Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘Thanks,’ said Fabel. ‘Chief Commissar Kroeger will be working alongside us on this and provide the liaison with the other specialists in his unit. Anna has provided him with the full list of possible convergent identities from the social-network sites. What’s narrowed it down is that each of the victims seemed to favour a different site. We’ve found it difficult to find any points of convergence in their day-to-day real lives, and it’s proving tricky in their online activities, but we do know that all four women made regular use of social networking sites to meet men.’

‘One thing I didn’t mention,’ said Kroeger, ‘is that we have a distinct advantage in being in possession of the computers used by each of the women. We have technology that enables us to retrace their steps. We may even be able to recover a good part of their chatroom messages. And that could point us in very specific directions.’

‘Where are we with that?’ asked Fabel.

‘Not that far away. I reckon another day or two and we’ll potentially have a lot of leads from what was keyed into the computers. It’s painstaking work, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Fabel and smiled. Kroeger was all numbers and no personality. This was no game nor some kind of professional challenge. In two days another woman could be dead. She could be planning to meet her killer right now: chatting, flirting, making arrangements with an electronic fiction of a human being. ‘But, as I’m sure you appreciate, time is of the essence here.’

‘Naturally we will treat this case as an absolute priority.’ When Kroeger spoke he always said the right things. But whatever sentiment was in it never made it into his expression or his grey eyes. He was himself almost a machine, thought Fabel.

Fabel had worked with Kroeger once before, on a child-murder case involving an internet-based paedophile ring; Kroeger had all but come right out and said that he thought Fabel’s technological illiteracy compromised his efficiency as an investigator. But what had riled Fabel most of all was the way Kroeger had remained so detached from the human suffering involved in the case. Kroeger seemed as uninterested in and as uncomprehending of the fact that a child had been murdered and a family ripped apart by horror and grief as Fabel was about the difference between a kilobyte and a gigabyte. The result was a lingering mutual distaste.

But Fabel needed Kroeger on this case. There was no denying that if they stood a chance of catching the Network Killer, then Kroeger’s expertise was the most important tool they had. It was, as Kroeger had said himself, his beat.

‘Unfortunately my team is unusually stretched at the moment,’ continued Kroeger. ‘We’ve been given the responsibility of tracking down the source of this Klabautermann Virus that’s been wrecking e-comms within the state government. But, like I said, this case will naturally take priority.’

‘I appreciate that.’

Fabel spent the rest of the briefing with the usual mechanics of a major investigation. Each team of two detectives gave a report on their corner of the investigation, followed by a group discussion and the allocation by Fabel of further investigative tasks.

‘That guy Kroeger gives me the creeps…’ Werner came up to Fabel after the others had gone. ‘I’m sure I saw him in that science fiction film — you know, The Matrix.’

‘He’s good at his job,’ said Fabel. ‘One of the best in Europe, I’ve been told. That’s all that counts. And god knows we need him on this one.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t The Matrix I saw him in. I used to watch a lot of Westerns when I was a kid,’ said Werner. ‘You know… when the cavalry are in hostile Red Indian territory but they have to rely on a native tracker from the same tribe to get them through. Why do I get the feeling Kroeger is as likely to take scalps as the bad guys?’

‘He’s an odd one, that’s all, Werner. As far as I can remember I’ve never seen Kroeger wear feathers in his hair.’

‘Suppose not.’ Werner rasped a shovel of hand across his stubble-cut scalp. ‘But I have to admit to being out of my depth with all of this electronic stuff, Jan. I have never been able to understand these social networking sites. Why do people need to use computers to connect with each other, piling all of their personal stuff out there on the internet? Yet if you sit next to one of them on the S-Bahn, you can’t have a conversation with them because they’re plugged into their mp3 players.’

‘That’s the technological society for you,’ said Fabel. ‘All technology and no society.’

Most of the officers working in the Presidium took lunch in its huge canteen. Fabel frequently used it himself but often preferred to take three-quarters of an hour in the middle of the day to get out of the Commission. Thinking time, he liked to call it. He was just about to leave the building when a bleep from his cellphone alerted him that he had received a text message.

Arrived safely Wiesbaden. Weather crap. Hotel soulless. Phone tonight. Sx

He sighed. Fabel could never understand why Susanne sent him texts: she knew he wouldn’t reply to them. It took him too long to fiddle around with the phone keys and even then it was all wrong or he would accidentally delete the two-sentence reply it had taken him fifteen minutes to compose. Why didn’t people simply talk to each other any more? The thought hit him and he remembered Werner saying pretty much the same. Fabel resigned himself to Old Farthood.

One of the places Fabel favoured for lunch was a cafe on one of the dozens of canals that criss-crossed the city. This particular cafe was on the Alsterstreek canal, next to the Winterhuder Fahrhaus, where tourists and locals would catch the red and white water buses that criss-crossed the Alster. Sitting below the city that surrounded it and tucked in tight to the bridge, the cafe gave Fabel an odd sense of safety. Its location made it handy for the Presidium and if the weather was half decent he could sit out at one of the tables by the railings that ran along the side of the Alsterstreek and watch the swans patrol the waterway. Being beside the water, too, comforted Fabel, calmed him; which was strange, because, as a boy growing up in Norddeich, Fabel had been just a little afraid of the water; specifically of the sea. He had always put it down to the fear of flooding that was instinctive in East Frisians and their neighbours, the Dutch. Fabel’s boyhood home had been behind a dyke and there had been nights in his childhood — not many, but a few — when he would lie awake thinking about the dark mass of sea held back by a simple man-made earthwork.

A waiter came over to wipe down the table before taking Fabel’s order. He greeted him with a smile and asked him how he was. It was a ritual of recognition: Fabel was a known face here, but he knew that none of the staff would have any idea what it was that he did for a living, and that somehow added to his sense of comfort. It was something he had often wondered about: what people assumed about him, not knowing that his daily business was all about violence and death. Did he look like an academic, which is what he would prefer them to think, or did they take him for some kind of businessman? The latter thought depressed him.

Fabel had given a lot of thought to how people perceived him, and how they perceived each other; mainly because it was something that came up so frequently when interviewing the family and friends of murderers. Not, of course, in the majority of homicides where the murder was committed by people known to the police and to their victims as habitually violent and potentially dangerous. Most of the murders Fabel dealt with occurred within a certain milieu and were fuelled by drink or drugs; but there were cases — particularly with sex killings — where everyone stood open-mouthed on discovering that the murderer was someone they knew. The I-would-never-have-guessed killers. The bloated body washed up at the Fischmarkt, head and limbs removed, could well turn out to be the victim of just such a killer.