Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘What makes you convinced it wasn’t her? asked Fabel.

‘I just knew it wasn’t her. You can tell. Everyone has a… I don’t know… a style when writing an email.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘And, I know this sounds mad, but it was too grammatical. Meliha is Turkish. I don’t mean Turkish-German, she’s a Turkish national. Her German was excellent but she made mistakes, like all non-natives. This email was… well, too perfect. And, in any case, email just wasn’t our medium.’

‘Mmm…’ said Fabel. He remembered what Kroeger had said at the briefing about identifying fakes on the internet. Maybe Muller-Voigt could have seen through a phoney email. ‘I have to say I don’t know what I can do, Herr Muller-Voigt. It doesn’t sound like a homicide to me. And, to be frank, not much of a missing-person case, either. But I can get in touch with the local police and get them to look into it.’

Fabel stood up.

‘Listen, Fabel…’ Muller-Voigt stepped forward, as if to block his exit. ‘I don’t know what you think of me, but I do know that you don’t take me for the hysterical type. If anything I’m well known for being the opposite. I am telling you that I am absolutely convinced that a woman I was involved with has been abducted or murdered. I am also telling you that not only can I not offer objective evidence that this has happened, I can’t even offer objective evidence that Meliha existed in the first place.’ Muller-Voigt stood back and indicated the sofa. ‘Please, Fabel, I need your help.’

‘You must know where she lives,’ said Fabel, but he remained standing.

‘I was never there. I had an address for her, but when I called there the flat was empty. I don’t mean she wasn’t in, I mean the flat was unoccupied. I asked a neighbour about her and only succeeded in making the woman suspicious. I left before she called the police. But she did say that the apartment had been empty for more than a month.’

‘You say Meliha was a foreign national?’

‘Turkish, yes.’

‘And she was here in Germany legally?’

‘As far as I am aware.’

‘Then there will be a record of her entering the country. What is her full name?’ asked Fabel, taking his notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket.

‘Meliha Yazar. She was from somewhere just outside Istanbul. I think it was Silivri.’

Fabel wrote it down.

‘Is there any reason she would lie to you about where she lived?’

‘None that I can think of. I know this sounds insane, but I don’t think she was lying. I think she lived in that apartment. You see, I met Meliha at an environmental conference. At the Hamburg Congress Center.’

‘She was involved with the environmental movement?’

Muller-Voigt nodded. ‘She was a campaigner, an activist, or at least said she was. From what I could gather, she had some kind of Earth-sciences degree from Istanbul. She told me that she worked as a researcher for an environmental protection agency but she was always pretty evasive when I asked which one. The truth is, I suspected she might be some kind of investigative reporter and I was pretty guarded around her at first. I definitely believe that she was into stuff that placed her in danger.’

‘What kind of stuff?’

Muller-Voigt looked at his half-empty whisky glass and put it down on the table. ‘I’m going to make some coffee,’ he said decisively. ‘It’s a long story…’

Roman Kraxner stood behind the door of his flat, head tilted close, ear angled, his sweat-freckled brow furrowed in concentration. He tried to keep his breathing quiet and shallow so he could hear as much as possible of what transpired downstairs. It was a difficult task: Roman’s obesity squeezed each inhalation into a protracted snort through fat-compressed airways.

A deep male voice resonated outside in the stairwell, one floor down. The voice was quiet, too quiet for Roman to make out exactly what was being said, but it was calm, controlled, strong. Authoritative.

Another voice made Roman recoil slightly from the door. This voice was louder; angry and harsh. Accented.

‘I bet it was that fat pig of a paedophile upstairs!’ The voice was clear and Roman imagined the Albanian leaning into the stairwell, over the banister, shouting up in the direction of Roman’s flat.

Of course it was me, thought Roman. I called them. And I’ll be sending an email to the landlord, you can be sure of that.

‘You should go up there,’ the Albanian shouted for Roman to hear. ‘I tell you. I tell you that what you should be doing. That what you should do… You should finding out what he got on all those computers. Little boys, little girls, I bet.’

Roman felt something between fear and fury surge up from someone deep inside. How dare he? How dare those people say these things about him?

The other voice: slightly louder now, but still calm and even more authoritative. A hint of warning in the tone. Leaning closer into the door, Roman still couldn’t make out what the policeman was saying. A few words. An injunction against bothering Roman. A warning to keep the music down. A mention of Hamburg city ordinances. All voices lower now. Calmer.

The deeper voice laughed at something that the Albanian said. Laughing at what? Laughing at whom? Were they laughing at him? Why was the policeman laughing? He was supposed to be there to shut them up. Stop that stupid music. That was why Roman had called him here.

Roman couldn’t hear the policeman’s voice any more. He heard the outer door at the bottom of the apartment block’s stairwell slam shut. Something muttered, loudly, in Albanian and then the slamming of a second door: the downstairs apartment.

He stood at the door for a moment, straining to hear footsteps on the stairs; the Albanian coming up to confront him. Nothing. Roman turned and leaned his back against the door. He felt something high in his chest, almost in his throat. A fluttering. He knew he would feel it again, every time he had to pass the Albanian’s door. And, although Roman did everything he could to avoid leaving his flat, when he did go out it took him a breathless age to pass the Albanian’s apartment.

God, how he hated living here. He was better than this. Better than the people around him. Better than this shitty little flat. Better than living in Wilhelmsburg.

Most of all, he hated living above the Albanians. Their country of origin was immaterial to Roman: he hated living above anyone, because what he loathed most of all about this flat was the climb up the stairwell. Since he had lost his job in the computer store, it was an effort that Roman had to make less and less. His flat was only two floors up, but the climb was enough to completely rob him of his breath and leave him white-faced and sweating, his lungs screaming for oxygen. There were times, frequent times, when his meal would be cold by the time he had brought it up the stairs: Roman never cooked. Occasionally he would reheat food in the microwave but he had never so much as made a cup of coffee in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. Everything he ate or drank came from a can or a box or a styrene container.

The flat itself comprised three rooms. Four, if you counted the bathroom. The apartment building was reasonably new and was well maintained by the landlord, and when Roman had moved in the decor had been fresh and clean. But now the inside of Roman’s flat was untidy and grubby. He found doing housework tiring; not tedious — literally exhausting, sapping every ounce of energy from him. Ten minutes of moving trash from one corner of a room to another drained him; made him sweat until he dripped and was wheezing for breath. And ten minutes would make no difference to the piles of magazines and books, the detritus of convenience meals, the empty soft-drink cans.