‘That, Herr Wiegand, is exactly my intention.’
Wiegand stood up to indicate that the discussion was at an end. Fabel remained seated.
‘There is another matter I would like to discuss.’ Fabel carefully folded the jacket he had been given on his lap, running his fingers over the material. He could tell that it was made from the kind of fabric that Astrid Bremer had described: there was no yield to it and it had a nylon-like feel. ‘As you are no doubt aware, we have a case running at the moment concerning the murder of four young women targeted by someone they met through the internet.’
‘The Network Killer case. Yes, I’m aware of it.’
‘Well, a few nights ago, I was approached by a woman who was dressed in a style not unlike this …’ Fabel indicated the jacket on his lap. ‘She gave me a false identity. In fact, she gave me the identity of the next Network Killer victim – before we found the body. What makes it especially interesting is that when we did find the body, there was evidence that it had been kept in cold storage for some time.’
‘And …?’
‘Nothing … other than it suggests to me that the body was kept on ice long enough for me to be approached with the victim’s name, and also to confuse us about the time of death. As if it was important for us to believe that the woman died some time later than she actually did.’
‘And this means what to me?’ asked Wiegand wearily.
‘I’ve been thinking about it a great deal, and I think I understand its significance. And I think it tells me what it was Meliha Yazar found out.’
‘Which is?’
‘I think we’ll save that for another time.’ Fabel stood up. ‘Thank you for your time, Herr Wiegand. I look forward to our next chat.’ He looked around at the office, the glass walls, the dimmed view of the water around them. ‘Next time we can meet in my office, I think.’
It was fully dark as Fabel drove back along the narrow road towards Stade. It was deserted of cars and he could see there were no headlights in his rear-view mirror. Anyway, he thought, Wiegand knew exactly where he had been and the road he would take back to town. So there was no need for him to pick up a tail until he had reached the main road network.
Jan Fabel was a man who liked to do the right thing in every situation; to follow the rules. It sat heavy and hard with him that he had just done something he would never have allowed one of his junior officers to do: he had deliberately exposed himself to danger. Fabel had known that there was no way that he would ever build a solid case against an organisation as sophisticated, resourceful and skilled as the Pharos Project. He needed to flush them out. Flush Wiegand out. Wiegand had said that Fabel had been on a fishing trip and he had been right; except Fabel was the bait. Fabel had hinted that he possessed the same knowledge that Meliha Yazar had, and had been abducted and more than likely murdered over. Müller-Voigt had had his skull pulped in the belief that he might have had the information. And now they would believe that Fabel had that knowledge. And, as someone who could do infinitely more damage than either Yazar or Müller-Voigt, they would no doubt come after him.
The truth was, he was beginning to believe that he did know what it was that Meliha had found out. How he could ever prove it was another matter.
He was just approaching Stade when his cellphone rang.
‘Chief Commissar Fabel?’ It was a male voice. Deep – too deep and faintly robotic; punctuated with deep, rasping breaths. Fabel realised that it was being electronically altered.
‘Who is this?’
‘Call me the Klabautermann, that seems appropriate.’
‘You’re joking, right?’ Fabel laughed. ‘You want me to call you the Klabautermann? I’m guessing you read too many comics. Or what is it they call them these days? Oh yes, graphic novels. Now listen, you know you are speaking to a police officer, so I suggest you stop wasting my time …’
‘Now wait a minute …’ The menace of the electronically altered voice dissipated as the person behind it grew flustered. ‘You’ve got to listen to me …’
‘Lose the Darth Vader crap and we can talk.’
There was a pause. Then something clicked on the line.
‘Who is this?’ asked Fabel.
‘I can’t tell you.’ Now the voice was natural. Male, but high-pitched. Still punctuated with snorting breaths. Someone overweight, Fabel guessed.
‘Then I can’t talk to you.’
‘They’ll kill me,’ the voice said and something in the tone told Fabel he believed it.
