A fear of dark water jf-6

by Craig Russell

  ‘So what happens? Am I suspended?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Steinbach.

  ‘Then I insist on leading the Muller-Voigt case.’ Fabel still could not believe he was referring to the man he had sat and talked with just two nights before as a case. ‘That is my job, after all. And I have a personal stake in this…’

  ‘But that’s exactly the point,’ said van Heiden. ‘It’s precisely because of your personal involvement that we have to place the case in the hands of another officer.’

  ‘I suggest we all head out to the crime scene,’ said Menke. ‘There’s clearly more to this than meets the eye. And, in my opinion, Herr Fabel hasn’t compromised himself: someone else has deliberately gone out of their way to remove him from the investigation.’

  Fabel looked at Menke: he was surprised that the intelligence man had spoken up for him.

  ‘I agree,’ said Werner. ‘This is all crap, the thing with the text messages and this woman with a victim’s identity. It’s all engineered to get Jan off the case. Unless you really believe that he is a suspect. In which case you can suspend me as well.’

  Fabel shot Werner a warning look: Van Heiden, who now glowered at Werner, was by-the-book enough to take him up on his suggestion.

  ‘You lead the investigation, Werner,’ said Fabel. ‘The Criminal Director is right. I’m too close to all of this.’ He turned to van Heiden. ‘But I still want to see the Muller-Voigt murder scene.’

  Fabel sat in the back of the Mercedes that took them out to the Altes Land. Werner followed. Stuck in the back of the car next to Menke, watching a huge sky above a billiard-table landscape slide by, Fabel still felt more than a little like a suspect and found himself resenting the intelligence man’s presence.

  ‘What did Muller-Voigt say to you about this supposedly missing woman?’ asked Menke.

  Fabel remained quiet for a moment. Long enough to make the point that he resented Menke questioning him.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Menke into the void.

  Fabel sighed. ‘She’s not just supposed missing, she’s a supposed woman. Muller-Voigt told me that he said that he could find no trace of her existence. He asked me to investigate because he felt that if he were to go through official channels he would look like he was losing his mind.’

  ‘You do realise,’ said Menke, ‘that this all ties up. Your encounter with a woman who shows you identification that belongs to someone already dead, your problems with electronic messages disappearing.’

  Van Heiden twisted around in the front seat, edged his broad shoulders so he could turn to Menke. ‘If you have some information we should know, Herr Menke,’ he said, ‘then I strongly suggest you share it with us.’

  Menke shrugged. ‘I was just making an observation, that’s all.’

  Holger Brauner and his team had been at the Muller-Voigt murder scene for some time and when Fabel entered the house with Menke, van Heiden and Werner, Anna Wolff was standing in the lounge, talking to a uniformed officer. She came over and spoke directly to Fabel, pointedly ignoring van Heiden.

  ‘Muller-Voigt is over there…’ She indicated the seating area where Fabel had talked with the politician two days earlier. Fabel could see a scattering of books and magazines on the floor next to the coffee table. Muller-Voigt’s feet were just visible: he had obviously fallen between the sofa and the coffee table. There was an arc of blood spatter visible on the leather of the sofa. ‘You want to see?’

  Anna handed Fabel blue stretch overshoes and a pair of latex gloves but ignored van Heiden. The Criminal Director began to fume and Fabel shot Anna a warning look. She handed the Criminal Director a set. Anna was an officer of great ability and promise, but Fabel knew her very obvious problem with authority meant she would never be promoted much above her current rank. It frustrated him but somewhere deep inside he was heartened by these little displays: maybe her rebellion was not at an end after all.

  ‘Signs of struggle?’ asked Fabel as they approached the body.

  ‘Minimal,’ said Anna. ‘It looks like he knew his attacker. There’s no sign of forced entry and all this…’ she indicated the scattered books and magazines ‘… could have been simply when he fell, or at the most after a very brief struggle.’

  Fabel nodded a greeting to Holger Brauner. ‘Can I have a look?’

