A fear of dark water

Chapter Seven

A moment’s calm before the storm.

Sitting quietly in his car, Fabel listened to his music and watched the rain through the windshield as it eased to a drizzle. He knew what was coming.

This was his business. His job. Looking at death. Trying to understand it. But it didn’t matter how often you saw death — violent death — it still stirred a turmoil in you. Maybe not as big a turmoil as it had ten, fifteen years and countless cases ago, but it was still there: the vague churning in your gut triggered by an irrepressible human instinct. A natural fight-or-flight reaction firing somewhere in the oldest evolved part of your brain. Especially if there was a lot of blood. When there was a lot of blood something instinctive kicked in and overrode your reason. And, later on, long after you had left the scene of crime, the images of the dead would come back to you. Unbidden and at the most inappropriate moments: eating a meal, during sex, relaxing with friends.

So Jan Fabel took a moment and sat in the car with the wipers switched off, watching the viscous rain burst maliciously against the windshield. The day outside was grey: the sky, the water, the buildings — all tonal shifts of graphite. It was a grey peace, this moment.

The music seemed to fit his mood — and the weather — perfectly: the Esbjorn Svensson Trio, played through the mp3 player he had plugged into the BMW’s sound system. From Gagarin’s Point of View. A great title. A great piece for a Hamburg morning in graphite tones. Pleasantly melancholic in the way only the Scandinavians seemed able to master.

Cold, wet knuckles rapped on the passenger window and snapped him out of his grey peace. He opened the window and chilled pinpoints of rain prickled against his cheek.

‘Are you going to join us, Chef?’ Anna Wolff leaned over into the window, frowning against the cold and wet. Impatient. Anna had always been youthful-looking and pretty: dark eyes and dark hair cut short. Girlish. But standing there in the rain there was a hint of a future, older Anna: an Anna with the edge of her typical energy blunted. Fabel noticed the subtle change and felt bad. He also noticed her slight limp as she stepped back from the car and felt worse. His team had taken more than its fair share of casualties over the years.

‘You look full of the joys,’ she said as Fabel stepped out of the car.

‘So what have we got, Anna?’

‘Like I said, a wash-up. And be warned: it’s a stinker. It was found by the flood-defence team working here. The boss is a guy called Kreysig.’

‘Lars Kreysig?’

‘You know him?’ asked Anna.

‘More know of him, but I have met him. He’s a bit of a legend in the Hamburg Fire Service. A lot of people are breathing today who wouldn’t be if Kreysig hadn’t been there to pull their fat out of the fire. Literally. He still here?’

‘We asked him to hang about until you arrived. What was that crap you were listening to in the car?’

Fabel stopped and turned to face Anna. ‘You have no soul, Commissar Wolff, do you know that? No appreciation of the finer things in life. Leave me alone, Anna… Susanne’s been having a go at me all the way to the airport about my car.’

‘Really? Personally, I like antiques. Anyway, Susanne’s good for you. You’re less grumpy these days. You ready for this?’

They made their way across to where a white forensic tent had been set up, stepping over pipes and hoses and avoiding the dark rainbow puddles of oil and water and the black tangles of flotsam washed up from the flood.

‘I’ve already had the pleasure,’ said Anna when they reached the tent. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll wait for you here.’

Fabel nodded: Anna was tough, and she had seen more than her fair share of violent deaths, but her Achilles heel was dealing with a messy corpse. And Fabel knew that there was nothing messier than a body that had been in the water for anything more than a few days. In water, the processes of decomposition are greatly accelerated: the flesh softens and the body swells with trapped gases, rising and bobbing on the surface like some putrid buoy.

There was a table with forensic kits set up outside the tent. Anna handed Fabel a white paper oversuit, latex gloves, blue stretch overshoes and a cup-filter face mask. She took a perfume atomiser from her jacket pocket and sprayed a puff into the inverted cup of the mask.

‘You’ll need it,’ she said. ‘This one’s ripe. And keep your forensic suit zipped up. If that stink gets on your clothes, you’ll never get it off.’

‘I’ve dealt with floaters before, Anna. I know the drill.’ Fabel smiled as he said it: he had noticed Anna’s pale face grow paler, obviously as she recalled her time in the tent.

