A fear of dark water

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 if 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 asked 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.

‘So we thought, if she didn’t have a computer, maybe she had a web-enabled cell phone.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Fabel. ‘No cellphone, either.’

‘Julia Henning must have been the only twenty-seven-year-old in Hamburg without a computer or cellphone. So we pulled out of the apartment and sent in a forensics team. It’s pretty obvious that someone has been in there and taken her stuff, possibly our killer.’

‘The neighbours see anything?’

Thomas Glasmacher, the larger and quieter of the two answered. ‘No

… no one saw anything unusual or anyone they didn’t know come in or out. We found a shoebox full of receipts and warranties and we’ve been going through that. Also, we’ve asked her bank for full details of her outgoings. I’ll bet we’ll find a direct debit to a phone-service provider. But proving she had a computer and a cellphone doesn’t bring us any closer to actually finding them.’

Fabel grunted; they seemed to be perpetually scrabbling around in a fog.

‘There’s something about this one,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘It all smacks of someone trying to cover tracks and confuse times. As Werner said, why now? Why did he feel the need to make these changes with this one?’

They moved on to the Muller-Voigt inquiry. Werner ran through the progress to date. He confirmed what Astrid Bremer had already told Fabel about the fingerprints and the stray sample of grey fibre found at the scene. Fabel felt the tension in the room when Werner read from the report that only Fabel’s and the dead man’s fingerprints had been found on the weapon. Other than that, the investigation into the politician’s death also seemed to be stalling, despite it being obvious that Werner was pulling out all the stops to remove any suspicion, no matter how slight, that his boss might have been involved in the murder.

Anna Wolff then picked up the thread.

‘Muller-Voigt’s mystery woman is less of a mystery,’ she said. ‘But not much less.’

‘Oh?’ said Fabel, his interest pricked.

‘Muller-Voigt had a broad range of restaurants he would take women to. It would have made things easier if he had been more a creature of habit, but I have checked them all out. No one saw him with a woman fitting Meliha’s description. Then I thought that maybe she called the shots and decided where they should eat. And with her being Turkish, I thought I’d check out some of the Turkish restaurants in town. Believe me, there are a lot of Turkish restaurants in Hamburg. I took the liberty of pulling in a favour from uniform and circulated a picture of Muller-Voigt and a description of Meliha Yazar. We struck gold in Eimsbuttel — not something you get to say every day. There’s a restaurant on Schulterblatt in the Schanzenviertel and the owner swears Muller-Voigt and Meliha were regulars. He recognised Muller-Voigt’s picture but didn’t have any idea he was a politician, and he remembers Meliha because she spoke Turkish to him. He said she told him she was from Silviri, on the coast. She had been in a couple of times on her own, but there’s no credit card transaction recorded because either Muller-Voigt paid or she paid by cash. But I’m afraid that’s it — he couldn’t tell me any more. Although he did say their regular waiter is on holiday at the moment. But he’ll be back this week. The owner said he got the idea that the woman didn’t like being asked questions. Other than that, she was very friendly and he got the impression that they were a very close couple.’

Another amateur psychologist waiting table, thought Fabel. ‘Well, it’s something. It’s more than something — well done, Anna. At least now we can demonstrate that Meliha Yazar did exist.’

He resumed the formal procedure of the caseload recap, hoping that something would leap out at them. Usually the job of the Murder Commission was to find a commonality between cases, to establish links. The problem at the moment, thought Fabel, was that they kept tripping over commonalities and links where there should be none: the Network Killer case was unlikely to be related to the female torso washed up at the Fischmarkt; Muller-Voigt’s murder could be linked to the torso, but logically Daniel Fottinger’s death — his possible unintentional death — should have been separate from everything else.

But there were links. There was a commonality. Or at least there was a mass of coincidences that stretched the laws of probability beyond the credible.

Muller-Voigt’s missing girlfriend had been investigating the Pharos Project and the body on the Fischmarkt had been in the water for almost the same period that she had been missing. Muller-Voigt was a non-executive director of Fottinger Environmental Technologies, and both Daniel and Kirstin Fottinger were members of the Project. Even the Network Killer case had an unexpected, if coincidental, link to Pharos through the company that had developed Virtual Dimension. Then, of course, there was the fact that someone had done their best to implicate Fabel in both the Network Killer case and Muller-Voigt’s murder; and whoever had done that had enormous technological skills and resources at their disposal. Like the Pharos Project.

‘But what possible link could there be between the Pharos Project and women who have been targeted in a classic serial sex-offender way, raped and strangled?’ asked Nicola Bruggemann. ‘Ritual murders, I could believe. Elimination of ex-members would be probable, but we know that none of these women had any connection to the Project at all.’

