A fear of dark water jf-6

by Craig Russell

  ‘Well, Anna is. I’m going to have to oversee things here. We won’t be able to hold anyone, but the warrants mean we can get their computers into Kroeger’s department. We might just get lucky. I’m also going to give my cellphone to Kroeger.’

  ‘So he can trace who sent you the text?’ asked van Heiden.

  ‘Not quite…’ Fabel sighed. ‘I can’t find the text any more. I think I may have deleted it. Accidentally. But I don’t see how.’

  ‘I see…’ said van Heiden. It was a habit of van Heiden’s to drop an elliptical I see into conversations with his officers. It was up to you to interpret what lay in the ellipsis: I see… that I’ve got the wrong man for the job; I see… that you’ve really screwed up this time.

  ‘And we’re just assuming that the text is significant,’ said Fabel. ‘It could be a pure coincidence.’

  Van Heiden gave Fabel a look: the kind of look he would have given someone who walked into the Presidium and claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

  ‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘It would be a hell of a coincidence. I’ll get Kroeger onto it. You said you were looking for me this morning… why?’

  ‘It was just that, after our discussion this morning, I thought that I should update you on that car-burning attack in the Schanzenviertel. I’ve just had word that Fottinger died during the night. So we’ve got an unlawful killing, Fabel, which makes it your baby. But we may have a real job pursuing it as homicide, given that Fottinger was inside the cafe when the arson attack was carried out. He came out to the fire that killed him.’

  ‘That was maybe part of the plan — to set light to the car to draw him out into the street,’ said Fabel. ‘But I’m guessing that that’s not the only the reason you came all the way down here to see me.’

  ‘No — or, at least, not entirely. I wanted to ask you if Berthold Muller-Voigt said anything to you when you left the meeting together yesterday.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why?’

  Van Heiden placed a hand on Fabel’s elbow and steered him a few steps further up the towpath, away from the crime scene and out of Werner’s hearing.

  ‘Listen, Jan. You know the rumours about Muller-Voigt’s past. The press accusations about his possible involvement with extreme leftist terrorists in the early eighties.’

  ‘I don’t think he had anything to do with that. I believe his involvement was never anything than purely political,’ said Fabel. He didn’t want to tell van Heiden that he had delved deeply into the politician’s past as part of the investigation that had first brought him into contact with Muller-Voigt.

  ‘Whether he had or not, I am uncomfortable with some of the information I have to share with him as part of the GlobalConcern Hamburg security committee. Whatever his background, Muller-Voigt is a conniving, manipulative swine. I know that you and he have had dealings in the past — I was just concerned that he was perhaps trying to get information out of you.’

  ‘Information about what?’

  ‘I don’t really know. All I do know is that, before you arrived, Muller-Voigt had been very persistent with Menke. He kept asking him about what extreme environmental groups the BfV were watching. Naturally, given Muller-Voigt’s colourful history, Menke wasn’t keen to share anything more than he had to.’

  ‘But Muller-Voigt is a senior member of the Hamburg government,’ said Fabel. ‘Whatever he was or wasn’t in the past, he is an elected and appointed public official. I would have thought we should be cooperating as much as possible.’

  ‘Of course…’ Van Heiden looked a little taken aback. ‘Of course we are cooperating. But Muller-Voigt’s questions were… I don’t know… they were irrelevant.’

  ‘Well, I can promise you that Muller-Voigt didn’t discuss anything like that with me in the lift. I got out at the Murder Commission, so we didn’t get a chance to talk much.’

  ‘Right…’ said van Heiden absently, rubbing his chin for a moment. ‘Right… I just wanted to ask. Muller-Voigt can be quite the slippery customer.’

  Fabel didn’t know why he hadn’t told van Heiden what had really passed between him and Muller-Voigt. He just felt he had to keep it to himself, at least for the moment. He had, after all, promised the politician to keep everything unofficial and strictly to himself.

