A fear of dark water jf-6

by Craig Russell

  Fabel thought about what she had said; it was almost exactly how the waiter had described Fottinger. ‘What do you know about Herr Fottinger’s business?’

  ‘Just what I found out through working on its website. Environmental technologies. Daniel was involved in all types of carbon-capture technology. He was supposed to be involved with this GlobalConcern Hamburg summit — you knew that, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’d heard.’ Fabel paused for a moment. ‘What about Frau Fottinger? Was there ever any suggestion that she knew about her husband’s relationship with you?’

  ‘What? Hell hath no fury? No, I don’t think Kirstin Fottinger paid for someone to torch Daniel’s car because she knew about us. Trust me, she’s not that engaged.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In some ways she was very like Daniel, but more so, if you know what I mean. Daniel’s wife was the real environmental freak. And I mean extreme. She’s a strict vegan and believes that we should make zero impact on the planet. She got involved in some group with weird ideas. I mean really weird ideas. Daniel was involved with them too, but not in the same way she was. I think she dragged him into it to start with. The sad thing is I think that at one time, not so long ago, Daniel really loved her. The way he put it to me was that she simply disappeared… faded away. I don’t think he would ever have got involved with me if she hadn’t gone all weird. The funny thing is I sensed the same thing happening to Daniel. He was fading away. Becoming weird.’

  ‘Group? What kind of group?’ asked Fabel, although he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

  ‘More of a cult,’ said Kempfert. ‘They call themselves Pharos, or something.’

  Fabel nodded slowly, looking down at his notebook. A deliberate movement to conceal from Victoria Kempfert the significance of what she had just told him.

  ‘You say he was involved with this group too, but not to the same degree?’

  ‘Well, yes. But, from what I could gather, they didn’t believe in degrees of involvement. You had to give yourself totally to Pharos. It creeped me out a bit. More than a bit. Daniel was a bright guy. He had great ideas but didn’t have the money to back them up. His wife was loaded, though. She bankrolled him to start with but he built up his business to become a leader in the field. The price he had to pay was to become a member of Pharos. He used to joke about it.’ Kempfert frowned. ‘Then he stopped. In fact, he stopped joking about anything much.’

  ‘He changed?’

  ‘He was changing. I told him to get out while he could. I could tell that a big part of him really wanted to, but every time I met him it was like that part of him was getting smaller. As if a little more of his personality — a little more self-will — had been sucked out of him. That’s what I meant when I said it was all getting tiresome.’ She paused. ‘Listen, Herr Fabel, I wasn’t that much into Daniel. Even at the start. It was fun — he was fun — to begin with, but then it all got a little tired. And the weird stuff with this group that he and his wife were involved with.’

  ‘You wanted out?’

  ‘I told him at lunch. Right before that happened to him. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?’

  ‘You weren’t to know, Frau Kempfert. How did he take it?’

  ‘Well. So well, in fact, I could have let it damage my ego. It was as it he didn’t care. Actually, more like he was relieved.’

  As Fabel crossed the street to his car, he did not need to turn to know that Victoria Kempfert was watching him from her window. She had been all prickles; defiant to the point of hostility. It was, he knew, part of the denial process that followed a trauma such as the one she had experienced. But there was more to it. There was something she had wanted to tell Fabel but had been too unsure or afraid to voice. Instead she had ring-fenced it with verbal barbs. He took his cellphone out and hit the speed dial for the Murder Commission, before realising that this was the replacement phone and did not have the number stored. It took him a moment to recall it and key it in: the irony of technology making life easier was that you forgot how to do things for yourself. He got hold of Anna Wolff.

  ‘Anna, I need you to run a couple of checks for me. And I need them quickly.’

  ‘Okay, anything for our number one suspect. The last time you had someone checked they ended up dead.’

  ‘When this is over, Commissar Wolff, I’m going to have you transferred to Buxtehude where the highlight of your week, of your month, will be a bicycle theft.’

  ‘Oh no!’ she said with mock horror. ‘That’s too far away from Billwerder prison. I’ll never get to visit you. Who do you want checked out?’

