Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘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…’

It was shortly after lunchtime when Fabel sat down with his team.

Just before he went into the briefing, he got a message on the Presidium’s internal email system that Criminal Director van Heiden, chief of the investigative branch and Fabel’s boss, wanted to see him at around three-thirty. After several years working with van Heiden, Fabel knew that around three-thirty meant three-thirty on the dot. As he was only too willing to admit, Fabel himself had a tendency to be punctilious about punctuality, but his boss’s timekeeping made the average atomic clock look sloppy. Fabel could guess what van Heiden wanted to see him about. The Criminal Director was as scrupulous about being kept informed of every development in every case that was remotely in the public eye as he was about timekeeping; he would no doubt have already been briefed about the body down by the Fischmarkt.

By the time Fabel walked into the main conference room at the end of the Murder Commission’s corridor, his team had already assembled. The conference room was large and decorated in neutral tones, clean but bland and somewhere between linen white and beige. In contrast, striking, vivid colours leapt from the two large frameless canvases on the side wall. The two abstract paintings were what Fabel described as ‘corporate art’: the kind of stuff you found in the reception areas of banks, insurance companies, ad agencies and accountancy firms in an effort to convince you that they were actually ‘quite edgy’.

The conference room’s large windows looked out over the treetops of Winterhude Stadtpark. A jug filled with iced water, a white vacuum coffeepot and cups, all of which looked as if they had come from Ikea, were neatly arranged on the cherrywood table. The officers sitting around the table had all set down their clipboards with notepads in front of them, like table settings.

Sitting there at the top of the conference table, an electronic whiteboard behind him, Fabel felt as if they were about to discuss monthly sales targets, or the launch of a new product line or ad campaign. It seemed to Fabel that the whole world was becoming corporate. Politicians, medical professionals, now even policemen, all looked as if they were about to sell you something. The business of policing.

Fabel was only forty-eight but sometimes he felt he’d been born a decade or two too late. Everything seemed to be less real than it had been when he had started his career. He noticed that even edgy Anna Wolff was beginning to dress more conservatively. Every rebellion, it seemed, ended in resigned conformity. In addition to Fabel’s regular team, there was a tall, thin man sitting at the far end of the cherrywood table. He would have been in his early forties but had a demeanour of seriousness that, along with his conservative tailoring and a thin face that was all bony angles, made him seem older. Fabel had nodded to the visitor as he had entered the room and took his seat.

‘Will you work this thing for me?’ he asked Anna, dodging having to operate the electronic whiteboard himself. Technology was something else that had crept up on Fabel: somewhere along the way, murder had become digitised.

‘Okay…’ Fabel stood up. ‘The so-called Network Killer. We’ve got three victims and you all know the background to the murders so far. Each investigation team has been allocated a case file. But, before we get started, I have to tell you that this morning we recovered another body from the water. Or, more correctly, the water delivered up a body to us this morning: she was swept up onto the Fischmarkt by the storm.’

There was a low groan from the team.

‘Great…’ It was a thickset bull of a man sitting hunched with his elbows resting on the conference table who spoke. He was in his late fifties with grey hair cropped tight to his skull and he had the look of a boxer. Senior Commissar Werner Meyer — Fabel’s deputy. ‘Another one.’

‘Probably not,’ said Anna. ‘The stiff this morning was a dismembered torso. No head, legs or arms. If our guy is anything, he’s consistent.’

‘ Perhaps not…’ Fabel fired a meaningful look at Anna. ‘The body found this morning certainly looks like something different, and that probably means someone different. So there’s no point in us including this body in this case until we get a full forensic and autopsy report. My main worry is that maybe we have a copycat killer. Or it could be our guy and he’s simply experimenting with his art. But, as Commissar Wolff has so helpfully pointed out, so far our guy has been completely consistent. And he doesn’t strike me as the type to play with his food: he stalks his victims, traps them, rapes them and strangles them. That’s the main event. Anything he does afterwards is housekeeping. Disposal. He’s never felt the need to dismember the bodies before. So, for the moment and until we get the reports, let’s leave this one out.’

Fabel nodded to Anna, who hit a key on the wireless keyboard. Four photographic panels appeared. In three, the usual flash-stark scene-of-crime pictures of the young female victims. In the fourth, a sequence of photographs, all of young men, flashed rapidly on the whiteboard. Scores of them. Hundreds. In fast succession.

‘We’re in a whole new area of offending here,’ continued Fabel. ‘Our killer has a familiar modus for anyone who’s worked a multiple sex-murder case before. Everyone in this room has experience in the investigative process of identifying and locating a murderer. We work with the forensic detail, the chronology of the homicide and the connections between witnesses, key events and locations. We can visit the places, we can trace witnesses, find physical evidence, gain background intelligence; and from all that we can build a picture, even get a description of our suspect. But in this case, we are not dealing with the physical world. Our killer locates his victims in cyberspace. Three women, to date completely unconnected, each of whom was lured to their death by one of these men…’ Fabel indicated the still-flickering procession of photographs.

‘These are the men with whom we know the victims had contact on the internet through social networking sites. Could you slow that down a bit, Anna?’ Fabel asked. Anna Wolff held a key down and the images changed less frequently. All of the photographs were amateur shots of men in their twenties or early thirties, some taken with a phone or a digital camera into a mirror. Several of the faces were indistinct: blurred or partially masked behind the reflected camera flash. There was a variety of the usual grimaces and postures, some muscled torsos shirtless, and most made the predictable, inane ‘hanging loose’ or ‘throwing horns’ hand gestures. ‘The problem we have is this. In the real world we could pinpoint a single person out of this selection who has had contact with all of the victims and put a face to him. But here, on the internet, he could be several of these faces. Or none of them. It is almost certain that he uses a different identity for each woman he “meets” on the internet, and that none of these identities are his. For all we know, he isn’t even posing as a man. It could be that he has arranged to meet his victims while posing as a female, or even a representative of an organisation.