  After van Heiden had left, Fabel supervised the management of the crime scene as he had before with so many crime scenes over the years. Holger Brauner arrived with his team and with his usual inappropriate good cheer examined the body, Tesa-taped anything extraneous on the victim’s skin, placed numbered tent cards, took photographs, zippered the remains of the young woman in black vinyl and removed her from the scene. The uniformed police kept the growing crowd of rubberneckers at bay. Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner turned up at the scene, took statements from the fisherman and started a door-to-door in the immediate area.

  It was the carefully rehearsed choreography of the beginning of a new murder enquiry. And Fabel directed the dance in the faint grey drizzle. No horror this time; no dismemberment or stench of putrefaction. Just the sadness of a young life lost.

  Another thing Fabel had never learned to get used to.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Fabel made it back to the Presidium just in time to catch the start of Anna Wolff’s briefing. He and Werner had left Glasmacher and Hechtner dealing with the follow-up at the crime scene.

  Henk Hermann was also just on his way into the briefing room.

  ‘Hi, Chef,’ he said as he saw Fabel approach. ‘I checked out that address with the housing authority. There’s no record of any Meliha Yazar as a tenant and it’s only been vacant a month. If she exists, she was never there.’

  ‘She exists, all right,’ said Fabel. ‘And that means she has to have lived somewhere. Thanks, anyway, Henk.’

  ‘By the way, you know that wash-up on the Fischmarkt… the torso?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I didn’t know Schleswig-Holstein have an interest in it too,’ said Henk. ‘What’s their involvement?’

  ‘Henk,’ said Fabel impatiently, looking through the open door to the conference room, which was already filling with officers, ‘I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about.’

  ‘There was someone from the Polizei Schleswig-Holstein — Kiel division, I think — up at the mortuary to look at the Jane Doe torso. A Commissar…’ Henk frowned for a moment as he forced the name into his recall. ‘A Commissar Honer, I think. He showed them his ID and said he’d cleared it with you.’

  Fabel stared at Henk for a moment as he processed the information. ‘Get a uniform unit up there right now to get a description or better still a shot from CCTV. I gave no one the okay to view the body, Schleswig-Holstein or not.’

  When Fabel walked into the Murder Commission briefing room it was packed with uniforms and detectives and Anna had started to match teams with addresses.

  ‘I thought you could do with an extra couple of bodies,’ Fabel said to Anna. ‘Your show, though.’ He turned to address the rest of the room. ‘Just to let you all know that the ante’s been upped. We have just found another body. This one really does look like it’s the Network Killer’s work.’

  A collective groan.

  ‘Okay, okay…’ said Anna over the voices. ‘Listen up. If we’ve got another vic then it means we’re going to be under even more pressure to get this guy. We’re working on four addresses specifically. These aren’t the ones we had originally planned to hit…’

  ‘Oh?’ interrupted Fabel.

  ‘Chief Commissar Kroeger’s been back in touch,’ explained Anna. ‘His team are still working on the victims’ computers and cellphones, but they’ve been able to recover some partial exchanges with four males common to them all. And all on one website. Well, more than a website…’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, these weird sites where people have a kind of alternative existence. A virtual life, really. Run a farm without the smell, build a busine
ss empire in a fictional world, that kind of crap.’

  ‘I know of them, yes,’ said Fabel. He knew of them but couldn’t understand them; why people would want to waste so much of their time living in a fiction.

  ‘Well, this one is called Virtual Dimension. It’s part social networking site and part real-time virtual-life site. It claims to “consolidate realities”.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean? Why can’t these people speak plain German?’

  Anna gave a don’t-shoot-the-messenger shrug. ‘According to the Virtual Dimension site, it deliberately merges this wacky virtual world with the real world. How it does that, I don’t know. It all sounds pretty flaky to me. Anyway, at least two of the women have interacted with a number of men, if they are men in real life, on Virtual Dimension. And of these men, four have had chatroom conversations elsewhere with one of the other victims.’

  ‘Mmm…’ Fabel nodded thoughtfully. ‘It sounds promising.’

  ‘Oh.’ Something had clearly just occurred to Anna. ‘Talking about virtual realities, that river cop we met down at the wash-up scene was looking for you.’