Fabel looked up at the sky, still steel-grey after the storm, then around the clean-up site with its temporary village of generators, cranes, trucks and fire engines. He took a long deep breath, tried to play in his head a few bars of From Gagarin’s Point of View to ease the flutter in his chest. Then, putting the strongly perfumed face mask over his nose and mouth, he stepped into the white forensic tent.

Even with the mask and the strong scent of the perfume, the stench hit him as soon as he entered the tent. He recognised the smell immediately; there was no other odour in the world like it: at once rancid and sour and sickly sweet. Fabel had come across it with a couple of other water-recovered bodies and a black-stage corpse found in the woods. Black was the fourth stage of putrefaction, between ten and twenty days after death. And the smelliest. Despite an extractor fan working full tilt, the air in the forensic tent fumed with the stench of putrid flesh.

Fabel often wondered how the Hamburg Harbour Police could put up with dealing with so many floaters. There was a demarcation of responsibility for discovered corpses between the Harbour Police and the ordinary Polizei Hamburg: the high-water mark. Any body found above the water mark was the responsibility of the City Police; below, it belonged to the Harbour Police. Rumour had it that more than a few bodies washed up along the shore had been given a nudge by the boot of a squeamish City Police officer and rolled back below the high-tide mark and into the Harbour Police’s jurisdiction.

‘Hi, Jan, how are you?’ Holger Brauner was a shortish, powerfully built man in his forties. From behind his mask, the head of the Polizei Hamburg’s forensic squad greeted Fabel gleefully as he entered the tent. Brauner, it seemed to Fabel, was irrepressibly cheerful. They had been friends for years and Fabel had never been able to square the joie de vivre of the friend with the grim task of the colleague.

Fabel did not answer at once. All his attention was focused on an effort not to vomit. The source of the odour lay on the wet asphalt: a torso, the skin puckered and greenish-black in patches, violet and greenish-white in others. It had no head, no legs, no arms. The flesh where the amputations had taken place was puckered and fluffed; nauseatingly pink and raw-looking. The torso looked as if it belonged to someone morbidly obese, the belly stretched taut and the breasts pushed out sideways, but Fabel knew that it was the pressure of the gases within that had distended and bloated the body.

‘I’m doing better than she is. How can you stand the stink?’ asked Fabel between controlled breaths.

Brauner mimicked taking a deep appreciative sniff. ‘I love the smell of putrescine and cadaverine in the morning. Did you know that cadaverine is also what gives semen its smell? It’s there at the beginning and end of life.’

‘You need to get some hobbies, Holger.’ Fabel nodded towards the torso. ‘Washed up by the flood?’

‘Well, I don’t think she swam here…’ Somewhere behind his mask Brauner gave a small laugh.

‘The loss of the head and limbs… no chance that’s accidental? A boat or something?’

‘No. Clearly done deliberately. And reasonably expertly. Disarticulative amputation of the arms, transfemoral amputation of the legs. Neat job, actually.’

‘When we catch her killer I’ll pass on your appreciative critique of his work.’ Fabel’s voice was tight as he unconsciously tried to keep his breaths short and shallow. ‘Whoever it was, he clearly doesn’t want us to identify her. Or at least wants to slow us down.’

‘Yeah…’ said Brauner absently, tilting his head as he examined the severed neck. ‘ Soooo last century. Who needs fingerprints these days? We can match her to a missing person through familial DNA.’

‘ If she’s reported missing and we can trace a relative.’ Fabel noticed what looked like a network of tattoos and then saw where some of the skin had burst, exposing slimy fat and flesh that looked like overcooked chicken. He felt a sudden strengthened surge of nausea and looked away.

‘We have anserita cutis. Goose skin,’ said Brauner. ‘And there is some evidence of skin maceration. But no significant adipocere in the subcutaneous layer. So I can tell you that this body has been in the water for more than one or two weeks but less than six.’

‘Are those tattoos on the skin?’

‘No, those lines are the work of our old friends bacillus prodigiosus and bacillus violaceum. Nature’s tattooists… chromogenic bacteria that pigment the skin red and purple respectively. It’s a sign of lengthy immersion in water.’

‘Any idea of the cause of death?’ asked Fabel.