‘Other than Virtual Dimension being owned by a Korn-Pharos company,’ said Werner.

‘True, but that’s not such a big coincidence. Between all the companies in the group, Korn-Pharos generates a hell of a lot of internet content.’

‘What about this guy Reisch, Jan?’ asked Werner. ‘His death could be seen as another coincidence. He was involved with Virtual Dimension too, and we know he had contact with the dead women. Maybe his suicide was guilt over their deaths.’

‘But he was physically incapable of committing the crimes,’ said Fabel.

‘I think Werner has a point, though,’ said Bruggemann in her deep contralto. ‘Because he was incapable of commission, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t involved in some way. Maybe he was part of a killing team, with some kind of folie a deux or folie a trois crap going on. Maybe he got some kind of vicarious cyber hard-on by having an accomplice commit the act for him.’

‘No. It doesn’t fit, Nicola. But we’ll explore it, anyway. Cybercrime Unit is doing a forensic search of his hard drive. Maybe we’ll find something there. But I think Reisch was just a poor schmuck who had been dealt the worst hand you can imagine. He just decided to throw that hand in. Or that’s my take on it, at least.’

‘What about the State Prosecutor’s Office? Are they closer to budging on warrants?’ asked Henk Hermann.

‘We simply don’t have enough on the Pharos Project. To be honest, the State Prosecutor’s Office is reluctant to take on the legal might of the Korn-Pharos Corporation without being totally sure of their ground.’ Fabel sighed. ‘I don’t blame them. We are talking about something with the resources of a small country behind it. We have to get more on Pharos. And something evidentially solid; not more coincidences.’

‘It’s odd,’ said Henk. ‘Usually we have an individual, a single person, at the top of our suspects list. But now, with all this, we’ve got a group of people, a pretty amorphous and anonymous group of people at that. It’s more like corporate crime.’

Fabel stared at Henk. So long that the junior officer started to look uncomfortable and eventually laughed nervously and said. ‘What?’

‘You’re right, Henk,’ said Fabel, animated. He stood up and grabbed the file that Menke had given him. ‘Crimes aren’t committed by corporate bodies. I read somewhere in here…’ He flicked determinedly through the pages of the BfV report. ‘Here it is… one of the cult’s philosophies stresses the importance of the egregore, the groupmind.’

Fabel started to read from the file: ‘“… the egregore has been a concept in occultism and mystical thinking for more than a century, but the Pharos Project has adopted it in the more contemporary sense from current business and commercial law usage, where corporate bodies are seen to have a single mind or corporate culture, at least in terms of corporate responsibility and liability. Like all destructive cults, the Pharos Project seeks to diminish the sense of the individual and increase the concept of a singular groupmind. To achieve this, members of the Project are subjected to psychological programming over protracted periods as well as having to follow a highly disciplined, hierarchical and structured daily routine. Part of the creation of a sense of corporateness is the exclusive use of English as the principal language of communication, something the Pharos Project has borrowed from large German corporations who conduct all senior management meetings in English, even if all present are native German speakers. Another element of the Pharos Project’s corporation-like culture is the wearing of uniforms by all its adherents. Because of federal restrictions on the use of uniforms by political or quasi-political groups, the Pharos Project has employed the simple device of forcing all members to wear identical business suits: pale grey for the rank and file, dark grey for Consolidators, and black for senior figures in the organisation. This avoids any difficulty with federal regulation and allows an element of anonymity, as the outfits supplied differ in no significant manner from normal business apparel.

…”’

Fabel snapped shut the file. ‘Werner, can you get onto Astrid Bremer and ask her if she can give us a detailed background of the grey fibre she found at Muller-Voigt’s place? She told me that it was particularly unusual because it was entirely synthetic. I’ll bet that the Pharos Project buys its uniforms in bulk from some corporate-wear wholesaler. Anna, I need you to sweet-talk your contact in the State Prosecutor’s office and tell him we need a limited search-and-seizure warrant for a couple of jackets from the Pharos Project for a comparison.’ Fabel checked himself and looked across to Nicola Bruggemann.

‘Go ahead,’ she said without a hint of antagonism. ‘It’s your department.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fabel, then frowned, like someone trying to remember where they had left their car keys. ‘That woman down by the docks — she was wearing a dark grey business suit.’

‘God, Jan,’ said Bruggemann, ‘that’s a bit of a stretch. A business suit is a business suit.’

‘Maybe so. But I’m pretty convinced that she was a Consolidator. It’s all beginning to come together. The Network Killer murders are linked to the Pharos Project. But I can’t for the life of me work out why.’ Fabel picked up his jacket from the back of the chair.

‘Nicola, I’ll leave you to it. I need to go out.’

‘Where are you off to?’

‘I’m going to take a North Sea lighthouse tour.’