A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  ‘I want you to think very hard, Osman,’ said Fabel. ‘Was there anything, anything at all, out of the ordinary that you can recall about them?’

  Osman frowned as he did exactly as Fabel had asked. After a moment he said: ‘No, I’m really sorry, but there was nothing. They were just a happy couple who seemed very involved in each other. I was so upset when I heard about Herr Müller-Voigt. I really wish I could do more to help …’

  ‘Thank you, Osman. You have been very helpful.’ Fabel smiled; he knew the young waiter really had done his best to remember any useful detail. Fabel thanked the owner of the restaurant and he and Anna headed for the door.

  ‘I was surprised she didn’t come in here more often,’ Osman said as they were leaving. ‘With her living so near.’

  Both Anna and Fabel froze in the doorway. They stepped back in, letting the door close behind them.

  ‘You know where she lives?’ asked Fabel. Something like a small electrical current tingled in the back of his neck.

  ‘Well … yes. I guess. Unless she was just visiting, but it looked to me like she lived there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Anna.

  ‘There’s an apartment building about three blocks away. I was passing it one day – my cousin lives in the next building – and I saw Frau Yazar go in through the main door, carrying groceries.’

  ‘Get your jacket …’ Fabel said to Osman and held the door open.

  It took no longer than fifteen minutes of talking to her neighbours to establish that Meliha Yazar lived on the third floor of the building. It was a modern apartment building only three blocks, as Osman had said, from the Ottoman Palace.

  Once they had established that they had found the right place, Fabel had sent Osman back to the restaurant, the young waiter beaming at the thought that he really had contributed something worthwhile. Fabel had been able to dispel Osman’s only concern that perhaps Meliha Yazar was in trouble with the police.

  ‘Not at all,’ Fabel had said reassuringly. ‘We’re trying to help Frau Yazar. You have helped Frau Yazar.’

  Osman had gone back to work happy.

  But it soon became clear that Meliha Yazar was not Meliha Yazar.

  ‘You mean Frau Kebir …’ said the young mother who had answered the door of the other apartment on the third floor, clutching a toddler to her flank. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages. Maybe a month. She does go away a lot. To do with her job, probably. I think she maybe goes back to Turkey.’

  ‘Do you know what her job is?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Couldn’t really say.’

  ‘And there’s been no one around the apartment for a month?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. She’s not been there for a month, but she was having some work done on the apartment. About three weeks ago there was a team of workmen in, after she had gone. It was okay, though, because she slipped a note under my door a couple of days before, just to warn me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fabel. ‘Did Frau Ya— I mean Frau Kebir … did she leave you a key, by any chance?’

  ‘Oh no.’ The young mother bounced the restive toddler in her arms. ‘She was very quiet. Very private.’

  Fabel thanked her and the young mother went back into her flat.

  ‘You know something, Anna?’ said Fabel as they stood outside the door of the apartment. ‘They’re not as good as their PR makes out.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Pharos Project,’ said Fabel. ‘All this time I thought they had wiped out all trace of Meliha Yazar. But it wasn’t them all along. The phoney address she gave Müller-Voigt, her fake surname – nice move, that, I have to say: keep your first name in case someone you know from your past bumps into you in public – all that was her herself. She didn’t want any trace of Meliha Yazar.’

  ‘Some kind of scam? Is that what you’re saying she was into?’

  Fabel shook his head. ‘No. Far from it. More like an undercover investigation.’

  Anna stared at the solid-looking front door for a moment. ‘Do you want me to get an emergency warrant to enter?’ asked Anna.

  In answer, Fabel swung a kick at the door. It took a second kick before the wood around the lock splintered and the door yielded.

  ‘We have reason to believe that the occupant of this dwelling is in danger,’ he said. ‘We don’t need a warrant.’

  The front door opened onto a long hall. It was bright and immaculately clean and at its far end there was a large framed poster from which a handsome middle-aged man gazed back at Fabel with piercingly light eyes. The man wore an old-fashioned suit and had his thumbs rammed into the pockets of his waistcoat. There was an incredible sense of determination in the pale eyes, one of which was slightly out of alignment because, Fabel already knew, of a First World War shrapnel wound.