‘Having her head cut off would have done it,’ said Brauner. ‘Didn’t they teach you anything at murder-detective school?’

‘Very funny. I’m guessing that the removal of the limbs and head were post-mortem. Any signs of violence on the body?’

‘Sorry, Jan, you’ll have to wait for the autopsy. With a ripe floater like this, it takes close examination to sort out what’s been done pre- or post-mortem. There could be bullet holes in there, but closed up and hidden by the swelling. And water corpses like these get buffeted about, hit by boats and nibbled at by all sorts in the water. The autopsy will also establish if decomposition is exclusively due to aquatic bacteria, so we’ll know if she spent any length of time on land after she died.’

‘Thanks, Holger. Give Anna Wolff your report when it’s ready.’ Fabel turned to leave the tent.

‘How is Anna, by the way?’ asked Brauner. ‘I mean, how is she coping?’

‘Fine. She’s fit and she’s been back on duty for six months. You know Anna.’

‘What d’you reckon?’ asked Anna when Fabel emerged from the forensics tent. ‘Dismemberment like that suggests an organised killer.’

‘Could be anything,’ said Fabel. ‘It could be our guy, but it could also be an organised-crime killing, a sex murder… or just a disgruntled husband with a meat saw and a rowing boat.’ He paused and they both turned to look back at the tent: there was the sound of whistling from inside.

‘He was at The Lion King last night, apparently,’ explained Anna. ‘A sucker for a catchy tune, he tells me. Brauner’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’

‘Yep,’ said Fabel. ‘Holger’s a good guy.’

‘Yeah… but you have to admit he’s a bit weird. You know that if he wasn’t a forensic specialist I’d probably have him on a list of potential serial-killer suspects.’

Fabel gave a small half-hearted laugh. Then, looking up at the sky, took a long breath. The air felt cool and clean and fresh, but the sickly-sweet smell of death lingered in his nostrils.

‘Awful in there, wasn’t it?’

Fabel nodded. ‘I hate floaters. You smell them for a week. You and Henk take this one. Let me see the forensics and autopsy when they come in. Like you say, it’s not the Network Killer’s MO. That’s all we need — someone else dumping bodies in Hamburg’s waterways. It’ll do the tourist industry no end of good. Talking about the Network Killer, how are you getting on with possible contacts?’

Anna shrugged. ‘We’ve nailed down another thirty identities on social-network sites that the victims visited. We’ve got a court order to get the IP addresses from the site administrators. We should have them by lunchtime.’

‘Okay, good — we’ll talk about it in the office. Where’s Lars Kreysig?’

Anna pointed to a group of men at the far side of Elbestrasse, leaning against a fire appliance. Even at this distance, Fabel could see the weariness in their posture. As Anna and Fabel approached, one of the firemen straightened up and smiled weakly.

‘Principal Chief Commissar Fabel?’ The man who spoke was taller than Fabel. Lean, with lines engraved deep in a long face topped with unruly prematurely grey hair.

‘Yes. Herr Kreysig?’

‘Call me Lars. I expect you want to talk to me about the floater?’

‘You’ve given Commissar Wolff all the details of when you found the body; I wanted to ask you if you could hazard a guess as to where it came from. The direction in the river, I mean.’

‘I’m not the one to ask.’ Kreysig called over his shoulder to the group of men leaning against the fire appliance. ‘Sepp… could you come here a minute?’ Kreysig turned back to Fabel. ‘My deputy, Sepp Tramberger, is one of your colleagues. Or, at least, he’s from the Harbour Police. He’s on attachment to this special flood-response unit. I tell you, no one knows the way the Elbe works better than Sepp. When he’s not on the river in real life he’s on it virtually.’

‘I don’t get you…’ said Fabel.

‘He’s created a “Virtual Elbe”. In his free time. A computer model of the river and its currents. He’s put it together with some boffin from the university. You can see it on the internet. Or a version of it, anyway. It’s really very impressive.’

Tramberger joined them and, after introducing him to Fabel and Anna, Kreysig repeated Fabel’s question. Tramberger was a shortish, stocky, scoured-looking man with blond hair buzz-cut to a stubble and a face that looked like it had been beaten by more than weather. Fabel knew that most Harbour Police officers had their master’s tickets, meaning that the Harbour Police was largely made up of ex-sailors who had seen a fair bit of the world before patrolling the wharves and quays of Hamburg. Tramberger looked off somewhere in the indeterminate distance and screwed up his leathery face in the contemplative expression that Fabel associated with plumbers about to deliver an open-ended estimate.

