. He had noticed Niels’s limp again as the younger man had come into the room. He knew that the neurological damage behind the limp came from the same cause as Niels’s unique intellectual architecture. Oxygen deprivation at birth.

  ‘This is a war,’ said the Commander. ‘A real war. And a war needs good soldiers. I need good soldiers. And you, Freese, are one of my very best. And that is why I am entrusting you with one of the most important missions we have ever undertaken.’

  Niels felt the pride bloom in his chest. All he had ever wanted to do was to be a good soldier for Gaia.

  ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to protect Gaia,’ said Niels proudly.

  ‘You have to understand, Freese, that I am asking you to take this war to a new level. Burning cars in the Schanzenviertel is not enough. The stakes are higher.’ The Commander nodded to the man in the grey suit, who pushed an envelope across the table to Niels. Niels opened it; it contained two photographs, one of a man in his early forties and the other of a car: a huge Mercedes cabriolet. There was also a piece of paper in the envelope with a time and an address written on it.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Niels.

  ‘All you need to know is that he is an enemy of Gaia. A real enemy. His activities have got to be brought to a halt. You have carried out a number of successful car-burnings with Harald. I want you to team up with him again and torch this car …’ the Commander tapped the photograph of the Mercedes. ‘… while it is parked outside the café at this address. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand what I have to do, but I don’t understand why burning his car will stop him doing whatever it is he has been doing.’

  The Commander turned to the silent grey-suited couple. The woman reached into her handbag, brought out a clear plastic bag and handed it to the Commander, who slid it across the table to Niels.

  ‘When his car goes up,
he’ll be inside the café. He meets a woman there. You wait until they’re both inside, then torch the car. And make it spectacular. I want you to bring him out of the café. Then I want you to use that.’ The Commander nodded to the plastic bag and its contents, which Niels had not yet lifted.

  ‘Can you use that?’ asked the Commander. ‘It will be the first mission of its type.’

  ‘This man is an enemy of Gaia?’ asked Niels, still staring at the bag.

  ‘More than that, he is threatening the whole success of the movement. He has done things … well, like I said, his actions could be disastrous for all we stand for.’

  Niels picked up the plastic bag, opened it and removed the automatic pistol and ammunition clip from it before placing them in the patch pocket of his combat jacket. As he did so, he had the feeling that he had seen and held the weapon a dozen times previously. But he knew he had never held any gun before.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

  Chapter Ten

  Horst van Heiden was a man of middle height, stockily built and with a brooding face framed by a grey-white continuum of hair and beard. When he walked into van Heiden’s office, Fabel was struck by the same impression that he always had on seeing the Criminal Director: that he wore an expensive suit as if it were a uniform. It fitted, because most of van Heiden’s career had been spent in the uniformed branch, including some time on attachment to the Harbour Police, and even after ten years in the post he did not look suited to the role of chief of detectives.

  Van Heiden looked at his watch as Fabel entered. The Criminal Director wasn’t making a point: it was simply a habit he had of time-checking the beginning and end of each meeting, or segment of a meeting, or time between meetings. Time was important to van Heiden. Fabel had worked with him for seven years and the relationship had become as relaxed and close as a relationship with van Heiden could become. Fabel had no doubt that van Heiden respected him, even liked him, but the Criminal Director was a hard man to read. Distant. Closed-off.