  ‘This is her apartment, all right,’ said Fabel, nodding towards the poster.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Her icon. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The father of modern Turkey. Meliha Yazar – or Kebir or whatever her real name was – was seeking a new Atatürk. An “Atatürk for the Environment”, Müller-Voigt said. Come on. Let’s check this out.’

  They moved from room to room. The flat was filled with books in Turkish, German and English. Literary classics, environmental tracts, geological and ecological textbooks. Fabel walked into the bedroom. The bed was made, everything was in perfect order as it had been throughout the apartment. Absolutely perfect order.

  ‘She was tidy, I’ll give her that,’ said Anna somewhere behind Fabel.

  ‘Too tidy,’ he said, picking up the three paperbacks that sat on her bedside table. ‘They’ve been through everything. Every corner. Every nook and cranny. My bet is that they photographed everything first and then put it all back when they’d gone through it. It’s nice work, I’ll give them that.’

  ‘The workmen her neighbour talked about?’

  Fabel did not answer; instead he sifted through the paperbacks as if he were slowly shuffling cards. An English edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. A German edition of Der Richter und sein Henker by Friederich Dürrenmatt. A copy of Silent Spring by Rachael Carson, again in English. He looked through them again. There was something significant about the mix of books, but he could not think what it was. He stepped out of the bedroom, the books still in his hands. By the time they had finished, the forensics team had arrived.

  ‘You been handling anything else I should know about?’ asked Holger Brauner, with a nod towards the books in Fabel’s hand.

  ‘You won’t get anything here, Holger,’ said Fabel. ‘Have a look around. What’s wrong with this picture?’

  Brauner scanned the room, then turned back to Fabel and shrugged. ‘You got me … other than it’s a hell of a tidy place.’

  ‘Someone’s beaten us to it,’ said Fabel. ‘Real professionals. They’ve cleaned up behind themselves.’

  ‘I wish they’d turn over my apartment,’ said Anna. ‘It could really do with a spring clean.’

  ‘But that’s not all that’s wrong with this picture. You too, Anna. Notice something odd?’

  They both looked around the room again. Anna frowned for a moment, then a look of enlightenment swept across her face.

  ‘Same as the last Network Killer victim?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Fabel. Brauner made a confused face.

  ‘No computer …’ said Fabel. ‘No computer, no cellphone, no chargers, no memory sticks, not even an electronic calculator.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ asked Brauner. ‘That the Network Killer has been here too?’

  ‘I can guarantee you it wasn’t the Network Killer, Holger. That’s one thing I’m certain about. It was someone else who turned this place over and took Julia Henning’s computer and cellphone. Someone who didn’t want us to know who the Network Killer was and what had happened to him.’

  ‘Now you’ve lost even me,’ said Anna.

  ‘All in due time,’ said Fabel. ‘In the mea
ntime can you do the follow-up here? I want to get back to the Presidium. I need to talk to Fabian Menke about—’

  He was interrupted by his cellphone ringing.

  ‘Hi, Jan, it’s Werner. You’re not going to believe this … we’ve got another body in the water. The Harbour Police have just notified us that they’ve fished a body out of the river near the mouth of the Peutehafen. They’re transferring it to Butenfeld.’ Werner used the police shorthand for the mortuary at the Institute for Legal Medicine, where the bodies of all sudden and suspicious deaths were taken.

  ‘I’ll be right there,’ said Fabel.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Fabel, Nicola Brüggemann and Werner Meyer stood without speaking and looked down at the body that had been wheeled out into the main morgue hall by the attendant. Outwardly, it looked like some token of respect: a moment’s silence. The truth was that they were doing what they had learned to do as police officers. You took a moment to look, to examine, to assess. To bring your fresh perspective to someone’s death.

  The body on the mortuary trolley was thin and pale, the ribs showing through the pallid skin and the upper arms skinny. Despite the evidence of stubble on his chin, the dead male looked more boy than man. There were four holes, now bloodless, in his skull, two above the hairline and two below, puncturing the skin of his broad forehead. Fabel noticed dark mottling on the pale skin of his brow: powder burns from a close-quarter shot. He was on his knees, thought Fabel. Probably begging for his life.

  A larger, uglier wound gaped beneath his jaw, where one of the rounds had exited. There was a dark green tattoo on his left breast, like a small inverted loop.

