A fear of dark water

Chapter Seventeen

Poppenbuttel lay to the north of the city centre in the Alstertal district of Wandsbek and marked the border between Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. This was yet another place that, at various stages of its career, had been German or Danish. It was now one of the less densely populated parts of Hamburg where the city landscape was broken up by large green spaces of park and woodland. The Poppenbutteler Schleuse had, for two hundred years, provided the city with two services: its primary function, as part of an integrated system of sluices and locks, had always been to control the flow of the Alster river into the centre of Hamburg, ensuring a constant water level in the city. But people knew it best for its secondary role: behind the sluice gates of the Poppenbutteler Schleuse, something between a deep pond and a small lake had formed; almost a miniature version of the Small, Outer and Inner Alster lakes in the city centre. Each weekend and on holidays, people would swim or hire a boat to take out onto the lock pond’s placid water. It was sheltered by a thick curtain of trees, and green-cocooned by the Henneberg Park. It was, Fabel reflected as he parked his car, the ideal place to dump a body: conveniently within the city and connected to a network of roads, yet offering seclusion.

By the time Fabel got there the uniformed branch had sealed off the scene with tape, but Holger Brauner and his team had not yet arrived to set up a forensics tent. Fabel parked off Saseler Damm, next to a canoe-hire stall. As he walked along the water’s edge he passed a couple of uniforms talking in calm tones to a pale-faced middle-aged man who clutched a fishing rod as though it was a lifeline.

Werner Meyer was waiting for Fabel on the towpath beside the lake. Behind him, twenty metres along the path, the naked body of a young woman lay face down. Her head was turned to one side and her wet hair streaked across her face. Unlike the torso washed up by the storm, this was a body you would have had to take a close look at to ascertain that she was in fact dead. If it hadn’t been for the inclement weather, you could have mistaken her for a sunbather.

‘I take it our chum with the rod found her?’

‘Yep,’ said Werner. ‘Where have you been? I was trying to get you on your cellphone. I couldn’t get through.’

‘Really?’ Fabel frowned. ‘I had it on all morning. Who fished her out?’

‘A couple of local uniforms. The guy fishing called it in with his cellphone. The uniforms thought she might have been a suicide but then they saw the marks on her neck and throat. And, of course, the Network Killer is pretty much front of mind.’

‘Let’s have a look.’ Fabel took the latex gloves that Werner handed him and snapped them on. They lifted the barrier tape and stepped through. Squatting down beside the body, Fabel eased the wet strands of dark hair from the face. She was about thirty, Fabel reckoned, and looked like she had kept herself in good physical shape. He examined her hands, starting at the fingernails, checking the fingers for breaks and the palms, backs and wrists for abrasions. Nothing. From what he could see, there was no evidence of any defensive injuries. Just like the others.

Fabel rolled the body onto its back. Gently, as if he was afraid to hurt someone who was clearly far beyond hurting. Her skin was bright and pale against the wet asphalt of the towpath. He again eased back a wet cable of hair from the face. Her eyes were closed and her lips, faintly blue-tinged, were parted. She had been pretty in life. Fabel eased back her eyelids: the white of the eyes were red with ruptured blood vessels — petechial haemorrhages, a sure sign of strangulation. He examined her face and worked his way down to her neck. There was another petechial haemorrhage, this time a diamond of livid skin on her throat, just above the jugular notch where her collarbones came together to meet her sternum. He could see that there was only a little bruising on her neck, where her killer had gripped with his fingers before digging his thumbs in to crush her larynx. The bruising was limited, Fabel reckoned, because death had been quick and she hadn’t had time to bruise.

‘He does it clean, I’ll give him that,’ Fabel said to Werner, straightening himself up. ‘He leaves us nothing to go on.’

‘Except he looks like he’s playing games now,’ said Werner. ‘And that’s what will get him caught. These nut-jobs always end up doing stuff like that. It’s like they want to get caught.’

‘What are you talking about, Werner?’

‘Well, I’d say it was pretty obvious that he’s trying to open up communication. That text, I mean. The one you asked me and Anna about. That must have been him.’

‘But why now? Why does he suddenly change his pattern? He’s never tipped us off before. Anyway, the weird thing about that was that the message seemed to come from Susanne’s number.’

Fabel took out his cellphone and flipped it open. ‘See?’ he said and scrolled through his text messages. ‘Wait a minute, I’ll get it…’ He frowned.

‘What’s up, Jan?’ asked Werner.

‘The damnedest thing-’

‘Oh, shit…’ Werner interrupted Fabel’s thought by tapping him on the arm with the back of his hand and nodding in the direction they had come along the towpath. Fabel turned to see Horst van Heiden striding purposefully towards them.

‘God,’ muttered Fabel. ‘How did he manage to get here even before the forensics team? He must have an always-on line to the ops room.’ He pulled a fake smile over his irritation and nodded a greeting as van Heiden drew near. ‘Herr Criminal Director, it’s not often we see you at a scene of crime.’

‘Do we have a name?’ asked van Heiden, nodding to the figure lying on the towpath.

‘We don’t even have any clothes, far less ID. It will take time to get a name for her.’

‘But she’s a victim of this maniac who uses the internet?’