‘Who will?’
‘The same people who killed Meliha Yazar. I know all about Meliha Yazar, I know about Müller-Voigt. I know about Daniel Föttinger.’
Fabel pulled over to the side of the road, putting on his hazard-warning lights. Snatching his cellphone from its cradle, he took the call off-speaker.
‘What do you know?’
‘I can’t tell you yet. They’re probably listening right now. Making me take the voice changer off will make it easier for them to find me, but they would have deprocessed it eventually. They can do anything with technology. Remember that, Fabel. Don’t use technology.’
‘Where is Meliha Yazar?’ Fabel’s voice was determined. ‘What happened to her?’
‘You already know that. It’s why it happened that you should worry about. I’ve got something they’re looking for. Something that Meliha left for me to find and I’ll die because I found it. Now they will find me, Fabel. They’ll find me and kill me. They’ll kill you too and anyone else they think knows.’
‘Knows? Knows what? Listen, if you really believe your life is in danger, then tell me where you are. We will protect you.’
There was a snort at the other end of the connection. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’ He paused. ‘I’ll be in touch later. I have to find a way of contacting you without them intercepting it. Do you understand?’
Fabel frowned, then, after a moment said: ‘Yes. I understand.’
The phone went dead.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Fabel knew he was not going to get a warm welcome. He had phoned to arrange a meeting with Tanja Ulmen, the first of Föttinger’s alleged victims, and she had asked if they could do it on the telephone. She was happily married with children and living in Bad Bramstedt, a small town between Hamburg and Kiel. Her family knew nothing of the incident when she had been a student with Daniel Föttinger. This was part of a murder enquiry, Fabel had explained, so a telephone interview was not an option. The truth was that Fabel disliked anything getting between him and the reactions of the people he questioned. Tanja Ulmen reluctantly agreed to meet with him after she finished work. She was a teacher at the local high school, she explained. He had been slightly taken aback when Ulmen had insisted that he bring a female colleague.
It took forty minutes for Fabel and Anna to get to Bad Bramstedt and another ten to find the rest area off the 207 route to the west of the town. During the journey Anna had noticed Fabel checking his rear-view mirror more than usual.
‘Is it there again?’ she asked. ‘The four-by-four?’
‘No. I thought maybe it was … but no. Maybe I’m becoming paranoid in my old age.’
‘If you really think you are being tailed, especially with all of the crap that’s been going on with emails and texts going missing, then I think we should visit this Seamark International and get a few answers.’
‘It’s maybe nothing,’ said Fabel. ‘It could be coincidence or maybe I’ve mistaken two or three different cars as the same one. I want to be sure before we show our hand. Anyway, it’s not there now.’ He paused for a moment, then said uncertainly: ‘There’s something else, Anna. I mean, as well as the texts and stuff. I got a call last night. An anonymous call from someone who claims to know all about what happened to Meliha Yazar and Müller-Voigt.’
‘And you believe them?’ Anna sounded incredulous. ‘I mean, after everything else that’s been going on, don’t you think it’s likely to be the same lo
t playing games?’
‘I thought that, too. But, I don’t know, there was something about this call. He said they would find him and kill him and I believe he meant it. Maybe he is an ex-member or has some other kind of connection to them.’
‘So you are convinced it’s the Pharos Project behind this?’
‘More than that, Anna, I’m beginning to get an idea about what’s really happened. Look, there she is …’
It was the only car in the rest area: an elderly Citroen. The rest area was screened from the road by a thick curtain of trees and there was an even deeper wedge of forest to the other side. Frau Ulmen had insisted that they meet there: it was far enough out of town but close enough for her to get back home without causing too much suspicion.