  ‘The guy who was burned in that arson attack in the Schanzenviertel. Daniel Fottinger. And the woman who was with him, Victoria Kempfert.’

  ‘Okay. You heading back in?’

  ‘I’ll be in later. I’ve got another house call to make.’ Fabel used his remote to unlock his BMW and slid in behind the driver’s seat. He checked his rear-view mirror. Yes. Still there. ‘Anna, there’s one more thing I need you to run through the computer. And keep this to yourself. I’m being followed. A new VW four-by-four. A Tiguan, I think. It’s been popping up in my rear-view mirror all day. I suspect it’s either one of ours or a BfV team. I just want to make sure.’

  ‘Shit… you don’t think anyone really suspects…’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Fabel, ‘but they’re maybe keeping tabs on me just to keep things straight, as Criminal Director van Heiden would say.’

  ‘Index number?’

  Fabel strained to make it out in the rear-view mirror and read it out to Anna.

  ‘Give me a couple of minutes,’ she said.

  Hamburg’s architecture tells you in a very discreet, decorous way that this is a city where some serious money is made. Daniel Fottinger’s house lay where Nienstedten became Blankenese and somehow managed to scream massive wealth quietly. It was set in four hectares of some of the most expensive real estate in Germany. Given the business Fottinger had been in, Fabel had expected it to be the same kind of ultra-modern zero-carbon set-up as Muller-Voigt’s house in the Altes Land. Instead it was an elegant white aristocratic nineteenth-century villa with green shuttered windows and a double-storey aviary-cum-conservatory on its east side. Its grounds were laid out like an English park, its lawns punctuated by century-matured oaks.

  It was not at all what Fabel had expected. But what he had expected was that Fottinger’s widow would not be alone. He was right.

  At first, given the grandeur of the surroundings, Fabel assumed that the stocky, impeccably neat man with the shaven head and the goatee beard who opened the front door to him was the butler. But it was apparent from his tailoring and demeanour that this was no manservant. He showed Fabel into a huge, bright drawing room. Another, younger, man stood over by the far wall, next to a grand piano. He too was wearing a business suit, but his was grey and not of the same quality. The younger man was made distinctive by the contrast between his pale complexion and his extremely dark, short hair.

  The only other person in the room was a woman of about thirty-five sitting on a rosewood settee. She was slim, with shoulder-length wavy hair of a vibrant auburn brushed back from her delicately modelled, pale and lightly freckled face. She wore a simple, black, sleeveless dress that clung to her slim figure in a way that only the most expensive fabrics could and her poise was so perfect that she gave the impression of sitting on the settee without actually touching it.

  Fabel’s first impression of Kirstin Fottinger was that she was made of fine china.

  In terms of attractiveness she was the equal of Fottinger’s mistress, but hers was a totally different type of beauty. Where Victoria Kempfert was the kind of woman men desired, Kirstin Fottinger was like a fragile, beautiful, expensive object to be collected and preserved. And there was something about her, thought Fabel, that made her seem otherworldly.

  ‘I’m glad you could make time to meet with me, Frau Fottinger,’ he said. ‘I know you must
be in shock after what has happened.’

  She smiled a polite porcelain smile. The truth was that she did not seem to Fabel to be in a state of much shock at all, and less grief. Perhaps it was a forced composure that had temporarily robbed her of expression.

  ‘Frau Fottinger has taken something to help. A mild sedative prescribed by her doctor,’ said the older man who had led Fabel into the drawing room.

  ‘And you are?’ Fabel turned to face him fully.

  ‘Peter Wiegand. I’m a friend of the family. I was also a business associate of Daniel’s.’

  ‘Peter Wiegand? You’re the deputy leader of the Pharos Project, aren’t you?’

  ‘I have worked with Dominik Korn for close to thirty years. My principal role is Vice President and Director of Operations of the Korn-Pharos Corporation. But yes, I am also active in the Pharos Project. Both Kirstin and her husband are members of the Project, so I am here to lend my support and comfort at this difficult time.’

