A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  He turned his attention back to the Mercedes convertible. New, maybe only weeks old. Shiny. It pulled up and parked across the street. The man who got out of the car looked exactly like the kind of person you would expect to see parking an expensive status-symbol car outside a self-consciously trendy, artificially alternative café in the Schanzenviertel: he was in his mid-thirties, tieless and dressed in a designer suit that fitted with the car yet would look out of place in a traditional boardroom. He was all dot-com, right-on, designery, sunrise-businessy. Ten years ago he would have had a ponytail.

  Niels despised these people even more than he hated the old guard. At least the old guard did not try to hide what they were. The old guard made it clear that they were about making money and keeping it from everyone else; they were visibly exclusive and conspicuously fuck-the-planet arrogant. These bastards – bastards like trendy Merc-Man – were much worse. They had exactly the same obsession with money and status, but they dressed it all up in a right-on, socially committed, environmentally friendly guise. They were fucking the planet just like the others, but they were doing it surreptitiously. Hypocritically.

  Niels did not know the man who had parked the Mercedes. The Commander had not told Niels his victim’s name nor anything about him, but Niels hated him. Hated him with every fibre of his being. And soon he would get to vent that hatred: soon, Merc-Man would come to understand that every decision, every choice you made had consequences, no matter how ignorant you were of them.

  Niels watched as a woman pulled up behind the convertible in an equally new, boxy, ugly Alfa-Romeo Giulietta. Everything about her, her look, her clothes, her hair, told Niels that she was a female equivalent of Merc-Man. She greeted the Mercedes driver with a kiss and a laugh and they both went into the café together.

  This was it. The next phase. Until now, the group had restricted itself to torching cars like this at night. But it was almost a tradition for the cars of the rich to be sporadically targeted in the Schanzenviertel and it was never clear which group was responsible. Often it was down to individuals simply protesting about the gentrification of the Schanzenviertel and the erosion of its edgy, individualistic character. But that was not what Niels was about, what the group was about. They were the Guardians of Gaia. Protectors of the Earth. Soldiers in a war to defend the air, the sea, the soil.

  He looked up again towards the end of the street where Harald waited, ready with the motorbike they had stolen the night before. That too would be torched. Afterwards. Harald, on the Commander’s orders, knew nothing about the automatic in Niels’s pocket, nor that this daylight arson attack was, in fact, an execution.

  Niels put the holdall on the ground and unzipped it. He didn’t take anything out; he was just getting it ready. He picked it up again and walked purposefully across the street. As he approached the Mercedes, he stayed on the road side of it, pulling a hammer with a spiked head from his combat jacket with his free hand. As he passed the car, he heard the angry buzz of the motorcycle engine as Harald gunned it up the street behind him. Niels smashed the driver’s window with the hammer and the car’s alarm exploded into an urgent whine. Pushing the holdall through the window, he walked on, repocketing the hammer. Once he was a few metres clear of the car he turned to see Harald, his face hidden by his helmet, pull up alongside the Mercedes and toss in the lighted Molotov cocktail before accelerating away and screeching to a halt alongside Niels.

  ‘Get on!’ Harald shouted at Niels and held out an arm.

  The couple were now out on the street, having rushed from the café on hearing the Mercedes’s alarm. Niels could see the flames inside the car increase in intensity, but it was still just the Molotov cocktail that burned: the five litres of plastic-bagged accelerant hadn’t ignited yet.

  ‘Get on!’ Harald shouted even more urgently. But Niels was hypnotised by the flames licking at the inside of the windshield. The fabric of the soft-top now burned and flapped. Merc-Man and his girlfriend were now out at the car, but were too focused on what was happening to the Mercedes to look in Niels’s direction. Merc-Man looked distraught and tugged at his hair, doing a little dance of decision/indecision, towards the car and back from it. He hadn’t a clue what to do. Niels guessed that there was something he wanted to rescue from inside the car.

  Niels closed his hand around the butt of the pistol still hidden in his pocket. But for some reason he hesitated. There was something about this situation, this environment, this event, that suddenly seemed overpoweringly familiar. Niels felt himself enter a fugue of déjà vu. He felt he had taken the pistol out of his pocket but knew he had not.

  But then, Niels realised he knew what was going to happen before it did happen, and that this realisation had nothing to do with déjà vu. Merc-Man pulled the sleeve of his jacket down over the palm of his hand in an improvised glove and snatched at the handle of the car. The door swung open and the man stepped forward. It was at that exact moment that the five litres of accelerant that Niels had dropped in through the shattered window ignited. It was like watching a flower blossom: a huge, curved, beautiful ball of flame burst out through the open door and up through the burning soft top. For a couple of seconds, Merc-Man disappeared into the flame, was consumed by it. Then Niels heard screaming. The girlfriend screaming. Onlookers screaming. He even heard a strangled, guttural cry, helmet-muffled, come from Harald behind him. But above it all, shrill and inhuman, he heard the screams of Merc-Man. The ball of flame surged up into the sky and Merc-Man was revealed again. His entire body was burning. All of him. A single walking, screaming flame. He staggered forward and fell onto the paving. A couple of onlookers ran forward and threw their coats over the burning man. Two men in the crowd suddenly noticed Niels and Harald and pointed at them.