‘I’ve told my children I’ve got shopping to do but I’ll be back in an hour,’ she said bluntly in greeting as she got into the back of Fabel’s car. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me about Daniel Föttinger?’ Fabel knew from the report that Tanja Ulmen was in her mid-thirties, but she had a weary look that would otherwise have made it difficult to guess her age on first sight. She had untidy blonde hair heaped on her head and held in place by a large wooden hair clasp patterned with a Celtic bow. Her clothes were baggy and vaguely bohemian. She looked every bit the eccentric art teacher, but Fabel knew that the subject she actually taught was information technology.
‘Yes, Frau Ulmen,’ said Fabel. ‘We’d like to talk to you about Daniel Föttinger. You know that he’s dead?’
‘Yes. I read about it in the papers.’
‘So you know how he died?’
‘Yes. Painfully. And I was glad. I hope it took him a long, long time to die.’
‘It did, I’m afraid to say,’ said Fabel. ‘I can’t imagine a worse way to go.’
‘So you’re here to accuse me of having something to do with it?’ Ulmen’s face was set hard. Defiant. Fabel guessed that she wished she really could feel good about Föttinger’s death, but could not.
‘No, Frau Ulmen. Why I asked to talk to you was because I’m trying to build up a picture of Föttinger. I wanted to ask you about what happened between you and him.’
‘Nothing happened between us. The bastard raped me.’
‘So why didn’t you pursue the case?’ asked Anna. ‘You do know that he went on to commit at least one more alleged rape?’
‘His father paid me “compensation”, as he put it. But before you think I was simply bought off, Old Man Föttinger made sure he employed a stick as well as a carrot. The Föttingers were filthy rich and very well connected. He made it very clear to me that things would go badly for me, very badly. They were peas in a pod, father and son.’
‘What do you mean, exactly?’ asked Anna.
‘They both thought that they could get anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. People didn’t matter to either of them.’
‘Please, Frau Ulmen,’ said Fabel. ‘It would be very helpful to me if you could tell me what happened with Föttinger.’
‘Daniel asked me out when we were both students in Hamburg. He was studying philosophy …’
‘Philosophy?’ Fabel was genuinely surprised. ‘I would have thought he would have studied some science or technological subject.’
‘Maybe he did later, but back then he was doing philosophy. And he was really into it. Anyway, Daniel asked me out. He was very charming and handsome, but there was something about him really gave me the creeps. So I said no. He couldn’t understand it. He simply could not wrap his mind around the fact that someone was denying him something he wanted. It was like it didn’t compute. That’s what I mean about him and his father being the same: neither of them could understand that the entire universe didn’t revolve around them.’
‘So he didn’t take no for an answer?’ asked Anna as gently as she could.
‘I was sharing a flat with some friends and he called around when they were out. He tried his lethal charm again, still not able to believe that someone could resist it. When that didn’t work he tried a more direct approach. A knife held to my throat.’
‘I know this is very difficult for you …’ began Anna.
‘No, it’s not. It was a long time ago and somehow I’ve managed to make it seem that it happened to someone else … make it a story, not part of reality. It was my way of coping and it worked. They say that every cell in your body is replaced every seven years or something like that. So I tell myself that what happened did not happen to this body, to the person I am now. But I never stopped hating him. Despising him for his arrogance.’
‘What I wanted to ask was how he behaved.’ Anna frowned at her own clumsiness. ‘I mean, the things an attacker says or does, the extra things, they can tell us a great deal about their state of mind.’
‘He just kept the knife at my throat. Otherwise he wasn’t violent. As his father made sure to point out, I didn’t have any bruises to show the police. No signs that I struggled for my virtue, as he put it, the old bastard.’ Ulmen looked through the passenger window for a moment, out to the dark green of the forest. ‘In a weird way, and I know this does sound really weird, but I don’t think Daniel thought for a second that he was doing anything wrong. I’ve thought about it a lot, over the years – doing what I said and imagining it was something you just read about happening to someone else … that makes it easier to be objective about it. Anyway, when I think back to the way he was, it was as if he didn’t really understand that I was there. You know, theory of mind or simulation or whatever psychologists call it. I think both father and son were sociopaths of some kind – I’m not being bitter, I really do believe that. I honestly think Daniel Föttinger didn’t understand that I had the independent consciousness to truly give or withhold consent.’
