A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  The young cybercrime officer bent to close the laptop and remove it.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Fabel; then, more gently, ‘Leave it switched on. I’ll bring it out in a minute.’

  On his way back to the Presidium, Fabel kept checking his rear-view mirror. But there was no sign of a VW four-by-four following him and he started to wonder if paranoia was infectious. Fabel always found strange the things that got to him about his work. Not always the exposure to violence or horror, or the constant exposure to all that was the worst in people: as he drove towards Alsterdorf and the Presidium, it was the image of a dying Reisch sitting in front of his computer wishing himself into a lie. It was the sadness, the vulnerability, the desperation that Fabel saw in his day-to-day work that troubled him most.

  The entire team was again assembled and they went through the usual recap of the caseload as well as any new information on each murder. As had been agreed with van Heiden, Nicola Brüggemann had taken over as lead investigating officer on the Network Killer case.

  Brüggemann’s build was what Fabel’s mother would have euphemised as mollig. But there was very little else about the Child Crime Principal Commissar that could be described as cuddly. Brüggemann carried her plumpness on a frame that was at least one metre eighty tall and with shoulders that would have put an American Pro-footballer to shame. Her black hair was cut short at the sides and thick on top, adding to the masculinity of her look. She was, Fabel knew, a no-nonsense Holsteiner whose manner could best be described as abrasive and her wit as acerbic. It was not the same kind of prickliness that Fabel encountered on a regular basis with Anna, more an uncompromising, direct professionalism. If they were all in the business of policing, then Nicola Brüggemann was the no-frills offer. Fabel had a great deal of respect for her as a colleague. As she ran through the progress of the Network Killer case, Fabel appreciated the way she made a point of asking him for authority to allocate resources and people. She was making a point: Fabel was still in charge.

  After Brüggemann had finished summing up, Fabel briefly outlined what had occurred at the Reisch residence in Schiffbek. It was, he said again, unlikely that there was any relevance to any of the other enquiries.

  Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner looked an unlikely team: Glasmacher was tall, blond and burly, Hechtner was small, dark and slight; Glasmacher was reserved, Hechtner was outgoing. Fabel had recruited and paired them over a year before and he was pleased at the way they had gelled as a partnership. Dirk always did most of the talking and he confirmed that the full report on the body found at the Poppenbütteler Schleuse had come in. Like the other victims, Julia Henning had been raped and strangled, and again there was no stranger DNA or trace to be harvested by the forensics team or the pathologist.

  But the autopsy had revealed something different.

  ‘It would appear that she wasn’t as fresh as we first thought,’ explained Dirk.

  ‘Meaning?’ Nicola Brüggemann and Fabel asked the same question simultaneously.

  ‘Meaning that an analysis of the victim’s blood found evidence of cold storage. Not freezing, but that she had been kept at a very low temperature, like in a cold store.’

  ‘Someone was trying to confuse us about the time of death?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Thomas Glasmacher. ‘There’s no way of telling how long she was in the cold store or how long she was kept at room temperature afterwards. So yes, it looks like the killer has tried to confuse us about the time of death. And he’s succeeded.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Werner. ‘Why now? He’s never done anything like this before.’

  ‘Unless our guy feels he’s slipped up,’ said Dirk. ‘Or maybe he thinks he was seen. It could be that he’s trying to fudge the time of death so he can’t be pinned down to the scene of crime.’

  Fabel thought about what Hechtner had said. ‘Possible, but it doesn’t gel with what we know about his modus. I don’t know, Dirk – it’s an odd change of pattern, that’s for sure.’

  They left it for the moment and Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner went on to provide a report on the victim. It revealed nothing other than Julia Henning had been a pretty, bright but reserved and unattached young lawyer who had worked for a commercial law office in Hamburg, dealing mainly with copyright disputes. Thomas and Dirk had spoken to Julia’s parents, colleagues and friends, of whom there were comparatively few. Despite being attractive, Julia had had few boyfriends and had not been seeing anyone at the time of her disappearance. She had lived alone in the apartment at the address Fabel had been given by the woman at the docks and had not been seen since she’d left work on the Friday afternoon. She could have been killed at any time over the weekend.