  ‘So long as you don’t contaminate my crime scene,’ said Brauner, with a grin.

  Fabel looked down at Muller-Voigt’s body and Muller-Voigt looked back at him with an unblinking stare and an expression of surprise. It was not really an expression, Fabel knew, just the slack-jawed stare of eased rigor mortis. One side of the politician’s head, above the right temple, was badly deformed, as if dented, and the hair was parted by an ugly deep laceration where he had been hit with a heavy object. There was a halo of dark, thickly viscous blood around Muller-Voigt’s head. Fabel felt something unpleasant flutter dark wings in his gut when he realised that Muller-Voigt was wearing the same clothes as he had been the last time Fabel had seen him.

  ‘How long has he been dead, roughly?’ Fabel asked Brauner.

  ‘He’s not fresh,’ said the forensics chief. ‘More than a day. Maybe two.’

  Fabel tensed.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked van Heiden over Fabel’s shoulder.

  Brauner gave a small laugh and looked at Fabel quizzically before turning to van Heiden. ‘I said the victim’s been dead for more than a day. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I met with the victim the night before last,’ explained Fabel in a dull voice. ‘Here.’

  ‘Ah…’ Brauner said and frowned.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Fabel turned to where Menke was standing. ‘Didn’t you say Muller-Voigt missed a meeting yesterday but got in touch to make his apologies?’

  ‘Yes… that…’ Menke said ponderously. ‘The thing is, we don’t have the email any more. Or, for the moment, any of our other emails. I’m afraid your concerns about email security were right, after all. You see, the message sent from Muller-Voigt’s computer had corrupted our entire system. It would appear to have been infected with the Klabautermann Virus. And, of course, an email doesn’t mean he was still alive. His killer could have sent it from his account.’

  ‘Muller-Voigt told me that his computer had been infected,’ said Fabel. ‘But he had sent it off for cleaning and repair. He told me that the computer he had was new and clean. And that he was using a new account to send emails. So I’d say your infected emails didn’t come from him.’

  ‘Herr Meyer…’ van Heiden called over to Werner. ‘I’d like you to take sole charge of this investigation.’ He turned back to Fabel, ‘I think you can understand, given the position we’re in.’

  ‘As far as I can see,’ said Fabel, ‘I’m the only one in a position.’

  ‘You said you saw a picture of this mysterious missing woman when you were last here,’ said van Heiden. ‘Where is it?’

  Fabel pointed to the digital picture frame. ‘It’s on that.’

  Leaning over the sofa, Brauner reached and picked up the remote control, handing it to Fabel. Van Heiden took it instead, frowning at the images.

  ‘These are all scenic photographs, as far as I can see,’ said the Criminal Director.

  ‘It’s a digital picture frame,’ said Fabel. ‘It stores hundreds of photographs. May I?’

  A new image appeared every time Fabel pressed the frame’s button. Seascapes, lots of seascapes, some images of the countryside around the Altes Land, several littoral scenes, many with lighthouses. Nothing with Muller-Voigt in it. None of the other photographs he had seen when the politician had flicked through them. Before they had viewed half of the photographs, Fabel already knew that he would not find any photograph of Meliha Yazar.

  ‘And you say that you definitely saw the woman Muller-Voigt said had gone missing on this thing?’ asked van Heiden after they had gone through all the images.

  ‘Without a doubt. Someone has deleted it. An
d a lot of other images.’

  ‘Just like the text message you say you got about the location of the victim the other day.’

  ‘Just like…’ Fabel handed the digital frame back to Brauner. ‘You’d better bag that up. Whoever did Muller-Voigt has been playing with his toys.’

  Brauner nodded. ‘By the way,’ he said, reaching down and picking up a large plastic evidence bag from the floor, ‘this would appear to be our murder weapon. Bloody ugly thing, if you ask me. Anyway, it has blood, hair and skin on the base and its weight and form seem consistent with the damage to his skull. We’ll take it back for a full fingerprint check. What’s up, Jan?’