‘As if you weren’t really there?’ asked Fabel.
Tanja Ulmen stared at Fabel. ‘Yes. Yes, that’s exactly it,’ she said, animated for the first time during the conversation. ‘Like I wasn’t really there.’
On the way back to Hamburg, Fabel asked Anna for the address of the Turkish restaurant that Müller-Voigt and Meliha Yazar had dined in regularly.
‘Could you give them a ring and see if that waiter’s back from holiday?’ he asked her. ‘And if he is, could we talk to him when we get there?’
Anna phoned and confirmed to Fabel that the waiter would be waiting for them when they arrived.
‘Did you see the report that Tramberger, the Disaster Team guy, sent in?’ asked Anna. ‘It arrived this morning.’
‘What, from his Virtual Elbe thing? No, I haven’t had a chance yet.’
‘You should. According to his model, and he says he ran it several times, that torso was dumped three kilometres upstream, but right in the middle of the river, in the deep channel.’
‘From a boat?’
‘Looks like. He says we should get the pathologist to check for signs that it had been weighted. He thinks that whoever dumped it there did so because it’s the deepest part of the Elbe that far upstream. Fewer big vessels, more barges and less likelihood of it being churned up. His opinion is that the torso was meant to stay at the bottom and never be found. Makes sense, Jan. My guess is that the head and limbs are scattered along the bottom as well. Whoever did this really didn’t want her identified.’
The Ottoman Palace was a lot less grand than the name suggested, but it did have a certain style to it. No clichés or walls bedecked with tourist posters of Turkey. It was a simple eatery with subtle reminders, such as the colourful kilim tapestry on the wall, of the culture behind the cuisine. While they waited for Osman, the waiter who had regularly served Müller-Voigt and his date, Fabel had a good look around the restaurant. It would not have been Müller-Voigt’s normal type of place; it was a choice, whether Meliha’s or Müller-Voigt’s, that owed a lot to discretion.
A smallish man of about twenty-five or so, with russet-blond hair, brought his eager smile out of the kitchen. He introduced himself as Osman, and told Fabel he would happily d
o anything he could to help. Osman was one of those people whose exuberant good nature, no matter how hard you tried to ignore it, was infectious.
‘She had an Istanbul accent,’ Osman explained after Fabel had asked him what he could remember about Meliha. ‘She sounded well educated and I got the idea she was quite rich. Her clothes were expensive. She was a beautiful woman.’
‘But the owner here said he got the feeling that she didn’t like talking about herself.’
‘That’s for sure. Naturally, when a customer speaks to me in such perfect, beautiful Turkish, I ask where they are from. As soon as I asked her I really got the feeling that I’d done the wrong thing. It’s funny with customers. You learn to drop a topic quick sometimes. The last thing you want is a patron to feel uncomfortable,’ he said very earnestly.
‘And she was particularly sensitive about where she was from?’
‘I got that idea. When I asked, she said she was from Silviri, on the coast near Istanbul, but the shutters came down, if you know what I mean. So, like I said, I dropped it quick.’
‘Did they seem happy?’
‘Very. Especially him. They were a nice couple. Good together, if you know what I mean. There was a big age difference, of course, but they seemed to be totally into each other.’
‘Was there ever any interaction between them and anyone else? Did they ever bring any friends or guests to the restaurant?’
‘No. It was always just the two of them. I don’t even remember any other diners coming up to them and saying hello in passing. That was their usual table …’ Osman pointed to the furthest-away table at the back of the restaurant, at the end of the seating arc. It confirmed Fabel’s theory about the restaurant being chosen because it offered an element of anonymity: no one would pass that table to leave or go to the washrooms. Meliha and Müller-Voigt would have had to endure only Osman’s good-natured interruptions.
A Fear of Dark Water Page 24