A fear of dark water jf-6

by Craig Russell

‘As a matter of fact, I did. Obviously our paths crossed because of our mutual involvement in environmental affairs.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fabel. ‘Did you ever meet his partner? Meliha Yazar?’

  ‘I can’t say I did,’ said Wiegand, with nothing to read on his face.

  ‘Frau Fottinger?’

  ‘The name is not familiar,’ she said. ‘I thought that Berthold was not exclusive with anyone. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

  Fabel thanked Kirstin Fottinger, expressed his sympathy for her loss once more, and took his leave of her. He knew he was a character leaving a stage: nothing about the interview had been natural or spontaneous. There was nothing more to find out here. As he had on the way in, Peter Wiegand made sure to act as Fabel’s escort as the detective left.

  ‘Your society intrigues me, Herr Wiegand,’ said Fabel as they reached his car. ‘Tell me, do you really believe in the Consolidation? That you can all be uploaded onto a mainframe?’

  ‘Herr Fabel, every religion, every belief system, has a central tenet that is open to a multitude of interpretations. Whatever the belief system, some adherents will hold that tenet to be literal, some to be figurative. In any case, for all I know all of this…’ He made a sweeping gesture with his arm to indicate the house’s parklike gardens, the trees and everything beyond. ‘Maybe all of this is the Consolidation. Maybe this isn’t true reality and we’re all just self-aware programs in a post-human generated environmental model. But if this is reality, and I firmly believe that it is, then it is coming to a close if we do not do something radical, and do it quickly.’ He paused and looked at Fabel as if assessing him. ‘You are welcome to visit us, Herr Fabel. Have you seen the Pharos, our headquarters here, out on the coast at Horne? In fact, it’s not very far away from Berthold Muller-Voigt’s house. And I believe you have been there.’

  ‘No, I can’t say I have seen the Pharos,’ said Fabel, refusing to take the bait.

  ‘Then you should come! It really is an exceptional piece of architecture. The Pharos is built as an extension to an existing nineteenth-century lighthouse. The entire building projects out over the water. We even have sections of glass flooring where you can look down at the sea, twenty metres below.’ He handed Fabel a card. ‘Please visit us, Herr Fabel. We are open to all, even to policemen. But I would ask that you ring first so we know when to expect you. The only other thing I would ask you to bring is an open mind.’

  ‘So you can close it?’

  ‘Despite what your colleagues from the BfV may have told you, we are not a cult. We are an environmental-action group.’

  ‘I have to say,’ said Fabel, ‘I don’t fancy the idea of being suspended above the sea.’

  ‘You have a fear of water, Herr Fabel?’

  ‘No… not a fear. I was brought up in Norddeich. I have a healthy respect for it.’

  ‘The only water I fear,’ said Wiegand, suddenly less affable and more serious, ‘is dark water. Do you know what the albedo effect is? Albedo is the reflectivity of a surface to the sun’s rays. Polar ice reflects the sun’s rays and prevents sea warming. The more ice, the cooler the sea, the more stable the climate. The higher the ratio of dark water to white ice, the faster the planet heats up. Every year there is less and less ice at the poles and more and more dark water. I want you to understand, Herr Fabel, that whatever you think of me or the Pharos Project I am genuinely afraid of the cataclysm that awaits us and genuinely committed to doing all I can, using every weapon at my disposal, to prevent it happening. We are not playing a game here. This is a battle to survive.’

  Fabel nodded thoughtfully. He was actually thinking about how far Wiegand would go, and what weapons he was prepared to use. But Fabel had also read that Wiegand’s personal wealth could be counted in billions, rather than millions; there was a profit to be made out of any apocalypse.

  ‘Maybe I will pay you a visit, Herr Wiegand,’ he said. He looked at the card Wiegand had handed him. It had the same stylised eye motif as the poster he had passed on the way to the airport. ‘Sometime soon.’

  Once he was in his car, Fabel switched his cellphone back on. It rang almost immediately. It was Anna Wolff.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘This is interesting. I ran a check on those names and I’ve got the details on that plate you ran… if that car really is following you, then it’s not one of ours and it’s nothing to do with the BfV. It’s registered to Seamark International, which, I am told, is a private maritime security company.’

