A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  Victoria Kempfert dropped into a huge red armchair and made a perfunctory gesture towards the sofa, indicating that Fabel should sit. I get it, he thought, I’m taking up your time. Fabel had learned to be suspicious of people who overstated how much of an inconvenience it was to have to talk to the police. Generally speaking, if someone had lost their life, witnesses were only too willing to give you their time. They were helping you make sense of an often senseless death; doing that, for most people, was a way of restoring the universe’s natural balance.

  ‘You usually came back here after your lunchtime meetings?’ asked Fabel. ‘You and Herr Föttinger, I mean.’

  ‘Yes. We came back here and fucked.’ She held Fabel in a defiant gaze, her eyebrows arched.

  ‘I see,’ said Fabel matter-of-factly, noting it down in his notebook. ‘And where did you and Herr Föttinger fuck? In the bedroom or here, where I’m sitting?’

  Victoria Kempfert’s expression darkened even more. She was clearly bursting to say something but, for the moment, she could not find the words.

  ‘Listen, Frau Kempfert,’ said Fabel. ‘I know that you have had a terrible experience, and you’ve made your distaste for police officers clear. But I’ve been a murder detective for a long, long time. There is very little that this world has left to throw at me that could shock me, so petulance and adolescent language isn’t going to set me back on my heels. But if you want, we can keep the conversation at that level. How often did you and Herr Föttinger fuck here?’

  She dropped her eyes. She was a beautiful woman. Strong features and a mane of thick, dark hair. Not unlike Susanne. And very much, he realised against his will, his type.

  ‘Daniel and I would come here every week – every Wednesday – after lunch. We’d see each other maybe one other time during the week, depending on our schedules. He was away a lot.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry if I was being … it’s just that after seeing that, seeing what happened to him …’ She bit her lip and something in her eyes hardened again. It was clear that she was determined not to cry.

  ‘I do understand,’ said Fabel, more gently. ‘Did the police officers you spoke to give you details of victim support?’

  ‘I don’t need counselling, Herr Fabel. I’ll get over it. Eventually.’

  ‘Did you see the attackers?’

  ‘No … yes … I mean I didn’t know they were the attackers then. The bastards just stood and watched Daniel burn. To start with I thought they were just passers-by like everyone else, then I saw they had ski masks or something on. Over their faces. I didn’t even know it had been an arson attack to start with. I didn’t know what had happened.’

  ‘Was there anything you particularly noticed about them?’

  ‘Other than the ski masks? Nothing. I was too busy watching Daniel. And then … Why would someone do that?’

  ‘What I need to establish is if they had intended to do what they did. A lot of expensive cars get torched in the Schanzenviertel. It could be that that was their sole intention.’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Kempfert said slowly, her eyes unfocused as if replaying the scene in her head. ‘It was the way they waited. Watched. One in particular.’

  ‘That could be a sign that they were shocked by the consequences of their actions.’

  Kempfert shook her head vigorously. ‘That’s the thing … You asked if there was anything I particularly noticed. Well, just before he jumped on the back of the motorbike and they made off, I could have sworn the guy in the ski mask … I could have sworn he was laughing. You don’t do that if you are shocked by the consequences of your action.’

  ‘No … probably not. But, believe it or not, it can be the result of shock. Or psychological conditions. Paradoxical laughter.’

  ‘There was nothing paradoxical about it. That bastard was laughing at what he had done.’

  Fabel regarded her for a moment.

  ‘How long had you been seeing Herr Föttinger?’

  ‘A couple of months. Maybe three. It was all coming to an end, though.’

  ‘You knew he was married?’

  ‘He made no secret of it. I made no secret of the fact that I didn’t care. We met through business. I design websites and I’d done some work for his company. But that had stopped months before our relationship started. He hired someone else. Then, about ten, twelve weeks ago, I met him at a business event. You know, the usual rubber-chicken dinner with flow charts and Powerpoints for dessert.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Fabel. ‘Not my natural environment, as it were. So that’s when you started to see him?’

  ‘About a week or so later he phoned me and asked me to lunch. We started to see each other each week, but it was becoming … tiresome.’

  ‘In what way tiresome?’

  ‘On the face of it, Daniel was charming and interesting. But there was something missing. It was like he was all veneer and nothing beneath. I know this sounds weird, but even when we were intimate it was like he was on his own. In fact, there were times it became unpleasant. It was like I didn’t exist for him in any real way. That’s mad, I know. But that’s why there was no future for us.’

  Fabel thought about what she had said; it was almost exactly how the waiter had described Föttinger. ‘What do you know about Herr Föttinger’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 Föttinger? 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 Föttinger 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 Föttinger. 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 Föttinger’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 Föttinger had been in, Fabel had expected it to be the same kind of ultra-modern zero-carbon set-up as Müller-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 Föttinger’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 Föttinger was that she was made of fine china.

  In terms of attractiveness she was the equal of Föttinger’s mistress, but hers was a totally different type of beauty. Where Victoria Kempfert was the kind of woman men desired, Kirstin Föttinger 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 Föttinger,’ 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 Föttinger 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 Bädorf. 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 Bädorf. ‘Does that mean for the Korn-Pharos Corporation or for the Pharos Project?’

  ‘I am not a member of the Project,’ said Bädorf. 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 Bädorf 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 Föttinger.

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

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

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

  ‘I know this is a very painful subject, Frau Föttinger, but were you aware of t
he 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 café.’

  ‘Frau Föttinger?’ 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?’

  ‘Föttinger 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 Föttinger’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 CO2 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?’