  ‘I see.’ Fabel looked pointedly at the other man.

  ‘Oh, sorry…’ said Wiegand. ‘This is Herr Badorf. He is our chief of security for the group. I felt, given the violent circumstances of Daniel’s death, that I should bring him along.’

  ‘For the group?’ Fabel spoke directly to Badorf. ‘Does that mean for the Korn-Pharos Corporation or for the Pharos Project?’

  ‘I am not a member of the Project,’ said Badorf. Fabel noticed he had a southern accent. Swabian, he reckoned. ‘I work for the Korn-Pharos group of companies. Believe it or not, Principal Chief Commissar, one is not obliged or even pressured to join the Project just because one works for the Corporation.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fabel again. But he remembered what he had read in Menke’s file on the Project; the rumours about the Consolidation and Compliance Office, which sounded as if it had something to do with mergers and business etiquette but which was actually the secret police of the Pharos Project. As Fabel looked at Badorf he was pretty sure he was in the presence of a Consolidator. And a senior one at that. Fabel had had to phone ahead to arrange this meeting and he had known that, in doing so, he was giving the Project the opportunity to have someone present to coax the right responses from Kirstin Fottinger.

  Fabel turned to the newly widowed redhead. ‘Frau Fottinger, I wonder if I might speak with you in private…’

  ‘I would rather that Herr Wiegand and Herr Badorf remained here. Herr Wiegand has been a great support to me.’

  ‘As you wish. May I?’ Fabel indicated the armchair opposite Frau Fottinger. It had been worth the attempt, but Fabel had known there was no way he would have been allowed to question Fottinger’s widow without someone from Pharos being present. She nodded and he sat down.

  ‘I know this is a very painful subject, Frau Fottinger, but were you aware of the relationship between your husband and Victoria Kempfert?’

  ‘I knew nothing about any such relationship until told about it after Daniel’s death.’ Her answer actually sounded rehearsed.

  ‘Do you know Victoria Kempfert?’

  ‘We have never met.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why someone would want to harm your husband, or kill him?’

  ‘I was led to believe Daniel’s death was an accident…’ It was Wiegand who spoke. ‘Well, not an accident, but I thought the intent of the attackers had been to set fire to the car while Daniel was inside the cafe.’

  ‘Frau Fottinger?’ Fabel ignored Wiegand’s interruption.

  ‘No. Not on a personal level. Daniel was not the kind of person to make enemies. But it’s possible that some groups would view him with some distrust, because of the company’s activities.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Fottinger Environmental Technologies is a leader in sea-based carbon-capture technology. And Daniel was a key mover and organiser behind the GlobalConcern Hamburg summit.’

  ‘Why would anyone object to carbon capture?’

  ‘It’s the way we do it. Daniel perfected a more efficient way of iron seeding.’

  ‘Iron seeding?’

  ‘Perhaps I can explain,’ said Wiegand. ‘It was in this area that Herr Fottinger’s company cooperated with the Korn Corporation. Iron seeding is exactly how it sounds: it involves seeding deep ocean with iron dust.’

  ‘For what purpose?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Put simply: to trap atmospheric carbon dioxide at the bottom of the ocean. The theory has been around for a time and there have been trials — with mixed results. I would guess that even officers of the Polizei Hamburg are aware that the main danger we face on the planet is the increase of CO 2 in the atmosphere, leading to catastrophic global warming. The two main causes are emissions into the atmosphere and deforestation, which is reducing the Earth’s biosphere’s ability to process carbon dioxide. What do you know about plankton, Herr Fabel?’

  ‘Whales eat it. That’s about it.’

  ‘There are two types of plankton: phytoplankton and zooplankton. Effectively, phytoplankton is microscopic plant life, zooplankton is microscopic animal life. The principle of iron seeding is that the iron dust seeded into the ocean acts as a fertiliser. It causes an explosion in the population of phytoplankton. And phytoplankton, because it’s plant based, employs the process of photosynthesis: it absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen back into the atmosphere. In fact, even as it stands, a huge percentage of the planet’s “breathing” is done by phytoplankton. The theory is that by increasing the volumes of phytoplankton in the ocean, we can take up the slack created by a reduction in rainforest and other large vegetation on land. In many of the tests, there have indeed been massive increases in the levels of phytoplankton. The process of photosynthesis also creates organic materials, sugars, which cause the phytoplankton to sink out of the light and into the dark levels of the ocean, effectively locking up the carbon in the sea floor. The irony is that this dead plankton would, over geological time, eventually become mineral oil.’