  Niels remained static, staring at the burning man and trying to remember if he really had seen him burn before, so many times that Niels couldn’t count them. In that moment, he realised that none of what he was seeing was real. That everything they had tried to convince him of at the hospital had been lies. This was not reality. This was a fiction; an imitation. He did not really exist and what he had just witnessed had not really happened.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Niels …’ He heard Harald’s voice urgent behind him. ‘Get on the fucking bike. Now!’

  It took the men in the crowd a second or two to work out the chronology of events, to apportion the blame for what they had witnessed. By the time they had started to run towards Niels, he was already on the back of the stolen bike. Harald accelerated away, not stopping at give-ways and causing a couple of cars to come to a screeching halt.

  Sitting on the pillion seat, Niels still had the image of the screaming, burning man bright in his mind as they made their escape through the Schanzenviertel’s narrow streets. And he heard the strangest sound. Laughter.

  His own laughter.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘In the car. Hands-free.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Susanne. ‘Welcome to the twenty-first century.’

  ‘This isn’t the twenty-first century,’ said Fabel. ‘I distinctly remember on TV back in the 1970s they promised that by now we’d all be scooting about on hovercars, wearing silver jumpsuits and taking our holidays on the moon. How’s Wiesbaden?’

  ‘Bourgeois. More bourgeois than Hamburg, if you can imagine that. Where are you going? Are you taking advantage of my absence to have a tryst with some lithe blonde?’

  ‘Hardly. I’m off to see Berthold Müller-Voigt. At his domicile, don’t you know?’

  ‘Since when did you hobnob with the Schickeria? What do you have to see him about?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. He asked me. Funny thing …’

  ‘In what way funny?’

  ‘Just that he’s usually so cool and in control. Something’s shaken him up. What, I think I’m about to find out. You missing me?’

  ‘Terribly, but the young Italian waiter from the restaurant is keeping my
mind off it. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘By the way, what did you mean, “Poppenbütteler Schleuse”?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The text you sent me. Enigmatic, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Jan, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Earlier today,’ he sighed. ‘I was having lunch at the Fährhaus café and I got a text from you. It said “Poppenbütteler Schleuse”. Nothing else.’

  ‘And I thought you never drank at lunchtimes.’

  ‘I’m not joking, Susanne. It came from your number.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t send it. Definitely. Maybe you do have a blonde stashed away somewhere and she’s telling you where to meet for that tryst. I believe there’s a really good restaurant there.’

  ‘I’m being serious, Susanne.’

  ‘So am I,’ she said emphatically. ‘I didn’t send you that text. Oh, Jan, you know what you’re like with technology. It took me ages to show you how to work an mp3 player and now you’d be lost without it. That message can’t have come from me. You better check with work. Maybe it was Anna Wolff. You know something? I sometimes get the feeling that Anna would like a little tryst with you up at Poppenbütteler Schleuse herself.’

  ‘Anna?’ Fabel snorted. ‘You’re way off there. For a psychologist, your insight stinks. But I will check with the office tomorrow and see if it was someone there who sent the text.’

  Fabel realised that he was already approaching Stade. He hated talking on the phone while driving; even with hands-free he felt you were taken away from the road you were travelling. Particularly when trying to puzzle out who could have sent you a cryptic text message and why they had sent it.

  ‘Got to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Sleep well.’

  The sky had cleared a little and the sun was already low, painting the town of Stade red as Fabel approached it. He reflected that it was probably the only thing that had painted that particular town red for a long time: Stade was a sleepy, picturesque small town of canals, cobbled streets and gable-ended medieval buildings on the edge of the Altes Land – the Old Land – on the south side of the Elbe, about forty kilometres to the west of Hamburg. It was the kind of place that gave Fabel a sense of comfort. It appealed to the historian in him: Stade was over a thousand years old and one of the oldest settlements in Northern Germany. During the Middle Ages this small provincial town had been, in turn, a Swedish city, a Danish stronghold and a Hanseatic city-state in its own right. Now Stade was part of the Greater Hamburg Metropolitan Area, but nothing much seemed to change it and it stood, quiet, pretty and sedate on the banks of the River Schwinge, watching the passing of time and human follies with stately detachment.

  Fabel cursed as he found himself passing through the town’s ancient centre. He had been to Müller-Voigt’s home, on the outskirts of the town, before and had not had to drive through the town to get there. Fabel had been sure he would have been able to find it without any trouble and had not bothered to key the address into the satnav. The truth was that Fabel hardly ever programmed the satnav. Something told him it was the most human thing to find your own way, and that quite often some of the best things happened to you, the best discoveries made, when you had lost your way.

  Which was all well and good on a philosophical level, he thought, but not when you were late for an appointment with one of Hamburg’s most influential politicians.

  He made his way through Stade’s pretty centre, out into the countryside and found his bearings, driving along a narrow, straight ribbon of road beside the high banks of a canal. The sun was filtered through the tops of the trees, squeezing through a letter box of clear sky between the flat landscape below and a parallel bank of dark cloud above. The trees thickened into a dense wedge at the side of the road and Fabel swung into the long drive that he knew led up to Müller-Voigt’s home.