  ‘What? Why the hell is a private security company following me?’

  ‘Do you want me to send someone to their offices to get some answers?’

  ‘No, not yet. I don’t want them alerted to the fact that I’m onto them. If I see the same car on my tail again I’m going to have them pulled over. One thing you could do for me is to check out this Seamark International. I’d put a month’s wages on it turning out to be some kind of subsidiary of the Korn-Pharos Corporation. What about the names I gave you to check?’

  ‘Victoria Kempfert is as clean as a whistle. No convictions or arrests, no contact of any significance with the police. But it’s Daniel Fottinger who makes things much more interesting. He would appear to have been someone who didn’t take “no” for an answer. An accusation of sexual harassment last year lodged by a female employee, and two accusations of rape. One when he was still a student and the second in 1999. All three accusations were dropped as soon as the police investigated. It would appear that Fottinger’s daddy had the kind of wealth to make unpleasantness disappear… and, of course, so did Fottinger junior, later.’

  ‘Now that is interesting.’

  ‘There’s more. Fottinger’s parents put him in a fancy hospital in Bavaria after the student-days incident. A psychiatric hospital. I’ve asked for a court order to get his records. I thought you’d want them. I don’t know how relevant any of this is, but I thought there might be a chance that someone was exacting revenge.’

  ‘Well done, Anna.’ Fabel thought about what she had told him. ‘Get me the names and addresses of the victims, would you? I’d like to talk to them. Or at least one of them.’

  ‘Sure, Chef, but you’ll have to give me some time. I’m in the Commission but I’ll be mobile in ten. I’m going out to see the disabled guy you talked to, Johann Reisch. Two officers are going to check out his computer, one from Tech Section, the other from Cybercrime. By the way, they’re none too pleased with you. They say that the delay in examining his computer means he could have erased a lot of evidence.’

  ‘Reisch isn’t our man, Anna. And that’s good old-fashioned police instinct, not technology.’

  ‘Well, the problem is that they’re out at Reisch’s right now and can’t get an answer. And Reisch was expecting them. They arranged a time with him on the phone.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good, Anna. Reisch is pretty much housebound. Get a uniformed unit to go out with you. If you get no answer, force the door. I’m on my way now. In fact, hold fire until I get there. And see if you can get a number for his carer. Shit, I’ve forgotten her name…’

  ‘Rossing… I’m already on it. See you there.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  As it turned out, they did not need to force entry into Reisch’s house. Frau Rossing, the disabled man’s carer, turned up with a key just as Fabel arrived. Fabel noticed that Reisch’s carer wore an expression of genuine concern.

  ‘He was fine this morning when I left,’ she said as she fumbled through her bunch of keys.

  ‘Wait here,’ Anna told her after she had unlocked the door. ‘We need to go in first.’

  Fabel and Anna found Reisch exactly where he had been the last time Fabel had spoken to him; sitting at the table, staring at the computer screen of his laptop. Except that today Reisch was staring at the screen through the clear polythene of the plastic bag that was pulled over his head and sealed at the neck by a drawstring. The bag was large and ballooned out as i
f pumped full of air; it gave Fabel the impression of an oversized space helmet, or the hood of one of those suits you saw worn by people who handled radioactive material. Reisch still sat upright, the neck brace of his wheelchair preventing him from slumping, his blank stare aimed at the laptop screen.

  Fabel pushed two fingers into the flesh at the side of Reisch’s neck, just beneath where the drawstring had been pulled tight. He turned to Anna and shook his head.

  ‘Shit…’ Anna stared at the still-upright dead man. ‘Do you think someone’s killed him because of his connection to Virtual Dimension?’

  Fabel did not answer. Instead, he flipped open his cellphone and called it in to the Presidium. He asked who was on forensics duty.

  ‘Keep the carer out of here, Anna,’ he said quietly after he hung up from his call. ‘But tell her that Reisch has passed away. Holger Brauner’s on his way with a team.’