  ‘So why isn’t everyone running out to do this?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘There is a problem. Put crudely, plants make oxygen, animals make carbon dioxide. Zooplankton, which creates CO2, also lives in the sunlit levels of the ocean, and it feeds on phytoplankton. That has meant that in some of the iron-seeding trial areas, the zooplankton has increased in equal proportion to the phytoplankton. It threatens to neutralise the benefit of iron seeding. That is why, with some segments of the eco-protection community, iron seeding remains a controversial topic. Some see it as a danger, not a remedy.’

  ‘Enough to earn Herr Fottinger enemies who are willing to kill?’

  Wiegand shrugged. ‘You’re the policeman, Herr Fabel.’

  ‘If this iron seeding is so controversial, why were you and Fottinger Environmental pursuing it?’ asked Fabel. He became aware that he was not questioning the person he had come to question, but allowed himself to be deliberately diverted for the moment.

  ‘Because if we can iron out the problems, if you’ll pardon the pun, then the benefits are potentially enormous. It could literally save all our lives. The other reason is that Daniel’s researchers are close to developing potential fixes. They are adding elements to the mix that would speed up the process, causing the phytoplankton to sink much faster. Zooplankton cannot survive below three hundred metres, so if we can drop greater amounts of phytoplankton below that level after photosynthesis but before the zooplankton has a chance to feed on it, then we have our solution.’

  ‘I see. Do you have rivals… competitors in this area?’

  Wiegand laughed. ‘No one who would kill to get ahead. The environmental-technology industry does not work that way. The planet always comes before the profit.’

  Fabel turned his attention back to Kirstin Fottinger. He ran through the usual questions, establishing as detailed a chronology of the dead man’s movements as possible. When Fabel was finished, he went through what he had been told.

  ‘Going by what you have told me, Frau Fottinger,’ he said, ‘your husban
d spent — in fact, both of you regularly spent — upwards of six hours an evening on the internet or otherwise using computers?’

  ‘That’s correct,’ she said blankly, the porcelain face devoid of any hint that such behaviour should be considered odd. ‘It was part of his work and who he was. Who I am, as well. We both liked to remain connected.’

  Fabel nodded and let it go, but made a mental note to discuss with his team the possibility of getting a warrant to examine Fottinger’s computers. No, it would be futile. By the time the Polizei Hamburg’s experts got into the computers, the Pharos Project’s even better experts would have removed anything that might have proved embarrassing for the cult.

  ‘Your husband knew Berthold Muller-Voigt quite well, I believe.’

  ‘Not well. Naturally, they encountered each other frequently.’

  ‘But Herr Muller-Voigt was a director of Fottinger Environmental Technologies…’

  ‘A non-executive director. Berthold’s function was one of adviser.’

  ‘I would have thought that that would create a conflict of interest for him as Environment Senator.’

  ‘He lodged it with the Senate as a declared interest. In any case, our company does not operate in the Hamburg area. There are no contracts to be awarded or the like.’

  ‘But you do understand that I have to examine any connections between your husband and Senator Muller-Voigt?’

  ‘Do you really think there’s a connection?’ asked Wiegand. ‘They died under different circumstances, didn’t they? Poor Daniel’s death may not even have been intended and, from what I’ve read, Berthold was murdered by someone he had let into his home.’

  Fabel turned to Wiegand and held him in his stare for a moment. The agenda behind the last remark was clear: Wiegand knew, somehow, that Fabel had been in Muller-Voigt’s house shortly before he died.

  ‘I don’t know if there is a connection or not,’ said Fabel. ‘Yet. I take it you knew Berthold too.’