  It was just as Fabel remembered it: massive, imposing, modern, all angles and glass. And what wasn’t glass seemed to be faced with blue marble, although Fabel knew from his last visit that it was actually a façade made up entirely of solar panels.

  It was the kind of place that the architects would use on all their publicity. A mixture of masterpiece and pension fund.

  Müller-Voigt was dressed in chinos, a blue long-sleeved corded shirt with a white T-shirt underneath and canvas deck shoes. It was the most casual of outfits, but Fabel reckoned it had cost more than some of Fabel’s best suits.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ the politician said as he opened the door. Fabel had the same feeling that he had had when the Senator had spoken to him in the Presidium’s elevator: that he was looking at a troubled man. Which was a disconcerting sight: Fabel had never seen Müller-Voigt troubled. In fact, he’d never seen him anything other than calm and relaxed. And totally in control.

  Like a million other Germans, Fabel had seen and heard Müller-Voigt in many stressful situations. Hamburg’s Environment Senator was the kind of guest live TV and radio producers loved: he had an innate knack of being able to make statements that were both provocative and combative while maintaining a relaxed outward calm. It was a style that was simultaneously nonchalant and aggressive. And it made for great media interviews. Müller-Voigt seemed to thrive in an environment of conflict and his value to broadcasters was the adroit way he could light the fuse of other politicians. Interviews would end with his opponent seeming to lack self-control and self-assurance. Müller-Voigt made full and effective use of the truism that whoever loses their temper loses the argument. Müller-Voigt never lost either.

  But tonight Fabel was seeing something different. Someone different.

  Müller-Voigt showed Fabel into a huge living room, pine-lined with a double-height vaulted ceiling and a banistered gallery above. Just as he had the last time he had been here, Fabel was annoyed at the vague pang of petty jealousy he felt looking around the politician’s elegant home. Elegant but totally environmentally friendly. The house was making a statement: it was cool to be green.

  They sat down on a large corner sofa facing the two-storey picture windows. The sun seemed tinged a different colour through the glass.

  ‘I can adjust it at will,’ said Müller-Voigt, as if he had read Fabel’s mind. ‘It’s the latest technology: energy-capture glass. It doesn’t just insulate and prevent the escape of warmth from the house, it actually captures solar power and converts it to energy.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fabel. ‘Very impressive.’

  ‘I know that many people – and I don’t know if you’re one of them – think this is all a bit of a gimmick with me. That I’m really more interested in the political than the natural environment. Normally I wouldn’t care what you or anyone else thought, but I need you to understand something, Herr Fabel: I am genuinely, completely and irreversibly committed to changing how mankind treats the environment. It’s more than a political belief; it’s how I see life.’

  Fabel shrugged. ‘I have no reason to doubt that.’

  ‘Well, as I said, some do.’ There was a hint of bitterness in Müller-Voigt’s tone. ‘As a race, as a species, we’ve lost our way, Herr Fabel. And it’s going to be the end of us. In fact, we’ve lost our most basic capability to read Nature, the geography and climate around us. Take where we are right now.’ He waved a hand vaguely at the landscape beyond the windows. ‘I built this house on a geest – an island of sand and gravel dumped as moraine by the last ice age, in the middle of a flat sea of heath, marsh and moor. If you look around this whole area you’ll see that almost every town is built on a geest, Stade included.

  ‘When these settlements were first created, our ancestors were connected to Nature and to the landscape. They could read the signs and learn from experience of changing weather patterns. And that meant they knew where to build their homes. Do you know something? These geests have provided the perfect protection against storm surges for a millennium of settlement. The marshes around them work like huge sponges an
d the geests themselves are natural flood barriers. Giant natural sandbags. And you see all the Knicks that run alongside the canals and rivers here?’ Müller-Voigt referred to the turf embankments, topped by trees and bushes, that criss-crossed the Altes Land and much of the rest of the Northern German landscape. ‘Some of those Knicks are older than the pyramids of Giza, built by our ancestors more than five thousand years ago. And do you know something, they remain the best protection against aeolian and fluvial erosion this landscape has.’ Müller-Voigt gave a small laugh. ‘Look at the millions and millions of euros spent on flood defences for Hamburg. Don’t get me wrong, they’re needed to protect people and property – but if you look at the historical flooding patterns of Hamburg over the last century or so, you’ll see all of the areas that have remained immune. And guess what? They’re all the oldest settled parts of the city, on the Hamburg geest slopes. That’s what we’ve lost, Fabel. Connection.’

  ‘I understand, Herr Senator, but I assume that’s not why you called me out here.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I want you to remember what I have said because, believe it or not, it is relevant to what I have to talk to you about. There is a lot of discussion in the media about the environment, and it has slowly climbed the ladder of political priority, but it’s still not high enough. There is a disaster waiting for us, Herr Fabel, and it’s just around the corner. There are a lot of people who believe that extreme action has to be taken now. Very extreme action. Drink?’ Müller-Voigt asked, making his way to the cabinet.