  One thing did stand out, however. When her apartment had been searched, everything had been in order. It was only as they were leaving that Dirk had suddenly realised that something was missing. Something that became instantly conspicuous by its absence. A computer. And all the Network Killer’s victims had connected with him on social networking sites.

  ‘So we thought, if she didn’t have a computer, maybe she had a web-enabled cell phone.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Fabel. ‘No cellphone, either.’

  ‘Julia Henning must have been the only twenty-seven-year-old in Hamburg without a computer or cellphone. So we pulled out of the apartment and sent in a forensics team. It’s pretty obvious that someone has been in there and taken her stuff, possibly our killer.’

  ‘The neighbours see anything?’

  Thomas Glasmacher, the larger and quieter of the two answered. ‘No … no one saw anything unusual or anyone they didn’t know come in or out. We found a shoebox full of receipts and warranties and we’ve been going through that. Also, we’ve asked her bank for full details of her outgoings. I’ll bet we’ll find a direct debit to a phone-service provider. But proving she had a computer and a cellphone doesn’t bring us any closer to actually finding them.’

  Fabel grunted; they seemed to be perpetually scrabbling around in a fog.

  ‘There’s something about this one,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘It all smacks of someone trying to cover tracks and confuse times. As Werner said, why now? Why did he feel the need to make these changes with this one?’

  They moved on to the Müller-Voigt inquiry. Werner ran through the progress to date. He confirmed what Astrid Bremer had already told Fabel about the fingerprints and the stray sample of grey fibre found at the scene. Fabel felt the tension in the room when Werner read from the report that only Fabel’s and the dead man’s fingerprints had been found on the weapon. Other than that, the investigation into the politician’s death also seemed to be stalling, despite it being obvious that Werner was pulling out all the stops to remove any suspicion, no matter how slight, that his boss might have been involved in the murder.

  Anna Wolff then picked up the thread.

  ‘Müller-Voigt’s mystery woman is less of a mystery,’ she said. ‘But not much less.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Fabel, his interest pricked.

  ‘Müller-Voigt had a broad range of restaurants he would take women to. It would have made things easier if he had been more a creature of habit, but I have checked them all out. No one saw him with a woman fitting Meliha’s description. Then I thought that maybe she called the shots and decided where they should eat. And with her being Turkish, I thought I’d check out some of the Turkish restaurants in town. Believe me, there are a lot of Turkish restaurants in Hamburg. I took the liberty of pulling in a favour from uniform and circulated a picture of Müller-Voigt and a description of Meliha Yazar. We struck gold in Eimsbüttel – not something you get to say every day. There’s a restaurant on Schulterblatt in the Schanzenviertel and the owner swears Müller-Voigt and Meliha were regulars. He recognised Müller-Voigt’s picture but didn’t have any idea he was a politician, and he remembers Meliha because she spoke Turkish to him. He said she told him she was from Silviri, on the coast. She had been in a couple of ti
mes on her own, but there’s no credit card transaction recorded because either Müller-Voigt paid or she paid by cash. But I’m afraid that’s it – he couldn’t tell me any more. Although he did say their regular waiter is on holiday at the moment. But he’ll be back this week. The owner said he got the idea that the woman didn’t like being asked questions. Other than that, she was very friendly and he got the impression that they were a very close couple.’

  Another amateur psychologist waiting table, thought Fabel. ‘Well, it’s something. It’s more than something – well done, Anna. At least now we can demonstrate that Meliha Yazar did exist.’

  He resumed the formal procedure of the caseload recap, hoping that something would leap out at them. Usually the job of the Murder Commission was to find a commonality between cases, to establish links. The problem at the moment, thought Fabel, was that they kept tripping over commonalities and links where there should be none: the Network Killer case was unlikely to be related to the female torso washed up at the Fischmarkt; Müller-Voigt’s murder could be linked to the torso, but logically Daniel Föttinger’s death – his possible unintentional death – should have been separate from everything else.