‘Hard to say…’ Tramberger rubbed his chin. ‘It depends on how long the pathologist says she was in the water.’

‘More than two weeks, less than six, according to our crime-scene specialist,’ said Fabel.

More chin rubbing, more frowning into empty space.

‘The thing about floaters is that they don’t start out as floaters. They sink. Sometimes to the bottom, or they hover a metre or so above it. If the water temperature is low then they stay there. Sometimes for good. But if the water temperature is warmer, and if they’re unruptured, then they come back up to the surface and bob along. If your girl was in the water for more than a week, then my guess is she was dumped somewhere upstream. But not far. The body wasn’t too churned or chopped-up. And it didn’t look as if it had been scavenged much by fish and eels. Maybe just the other side of the river and a little upstream.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fabel.

‘When you get more info from the pathologist,’ said Tramberger, ‘why don’t you let me know? I could run the data through the computer and see if we can back-trace it. I’d be able to give you a more accurate location for her being dumped in the river.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’

‘Is this another victim of that internet killer you’re looking for?’ asked Kreysig with dull curiosity. He looked exhausted to Fabel.

‘Maybe,’ said Fabel. ‘But I doubt it. Our guy doesn’t dismember his victims — but who knows?’

‘It’s quite apt, isn’t it?’ said Kreysig.

‘What?’

‘The name they’ve given this storm.’ Kreysig’s weary expression suggested that his comment should have been obvious. ‘The storm… the federal weather bureau has given it the name Stortebeker.’

Fabel made a puzzled face.

‘It’s apt that a storm named Stortebeker,’ said Kreysig, ‘has given up a headless body.’

‘Oh… I get you. Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘What was all that about?’ asked Anna as they left the firemen and headed back to the scene of crime. ‘All that gobbledegook about Stortebeker.’

Fabel stopped and turned with an expression of mock shock. ‘First you call my music crap and now you tell me you don’t know who Stortebeker was?’

‘Of course I know. Klaus Stortebeker, Hamburg’s Robin Hood of the sea and all that crap. What’s that got to do with the floater?’

‘You obviously don’t know the legend of Stortebeker’s execution…’

Anna made a couldn’t-care-less face. ‘So demote me.’

‘Klaus Stortebeker was the greatest-ever thorn in the flesh for Hanseatic Hamburg. He and his fellow Victual Brother pirates robbed only Hanseatic ships and shared their booty equally. Simon of Utrecht was made Burgemeister of Hamburg, built a fleet of new warships and hunted Stortebeker down.’ Fabel waved his hand vaguely towards the east. ‘You know where the new Elbphilharmonie is being built? Well, it was down there that they executed them. Back then, long before the Speicherstadt was built, that was all just one long stretch of sandbank. That was where they executed all Hamburg’s captured pirates.’

‘Anyway…’ said Anna impatiently.

‘ Anyway, when Stortebeker was due to be executed, by beheading, along with seventy-odd of his men, he asked for a last favour: that the Hamburg Senate would release as many of his men as he could walk past after his head was cut off. The legend is that after he was beheaded, his headless body stood up and walked past eleven of his men before the executioner tripped it up.’

‘And did the Senate release the eleven men?’

‘No. The Senate were all politicians, of course, and businessmen first and foremost… so naturally they didn’t keep their promise. Everyone got the chop. Mind you, after all seventy-plus were dead, the Mayor asked the headsman if he wasn’t exhausted after so much axe swinging. He made a joke to the effect that he still had enough strength to behead the Mayor and the entire Senate if necessary. Not famed for a sense of humour, either, are politicians or business types, so they had the executioner beheaded on the spot as well.’ Fabel smiled. ‘So, all in all, it’s appropriate that the German Weather Bureau has called this storm Stortebeker. And, like Kreysig said, it’s ironic that Stortebeker has delivered up a headless corpse.’

‘What can I say, Chef?’ said Anna dully. ‘It’s always an education…’