  ‘Kreysig?’

  ‘No, the other one, his deputy. Tramberger. He’s been in touch asking if we still want him to run the data through his “virtual Elbe” computer model.’

  ‘It can’t do any harm. Could you check with Holger Brauner and get the weight of the body plus a ballpark on how long it was in the water? Send that off to Tramberger and see if he can do anything with it.’

  ‘That’ll keep him happy. He’s very proud of his toy. Funny, he doesn’t strike me as the computer type.’

  ‘Who isn’t, these days? Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah. I made a few enquiries about the Pharos Project and I’ve got people coming back to me. But I’ve had my hands full with organising these raids. You say you’re happy to take one?’

  ‘Sure. What have you got?’

  Anna handed Fabel a file and a warrant from the State Prosecutor’s Office. ‘It’s an address out Billstedt way. Between Horn and Schiffbek. The IP address belongs to a Johann Reisch.’

  ‘Because he pays the bills, it doesn’t mean he’s the only person using the computer.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘According to the census, Johann Reisch, forty-five, is the sole occupier at this address. And this…’ she handed Fabel a printout of a web page, ‘… is Herr Reisch’s online persona.’ Fabel looked at the picture. A young man two decades away from his forty-fifth birthday, wearing sunglasses and with his muscled torso summer-shirtless, smiled at the camera under a foreign sun. The information on the page gave the name Thorsten66. ‘You happy to take this one?’

  ‘Okay,’ Fabel took the paperwork from her. ‘This is your show… Chefin.’

  Schiffbek lay to the east of the city centre. The address Anna had given Fabel and Werner was in an immaculate street of terraced houses near the cemetery.

  Fabel parked at the end of the street, having ordered the marked police car to pull in behind him: there was no point in giving advance warning of their presence. The two uniforms followed Fabel and Werner up the street towards the house. As they approached, Fabel noticed that the tiny garden at the front was neat but had the minimum of plantings in it, as if to keep it as easy to maintain as possible. He also noticed that a ramp ran up the side of the steps.

  Werner rang the doorbell. A short woman with spiky blonde hair and glasses answered. She had a name badge pinned to the protective tabard apron over her clothes; it was a Hamburg State ID that told Fabel that she was an accredited care worker. She looked from Fabel to Werner and then to the uniformed officers behind them with a distinct lack of interest.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Polizei Hamburg,’ said Fabel. ‘We have a warrant to enter these premises and interview Herr Johann Reisch.’

  ‘Herr Reisch?’ She frowned. ‘What on earth can you want with Herr Reisch?’

  ‘I take it you’re not Frau Reisch?’ Fabel said, looking at the ID badge.

  The woman laughed. ‘There is no Frau Reisch. There hasn’t been for years. Cleared off. I think you better come in.’

  She led them into the house and along a short, bright hallway and into a living room with French windows that opened up onto a small patio at the rear of the house. A man sat behind a table that had a laptop computer sitting on it. He looked up slowly, his head moving stiffly. Fabel noticed that there was no expression of surprise or shock. No expression of any kind.

  ‘Herr Reisch?’ said Fabel. ‘I am Principal Chief Commissar Fabel of the Hamburg Murder Commission. I have a warrant here to seize any computer equipment.’

  ‘You can’t take his computer,’ the woman in the tabard protested. ‘It’s all he’s got.’

  ‘This warrant says I can.’ Fabel held up the paperwork. ‘Please stay out of this, or you could…’ The sentence died on Fabel’s lips. He noticed that Reisch was sitting in a motorised wheelchair, and that his head was held up by a neck brace. He returned Fabel’s gaze with watery eyes and the same lack of expression.

  ‘It’s all he has…’ The care worker continued to protest. ‘It’s his entire world.’

  ‘Can he speak?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Yes, I can speak,’ said Reisch. His voice was thin and he seemed to gasp for breath between words. ‘For now, anyway. But that will go soon, too. But I can speak and I am here. So you don’t need to refer to me in the third person.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Herr Reisch. Is this your only computer?’