  But there were links. There was a commonality. Or at least there was a mass of coincidences that stretched the laws of probability beyond the credible.

  Müller-Voigt’s missing girlfriend had been investigating the Pharos Project and the body on the Fischmarkt had been in the water for almost the same period that she had been missing. Müller-Voigt was a non-executive director of Föttinger Environmental Technologies, and both Daniel and Kirstin Föttinger were members of the Project. Even the Network Killer case had an unexpected, if coincidental, link to Pharos through the company that had developed Virtual Dimension. Then, of course, there was the fact that someone had done their best to implicate Fabel in both the Network Killer case and Müller-Voigt’s murder; and whoever had done that had enormous technological skills and resources at their disposal. Like the Pharos Project.

  ‘But what possible link could there be between the Pharos Project and women who have been targeted in a classic serial sex-offender way, raped and strangled?’ asked Nicola Brüggemann. ‘Ritual murders, I could believe. Elimination of ex-members would be probable, but we know that none of these women had any connection to the Project at all.’

  ‘Other than Virtual Dimension being owned by a Korn-Pharos company,’ said Werner.

  ‘True, but that’s not such a big coincidence. Between all the companies in the group, Korn-Pharos generates a hell of a lot of internet content.’

  ‘What about this guy Reisch, Jan?’ asked Werner. ‘His death could be seen as another coincidence. He was involved with Virtual Dimension too, and we know he had contact with the dead women. Maybe his suicide was guilt over their deaths.’

  ‘But he was physically incapable of committing the crimes,’ said Fabel.

  ‘I think Werner has a point, though,’ said Brüggemann in her deep contralto. ‘Because he was incapable of commission, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t involved in some way. Maybe he was part of a killing team, with some kind of folie à deux or folie à trois crap going on. Maybe he got some kind of vicarious cyber hard-on by having an accomplice commit the act for him.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t fit, Nicola. But we’ll explore it, anyway. Cybercrime Unit is doing a forensic search of his hard drive. Maybe we’ll find something there. But I think Reisch was just a poor schmuck who had been dealt the worst hand you can imagine. He just decided to throw that hand in. Or that’s my take on it, at least.’

  ‘What about the State Prosecutor’s Office? Are they closer to budging on warrants?’ asked Henk Hermann.

  ‘We simply don’t have enough on the Pharos Project. To be honest, the State Prosecutor’s Office is reluctant to take on the legal might of the Korn-Pharos Corporation without being totally sure of their ground.’ Fabel sighed. ‘I don’t blame them. We are talking about something with the resources of a small country behind it. We have to get more on Pharos. And something evidentially solid; not more coincidences.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ said Henk. ‘Usually we have an individual, a single person, at the top of our suspects list. But now, with all this, we’ve got a group of people, a pretty amorphous and anonymous group of people at that. It’s more like corporate crime.’

  Fabel stared at Henk. So long that the junior officer started to look uncomfortable and eventually laughed nervously and said. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re right, Henk,’ said Fabel, animated. He stood up and grabbed the file that Menke had given him. ‘Crimes aren’t committed by corporate bodies. I read somewhere in here …’ He flicked determinedly through the pages of the BfV report. ‘Here it is … one of the cult’s philosophies stresses the importance of the egregore, the groupmind.’