  ‘These, apparently, are the mortal remains of one Harald Jaburg,’ said Werner, with an expression that suggested he had just tasted something sour. ‘We found his ID in his jeans pocket. Unemployed. Twenty-eight years old.’

  ‘I thought he would be younger,’ said Fabel absently. He turned to Brüggemann. ‘Our workload seems to be growing exponentially. I think I’ll take you up on your offer.’ He ignored Werner’s quizzical look.

  ‘He has a tattoo on his chest,’ said Brüggemann. ‘Right above his heart. Some kind of symbol.’

  ‘I saw that, too,’ said Fabel. ‘It looks to me like the lowercase version of the Greek letter gamma.’ He turned the corpse’s arms over to examine the inside of the forearms. ‘No track marks.’

  ‘He doesn’t look the Classics type to me,’ said Werner.

  ‘No …’ said Fabel. ‘Nor me. Do we have an address for him?’

  ‘Billbrook. We’ve got uniform onto that,’ said Werner. ‘God, Jan, if we go on like this, we’re going to have to hire a fishing boat to trawl the Elbe for all the stiffs in the water.’

  ‘It would never be allowed,’ said Brüggemann. ‘I think we’ve already exceeded our EU quota.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Fabel. ‘Werner, I know you’re up to your eyes and I’ve left Anna at Meliha Yazar’s place, but I’d like you and Henk to follow this one up too. Run his name through the computer and speak to Organised Crime Division. This looks like a drugs thing, but he wasn’t a user as far as I can see. Ask them if there’s any gang they know of that uses the symbol gamma as a tag.’

  ‘Okay, Jan. But he looks to me even less like a gang member than he does a Classics scholar.’

  ‘Could have been small fry,’ said Brüggemann. ‘Someone suspected of cheating or being a snitch. But no, I agree he doesn’t look like the type.’

  The mortuary attendant came back carrying a heavy-duty polythene bag. He dumped it unceremoniously on top of the dead man’s chest. ‘You asked for his clothes,’ he said. ‘They’ve been bagged for the forensics people. They’re still wet, so they’d better get them out of that bag quickly or they’ll go mouldy.’

  ‘Cheery chap,’ said Werner sarcastically after the attendant had left them alone again. ‘It must be the job that brings out the optimist in him.’

  Fabel read the evidence-tag list attached to the bag out loud. ‘Black or dark grey hooded top. Black or dark grey jeans. Dark green T-shirt. Studded leather wrist band, right wrist. Broad leather-banded wristwatch, left wrist. Alloy metal neck chain with symbol pendant …’ Fabel shook and tilted the clear polythene bag. There was a considerable amount of oily water trapped in it with the clothes, but he spotted the neck chain. As he suspected, the pendant was also in the form of the Greek letter gamma. ‘… Dark red ankle-length socks. Black leather engineer boots. Leather wallet containing ID, twenty-five euros in notes, further fifteen euros in coins. White boxer-style undershorts.’

  ‘Funny, that,’ said Brüggemann. ‘I would have put him down as a briefs type.’

  Fabel did not respond but instead took out his notebook and flicked back a couple of pages. When he found what he was looking for, he leaned across the body and handed the open notebook to Werner, who frowned as he read Fabel’s notes.

  ‘No …’ Werner said, handing the notebook back. ‘You don’t think …?’ He nodded towards the corpse between them.

  ‘His clothing exactly matches the description of what the rider of the motorbike was seen wearing.’

  ‘It’s a common enough look, Chef.’

  ‘Are you talking about the arson killing?’ asked Brüggemann.

  ‘We need to get a time of death for this guy,’ said Fabel. ‘My money is on it being after the Schanzenviertel attack.’

  ‘You still want me to check with Organised Crime?’ asked Werner.

  Fabel nodded. ‘It could still be something else. But I have a line of enquiry I want to follow up myself …’

  * * *

  There was no doubt in his mind this time. Fabel had only driven fifty metres from Meliha Yazar’s apartment when he had thought that he had seen the large VW Tiguan pull out from behind a parked van and into traffic four or five cars back. But then he had lost sight of it and there had been no sign of it behind him as he had driven up to the Butenfeld mortuary in Eppendorf. But when he had left the morgue he had seen it again, once more keeping a distance of four or five cars back. Sometimes it was as if the VW did not need to keep him in view at all. A couple of times, when the four-by-four was out of sight behind a corner, he had taken a sudden turn off the road and followed a new route, only to see the VW appear a few blocks later.