  After Anna and the uniformed officer left the room, Fabel took a closer look around Reisch’s desk. There was a postal packet that had been untidily torn open. Next to it lay what looked to Fabel like a small oxygen canister with a length of tubing attached. Fabel took a latex glove from his jacket pocket and, without slipping it on, used it as a shield while he rolled the canister around. It had the symbol He on it. Not oxygen, helium.

  Fabel checked the laptop’s screen. When Reisch had died, he had been locked into Virtual Dimension. Now his avatar walked aimlessly through a surrealistically realistic world rendered by computer graphics. It had been what he had watched as he died. The last thing his dying brain would have registered. Even now, Reisch gave the impression of watching his cybernetic alter ego.

  Once Brauner and his team had arrived, Fabel joined Anna and the uniformed officer outside. Brauner had only been in the house for fifteen minutes when he called Fabel back in.

  ‘You can forget this one, if you ask me, Jan,’ said Brauner. ‘Of course you’ll have to wait for the autopsy, but this is no murder. Well, it’s self-murder, but that doesn’t interest you.’

  ‘But someone tied that bag around his neck. If he did it himself, then as soon as he started to suffocate, the survival instinct would have kicked in.’

  ‘No it wouldn’t, Jan. That’s a so-called “ Exit Bag ”. A suicide kit. The fastening is a drawstring you pull tight yourself. And the “survival instinct” you talk about is called the hypercapnic alarm response. It’s the panic you feel when the level of carbon dioxide in your blood becomes dangerously high and your brain tells you that you’ve got to start breathing fast. He won’t have experienced that. That’s what the canister was for: you fill the bag or your lungs or both with an inert gas like nitrogen or helium. It confuses your brain and it overrides the hypercapnic alarm response. You just feel you’re breathing normally, no pain, no panic, then you pass out and never wake up. Believe it or not, you can buy Exit Bags on the internet, or download instructions on how to make one yourself. We’ve bagged up the postal packet it came in: you might be able to find out whom he ordered it from. And I guess you’ll find something about it on that…’ Brauner nodded towards the laptop on the table.

  ‘So you’re convinced it was suicide?’

  ‘There’s no evidence to suggest it wasn’t. Why was he in the wheelchair?’

  ‘Some kind of motor neurone disease. Poor bastard.’

  ‘Then I don’t blame him. If it were me, I’d do the same before I couldn’t do it for myself. And, truth be told, these Exit Bags are not the worst way to go. You don’t want to be interrupted and saved, though. Pull through from an attempt with one of these and your brain’ll be mush.’

  The officer from Kroeger’s Cybercrime Unit came in. She had been the one who had alerted Anna and had waited while the forensics had done their work. She was an unlikely-looking police officer, petite with auburn hair tied back in a ponytail and wearing jeans and a waist-length casual jacket. She looked as if she could still have been a student on her way to a lecture. Something about her reminded Fabel of his daughter, Gabi, who had the same auburn hair and who had expressed an interest in following her father into the Polizei Hamburg. Fabel noticed that the young policewoman worked at not looking at the dead man in the wheelchair.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, Herr Chief Commissar. Sorry.’ She frowned. ‘I wondered if you still wanted us to take the laptop for examination?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fabel. He looked again at the screen. Thorsten66, Reisch’s virtual-world persona, still wandered the counterfeit world of Virtual Dimension ’s New Venice. In one corner of the screen, beneath the photograph of the muscle-torsoed youth who Reisch had chosen because it reminded him of a younger, healthy self, were messages from other users, inviting Thorsten66 to parties by the lagoons, or to take part in the New Venice Olympics. It was no accident that Reisch had had this on-screen, in his line of sight, as he died. Maybe he really had believed that through an effort of will he could project himself, at the moment of death, into that ersatz but infinitely preferable reality.

  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 Bruggemann had taken over as lead investigating officer on the Network Killer case.

  Bruggemann’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. Bruggemann 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 Bruggemann 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 Bruggemann 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 Poppenbutteler 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 Bruggemann and Fabel ask
ed 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.