  Fabel started to read from the file: ‘“… the egregore has been a concept in occultism and mystical thinking for more than a century, but the Pharos Project has adopted it in the more contemporary sense from current business and commercial law usage, where corporate bodies are seen to have a single mind or corporate culture, at least in terms of corporate responsibility and liability. Like all destructive cults, the Pharos Project seeks to diminish the sense of the individual and increase the concept of a singular groupmind. To achieve this, members of the Project are subjected to psychological programming over protracted periods as well as having to follow a highly disciplined, hierarchical and structured daily routine. Part of the creation of a sense of corporateness is the exclusive use of English as the principal language of communication, something the Pharos Project has borrowed from large German corporations who conduct all senior management meetings in English, even if all present are native German speakers. Another element of the Pharos Project’s corporation-like culture is the wearing of uniforms by all its adherents. Because of federal restrictions on the use of uniforms by political or quasi-political groups, the Pharos Project has employed the simple device of forcing all members to wear identical business suits: pale grey for the rank and file, dark grey for Consolidators, and black for senior figures in the organisation. This avoids any difficulty with federal regulation and allows an element of anonymity, as the outfits supplied differ in no significant manner from normal business apparel. …”’

  Fabel snapped shut the file. ‘Werner, can you get onto Astrid Bremer and ask her if she can give us a detailed background of the grey fibre she found at Müller-Voigt’s place? She told me that it was particularly unusual because it was entirely synthetic. I’ll bet that the Pharos Project buys its uniforms in bulk from some corporate-wear wholesaler. Anna, I need you to sweet-talk your contact in the State Prosecutor’s office and tell him we need a limited search-and-seizure warrant for a couple of jackets from the Pharos Project for a comparison.’ Fabel checked himself and looked across to Nicola Brüggemann.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said without a hint of antagonism. ‘It’s your department.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Fabel, then frowned, like someone trying to remember where they had left their car keys. ‘That woman down by the docks – she was wearing a dark grey business suit.’

  ‘God, Jan,’ said Brüggemann, ‘that’s a bit of a stretch. A business suit is a business suit.’

  ‘Maybe so. But I’m pretty convinced that she was a Consolidator. It’s all beginning to come together. The Network Killer murders are linked to the Pharos Project. But I can’t for the life of me work out why.’ Fabel picked up his jacket from the back of the chair.

  ‘Nicola, I’ll leave you to it. I need to go out.’

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘I’m going to take a North Sea lighthouse tour.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Susanne was still at the Institute for Legal Medicine when Fabel phoned her from his car as he headed out, once more, towards the Altes Land and Stade. This time he avoided the town and headed out along a ribbon of road that ran parallel to the coast but was shielded from i
t by the ripple of dyke that ran along close to the water’s edge to Fabel’s right. To his left the land was divided up into long narrow fields, pale green, dark green or muted gold; each contained by the type of Knick turf wall Müller-Voigt had talked about. It really did have the look of a patchwork quilt, but one that had been ironed impeccably flat except for the ripple of the waterside dyke at its hem.

  It took Fabel another hour or so to reach the Pharos. He actually pulled over to the side of the road and got out to admire it from a distance. The light was beginning to fade and the cloud cover dulled things even more, but even with that Fabel could see that Müller-Voigt had been right: the Pharos was a truly remarkable piece of architecture. There was a lighthouse, about four or five storeys high, against the flank of the new building. The lighthouse was the traditional North Sea German type: not slender but solid, squat and square-edged with a large lantern gallery criss-crossed with iron. It had clearly undergone a major renovation and looked bright, almost as if it had just been built rather than having stood there, resolutely planted in its landscape, for more than a century and a half.

  But it was the main building attached to the original lighthouse that really impressed Fabel. It was made up of three sections; modules, almost. The section against whose side the lighthouse was set was a long two-storey block. Clearly the intention had been not to obscure the view of the original lighthouse from either direction. This section extended fifty metres or so towards the water’s edge; then a five-storey block, with the profile of a massive parallelogram – a rhombohedron, Fabel suddenly remembered from school mathematics – took the Pharos to the water and jutted out over it. This section was outlined by a heavy reinforced-concrete beamed frame, but the flanks of the building were all glass. The third section was really an extension of the top floor of the building and projected out over the Elbe, supported by two rows of piles driven into the river bed. From the roof of the suspended level a pale blue needle of laser light, now visible in the twilight, pierced the clouds above. The light of the Pharos.