  Fabel stared at the evidence bag and its heavy, soiled contents in Brauner’s hand. In that moment he felt his career, his life unravelling.

  ‘It’s a bronze sculpture of Rahab. A Hebrew sea devil.’ Fabel’s voice was dull. Distant. He struggled for a moment to remember Muller-Voigt’s exact words. ‘ Rahab was the creator of storms and the father of chaos. And I think I’d better tell you now that you will get a good set of prints from it. Mine.’

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When he was eight years old Roman Kraxner’s parents had taken him to see the family doctor, who had shaken his head and frowned a lot and referred them on to a child psychiatrist who had not shaken his head or frowned at all. In fact, Roman had not noticed much of any kind of expression at all on the specialist’s face. Instead of frowning and head-shaking, the psychiatrist had discussed Roman with his parents in a disjointed, almost incoherent way. Roman recalled that about him; that and the heavy, black-rimmed spectacles he had worn. To hide his eyes, Roman had thought; to hide them so he didn’t have to look anyone else in the eye. And with this realisation, all Roman’s anxieties had gone. And so had those of his parents: the psychiatrist had reassured Roman’s parents that their son did not have any profound learning difficulty or mental instability.

  ‘Your son has a schizotypal personality,’ the doctor had said, fiddling with his black framed glasses and not engaging in eye contact. ‘But he… it’s not that… he doesn’t suffer from schizotypal personality disorder, or schizophrenia… no… we have also ruled out Asperger’s. But… he does… he’s got… he displays blunted affect and excessive introspection.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Roman’s father had asked.

  ‘Roman… well, he lacks a developed ability to function… to, erm

  … he will struggle to get on well socially. He doesn’t really understand others. But all this is typical of a schizotypal personality and it does not mean that he cannot enjoy a full and successful life. There are compensations: he is clearly highly intelligent and a schizotypal personality can manifest itself in an extremely imaginative and creative mind. A great many composers, artists, writers, mathematicians, physicists… in many walks of life it is an advantage.’

  Roman had sat there and wondered why the incoherent physician, hiding behind the heavy glasses, had not added psychiatrist to the list.

  His parents had never fully understood the implications of what the psychiatrist had said. After a period of reassurance, the old doubts had begun to creep back into their heads: the psychiatrist had said schizotypal, hadn’t he? And that sounded a lot like schizophrenic. In the meantime, Roman had blossomed from a strange child with no friends into an even stranger adolescent with no friends. It was not so much that others avoided him — although that certainly was the case — it was more that he avoided others. At school, there had been only one person with whom he had anything approaching a friendship: Niels Freese. But Niels had been even stranger than Roman and had been taken out of the school for long periods of therapy. Still, when they had spent time together, they had recognised that each, in his own way, saw the world completely differently from their peers.

  After Niels had been permanently transferred to a special school, Roman had shunned any kind of intimacy or contact. Not that he had to do a lot of shunning: his classmates either ignored or avoided him. Those who did not tormented him.

  When puberty had come along, Roman became aware that his rejection of intimacy was even more profound than he had guessed himself. The concomitant storm of hormones had failed to stir much in the way of sexual desire, for either gender. The idea of physical intimacy with another was not so much abhorrent as superfluous. He genuinely could not see much point in it.

  Roman realised that he was not entirely asexual, however. He found that any tingles of arousal he felt were connected to girls and women who were totally beyond the already corpulent Roman; for the only thing that stirred anything like desire in him was true beauty. Perfect symmetry, perfect skin, perfect figure. But, even then, the level of his arousal was muted. He had often wondered if it had been their very unattainability that had drawn him to these women: the knowledge that such desires were unfulfillable and could never result in actual physical contact.

  Roman had sunk deeper and deeper into a world of self-involvement. He rarely left his room and spent most of his time reading, listening to music and, most of all, daydreaming. Daydreaming played a major role in his life: fantasies in which a slimmer, happier, better-looking alter-ego Roman was popular and rich and physically attractive. It was not that he had been unhappy with his life: withdrawal into a better world of his own construction was what he wanted to do.