  ‘Yes. Why do you have to take it away? Frau Rossing’s right, I’d be quite lost without it. There must be some kind of mistake…’

  ‘No mistake, Herr Reisch. It’s just that you’re one of many people who have…’ Fabel paused and turned to Werner, who nodded and steered Frau Rossing and the two uniformed officers out of the room. ‘You have been in a chatroom and have interacted with two women who were subsequently murdered.’

  ‘This Network Killer thing?’ Reisch’s speech remained punctuated by gasps, which robbed his question of any intonation of surprise or shock.

  Fabel showed him the printout of Thorsten66. ‘Is this the…’ Fabel struggled for the right word. ‘… the persona you use on the internet?’

  ‘On that particular website, and a couple of others, yes.’ Reisch paused. ‘You must think me pathetic.’

  ‘I don’t make judgements like that, Herr Reisch. I can’t begin to understand what it must be like to be in your situation. May I ask what has caused your condition?’

  ‘Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.’ Again, small gasps between words. ‘It’s a form of motor neurone disease.’

  ‘Is it treatable?’

  ‘There are so few things doctors can tell you with any certainty, Herr Fabel, but I’m in the fortunate position to have been given some absolutes about my condition. It is one hundred per cent untreatable and one hundred per cent fatal. My neural system is shutting down, bit by bit, function by function. Within the next year I will be unable to speak any more. Six months after that I will no longer be able to swallow my own spit or breathe unaided. I will suffocate to death. And do you know the laugh? The sweet irony of it all? I will still be fully mentally alert. A healthy mind trapped in a decaying body.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Must you take my computer?’ asked Reisch. ‘I think you can understand that it means more to me than to most people. I spend hours on it each day. It’s my only window on the world and I won’t have it for much longer.’

  ‘How do you operate it?’ asked Fabel. ‘I mean, given your condition?’

  ‘I still have some movement in my hands, but not much. My computer is set up for voice recognition. I can control it by giving it spoken commands. Eventually, when I lose my ability to speak articulately, I will lose that too.’

  Fabel looked down at the printout. Reisch’s alter ego. Fantasy self.

  ‘You’re wondering why…’ said Reisch. ‘Why do I pretend to be young and healthy
? It’s simple: when I am on these sites, on the web, that’s who I become. I picked that photograph because he looks a little like I did at that age. He has the insolent look to him that I had. Once.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘No, you don’t. I’m not criticising you, but you can’t even begin to understand. Not until you’ve spent a minute in this body.’

  ‘You had contact with two of the four women who have been murdered. You even suggested meeting one of them. Why would you do that? How could you do that?’

  Reisch made an odd rattling sound that took Fabel aback. Then he realised it was the disabled man’s attempt at a laugh. ‘I did meet with these women. I met with dozens of women. Sometimes partied all night. But not here. Not in the real world. When you read messages where we were arranging to meet, all of the venues are inside Virtual Dimension. It was all part of the fantasy. Of course I know that I could never go out into the physical world and meet the women I talked to on the internet, but for as long as I was there, in that world, I believed anything was possible.’

  ‘But you never asked any of them to come here? To visit you at home?’

  ‘Never. Now you’re proving that you don’t understand. I exist in two universes. Distinct and separate. I would never bring them together.’ Reisch paused again. A pause of short, shallow breaths. Listening to it gave Fabel a feeling of tightness in his chest.

  ‘Do you know,’ continued Reisch, ‘that in the near future people like me will probably be plugged into a virtual world for as long as they wish? An alternate reality where they will be able to live a normal life.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be real life,’ said Fabel. ‘I think I’d rather be disabled in the real world than live out some kind of fantasy surrounded by people who don’t exist.’

  ‘But that’s the thing,’ said Reisch. ‘It wouldn’t be like that. It would be populated by others like myself: all escaping whatever was wrong with them and interacting with each other. Real people in an unreal world. But, of course, that will be too late for me. But that’s why I was signed into Virtual Dimension. It was as close as I could get to that type of alternate reality.’