  He continued to head towards his destination, the docks. There was much less traffic now and the VW found it difficult to find cover in the thinning camouflage of other cars. It was now only two cars behind him. Fabel used his cellphone to contact the Presidium. Anna Wolff, who was now back from Meliha Yazar’s apartment, took his call.

  ‘I’ve got good news and bad news, Anna. The good news is that I’m not growing paranoid in my old age.’

  ‘The tail? Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive this time. I’ve just passed the Fischmarkt. Could you contact Ops Room and ask for a marked car to be on standby down at the junction of Grosse Elbestrasse and Kaistrasse? It’s quiet enough down there for us to pull them over and have a chat.’

  ‘I’ll do it now. But I’m coming down too.’ She hung up before Fabel had a chance to answer. He continued to head west. Again there was no sign of the VW on his tail. They had been stopped at the traffic lights and had obviously decided to use the opportunity to open up a little space between them and Fabel’s car.

  He was on St Pauli Hafenstrasse when he saw it again, three or four cars back. These guys were good. Or they had help. Fabel began to wonder about what could have been attached to his car during his guided tour of the Pharos.

  Anna called him on his cellphone. ‘The uniform guys are in position.’

  ‘Good. Chummy is still on my tail. I’m on Hafenstrasse – could you tell the uniform unit to be ready to pull him over?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be there myself in a couple of minutes.’

  Fabel hung up and checked his mirror. There was only one car now between him and the big VW. He thought he could see the outlines of two men through the da
rkened glass.

  ‘Let’s make this interesting,’ he said to himself under his breath. He spotted a narrow cobbled roadway off the main carriageway. It led to the other side of the riverside buildings and the water’s edge. This was an access way that no normal traffic would use. The opposite lane was clear of oncoming traffic, so Fabel swung across to the left without indicating and slammed on his brakes, pulling into a parking bay at the edge of the water. The car behind drove past, the driver blasting his horn at Fabel’s failure to indicate. He saw the VW thunder past the road end too: either the driver felt he could not make the sudden turn or was trying to convince Fabel that he was not really following him.

  Fabel called Anna. ‘The Tiguan has just passed me. I didn’t give him an alternative. Tell the uniform unit he’s heading their way and to pull him over. I’ll be right behind him. If he’s pulled over or double-backed, I’ll let you know.’

  He had just begun to twist around in his seat to start reversing back out onto the main road when he saw a four-by-four hurtling towards him. The car had only just registered in Fabel’s brain when it slammed into the back of Fabel’s BMW. He was thrown violently forward, only to be caught painfully by the inertia reel of his seat belt.

  ‘Bastard!’ he shouted into the rear-view mirror. He slammed on the brakes and undid his seat belt. He tried to work out what had happened. He was not sure, but he thought that the four-by-four was another make. Not the same car that had been following him. Two cars?

  At least that made things easier in one way: he could detain the driver for careless driving, or on suspicion of drunk driving. He twisted round to see the four-by-four reversing back from the impact. There was the ugly sound of grinding metal as it did so and a tinny clang as something from the rear of Fabel’s car hit the cobbles of the wharf-side roadway. He could see it was not the VW: this vehicle was a Land Rover.

  Fabel had just reached for his door handle when the Land Rover smashed into the back of his car again. This time he was thrown forward without the restraint of his seat belt and his chest slammed painfully against the steering wheel, forcing a pulse of air from his lungs. Winded, he gasped for breath, his body screaming for oxygen. Between desperate gasps, he fumbled to free his service automatic from its holster. Another impact. The SIG-Sauer automatic jumped from his tremulous fingers and fell into the footwell. He turned again in his seat. The Land Rover was reversing away fast. Fabel felt faint and sick from lack of oxygen and his chest hurt with every breath, but he desperately sought to make sense of his situation. He reached for his phone. In the rear-view mirror he saw the car’s huge dark bulk loom at him as it slammed once more into the rear of his BMW. But this impact was different. This time the engine of the Land Rover screamed as the driver floored the accelerator.