  Then, one day, his life changed for ever.

  His parents had worried about their only child. Fretted about him. They worried about his ballooning weight and they worried about him squandering his obvious intellectual gifts. He found out later that it had been his mother’s idea to buy him a computer for his fourteenth birthday. Suddenly, a whole new world of possibilities opened up for him. The carefully constructed fantasy world he had built now had an environment outside his head.

  His parents were, of course, devastated by his decision not to go to university. But it was also, in a way a relief: they had never been able to envisage their overweight, painfully shy, reclusive son functioning in a campus environment. And it soon became clear that he had a real and marketable talent for designing computer games; he found a job with a software design company which seemed more interested in the games Roman had devised in his bedroom than in any paper qualification.

  It had not lasted. Roman’s inability to relate to other people meant that, despite his clear talent, he was let go from the software company. There had been another similar job but that, too, had not lasted. Then a less well-paid job. Finally the job in the computer store, selling Macs and PCs to morons who asked continually ‘How much memory does it have?’ without having the slightest idea what the question, or its answer, really meant.

  Stuck at home with his parents, Roman had found it impossible to cope with the weary sadness in their eyes every time they looked at him. They had been good to him, however, and whenever he needed cash for a new piece of computer equipment they seemed to find it. Then, one afternoon that had become evening that had become night as he had lost hours in idle surfing, he had found his way into a secure company site. It had been easy and he had not meant to do anything, but he found himself able to make online payments to suppliers. So he did. Not much, and it was not technically fraud, because Roman in no way benefited personally from the transaction, but he had done it because he could do it. He had returned the next day to find that the security settings had remained unaltered, so he put the money he had moved back to where it belonged. Roman had realised that if the discrepancy was discovered, then the IP records of people accessing the site would be examined. Before he attempted anything like it again he would have to camouflage his presence.

  It took Roman six months to set up his elaborate system of bot herders, shell accounts, proxy servers and bouncers to conceal his identity. The first theft was large: over thirty thousand dollars which he immediately transferred to the account of an environmental charity. No direct benefit yet. He was still working at the computer store and had to do his real work in the
evenings and at night; it took him another three months to set up the elaborate web of bank and credit-card accounts around the world, through which he could channel the income from his fraud. He monitored transactions on the account from which he had stolen the money. It took the company a month to uncover the theft and another month to work out that it had been committed online; only then did they change and tighten their security.

  It was then that Roman knew the course his life must take.

  Of course, there was the risk of detection. Arrest. Conviction. Prison.

  But, as someone whose expansive intellectual architecture was already confined by the dragging mass of his own body, there was a limit to how much a threat of confinement to a cell would be to the eremite Roman. And, of course, if he were to be sent to Billwerder prison in Hamburg he knew they ran computer training programmes. Even if they did catch him, they would never be able to track down all the money he had sequestered. He would leave prison a rich man. The risk was worth it. Worth it for the reward, worth it for the thrill.

  His parents had been surprised when Roman announced that he was working as a freelance developer for a major virtual-reality games-design company. He showed them their website and the letters of contract they had sent. The website and the letters, of course, had been created by Roman himself. But they had satisfied his parents that all the new equipment that arrived was being supplied by his employers. They were delighted when Roman eventually announced that he had enough money to find himself a small flat somewhere, but it would be best if he rented it in their name. To alleviate their concerns he had given them a deposit of eight thousand euros.

  Since then, Roman had amassed a personal fortune, stashed around the world, of somewhere in the region of four million euros. He knew he would never use a fraction of that amount: he could only access his funds in small bites and, in any case, Roman knew that the health problems associated with his obesity meant he would be lucky to live to see his thirtieth birthday. Setting up an automated transfer system meant that, if he were to die and could not enter the appropriate cancellation code at the end of the month, one million euros would be transferred to his parents’ account. He had left a note with his other papers that would explain that he had been paid massive royalties for one of the games he had developed and that the accumulated proceeds were to go to them.