‘Again, I can’t confirm that yet, but yes, my guess is that there’s a high probability that she is. The MO in dumping the body in an inner-city waterway fits.’

‘And, of course, he sent you that cryptic warning about where to find the body. I have to say, Fabel, it’s a pity you didn’t realise it was an advance notice of where the next body would be dumped. Not that I blame you… no one would have guessed.’

‘How did you…?’

‘I spoke to Frau Wolff.’ Van Heiden looked at the body again and frowned.

‘I take it you didn’t come down here to check up on my scene-of-crime skills?’ asked Fabel.

‘Quite,’ said van Heiden ‘We’ve got to get this lunatic, Fabel. I hear you’re going to execute those search-and-seizure warrants this afternoon.’

‘Well, Anna is. I’m going to have to oversee things here. We won’t be able to hold anyone, but the warrants mean we can get their computers into Kroeger’s department. We might just get lucky. I’m also going to give my cellphone to Kroeger.’

‘So he can trace who sent you the text?’ asked van Heiden.

‘Not quite…’ Fabel sighed. ‘I can’t find the text any more. I think I may have deleted it. Accidentally. But I don’t see how.’

‘I see…’ said van Heiden. It was a habit of van Heiden’s to drop an elliptical I see into conversations with his officers. It was up to you to interpret what lay in the ellipsis: I see… that I’ve got the wrong man for the job; I see… that you’ve really screwed up this time.

‘And we’re just assuming that the text is significant,’ said Fabel. ‘It could be a pure coincidence.’

Van Heiden gave Fabel a look: the kind of look he would have given someone who walked into the Presidium and claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘It would be a hell of a coincidence. I’ll get Kroeger onto it. You said you were looking for me this morning… why?’

‘It was just that, after our discussion this morning, I thought that I should update you on that car-burning attack in the Schanzenviertel. I’ve just had word that Fottinger died during the night. So we’ve got an unlawful killing, Fabel, which makes it your baby. But we may have a real job pursuing it as homicide, given that Fottinger was inside the cafe when the arson attack was carried out. He came out to the fire that killed him.’

‘That was maybe part of the plan — to set light to the car to draw him out into the street,’ said Fabel. ‘But I’m guessing that that’s not the only the reason you came all the way down here to see me.’

‘No — or, at least, not entirely. I wanted to ask you if Berthold Muller-Voigt said anything to you when you left the meeting together yesterday.’

‘What do you mean? Why?’

Van Heiden placed a hand on Fabel’s elbow and steered him a few steps further up the towpath, away from the crime scene and out of Werner’s hearing.

‘Listen, Jan. You know the rumours about Muller-Voigt’s past. The press accusations about his possible involvement with extreme leftist terrorists in the early eighties.’

‘I don’t think he had anything to do with that. I believe his involvement was never anything than purely political,’ said Fabel. He didn’t want to tell van Heiden that he had delved deeply into the politician’s past as part of the investigation that had first brought him into contact with Muller-Voigt.

‘Whether he had or not, I am uncomfortable with some of the information I have to share with him as part of the GlobalConcern Hamburg security committee. Whatever his background, Muller-Voigt is a conniving, manipulative swine. I know that you and he have had dealings in the past — I was just concerned that he was perhaps trying to get information out of you.’

‘Information about what?’

‘I don’t really know. All I do know is that, before you arrived, Muller-Voigt had been very persistent with Menke. He kept asking him about what extreme environmental groups the BfV were watching. Naturally, given Muller-Voigt’s colourful history, Menke wasn’t keen to share anything more than he had to.’

‘But Muller-Voigt is a senior member of the Hamburg government,’ said Fabel. ‘Whatever he was or wasn’t in the past, he is an elected and appointed public official. I would have thought we should be cooperating as much as possible.’

‘Of course…’ Van Heiden looked a little taken aback. ‘Of course we are cooperating. But Muller-Voigt’s questions were… I don’t know… they were irrelevant.’

‘Well, I can promise you that Muller-Voigt didn’t discuss anything like that with me in the lift. I got out at the Murder Commission, so we didn’t get a chance to talk much.’

‘Right…’ said van Heiden absently, rubbing his chin for a moment. ‘Right… I just wanted to ask. Muller-Voigt can be quite the slippery customer.’

Fabel didn’t know why he hadn’t told van Heiden what had really passed between him and Muller-Voigt. He just felt he had to keep it to himself, at least for the moment. He had, after all, promised the politician to keep everything unofficial and strictly to himself.

After van Heiden had left, Fabel supervised the management of the crime scene as he had before with so many crime scenes over the years. Holger Brauner arrived with his team and with his usual inappropriate good cheer examined the body, Tesa-taped anything extraneous on the victim’s skin, placed numbered tent cards, took photographs, zippered the remains of the young woman in black vinyl and removed her from the scene. The uniformed police kept the growing crowd of rubberneckers at bay. Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner turned up at the scene, took statements from the fisherman and started a door-to-door in the immediate area.

It was the carefully rehearsed choreography of the beginning of a new murder enquiry. And Fabel directed the dance in the faint grey drizzle. No horror this time; no dismemberment or stench of putrefaction. Just the sadness of a young life lost.

Another thing Fabel had never learned to get used to.