Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

Fabel drove out to the address Muller-Voigt had given him for Meliha. It was in a 1960s apartment block with galleries looking out over the trees and the small lake of the Wandsee. Fabel found the apartment on the third floor and, as Muller-Voigt had said, the windows were shuttered. He knocked at the door of the next apartment and a small woman in her forties with dark roots to her unnaturally butter-coloured hair answered. She eyed Fabel suspiciously and muttered something about not buying anything at the door before he showed her his police ID. Her expression shifted from suspicious and hostile to just plain hostile.

‘I’m looking for the lady who lives next door. Meliha Yazar. Do you know where or when I would be able to find her?’

‘There was already someone here a few days ago, asking the same thing. He wasn’t a policeman, though. I’ll tell you what I told him: that apartment hasn’t been occupied for a couple of months. And it was a family — a German family — who lived there.’

‘Who’s the landlord here?’ asked Fabel.

‘This block is all public. No private landlord here. Just the City and State of Hamburg, mister.’

Fabel thanked the woman and left. On the way back down to the car he called in to the Presidium and asked Henk Hermann to get in touch with the City and get hold of the rental records for the address.

He had just got back to the car when the phone rang. He saw it was the Murder Commission.

‘Hi, Henk, that was quick-’

‘ Chef, it’s Anna. You better get back here. It looks like the Network Killer has chalked up another one. A female body dumped in a city waterway. Werner’s already out at the locus.’

‘ Shit…’ said Fabel. He looked at his watch. ‘You’ll have to do the briefings for the raids this afternoon yourself. I’ll meet Werner at the scene. Where was the victim discovered?’

Anna paused before answering. Fabel could have sworn he heard her take a deep breath.

‘You’re not going to believe this, Chef,’ she said at last. ‘Werner’s up in Poppenbuttel. The Network Killer dumped his latest victim in the Alster canal lock at the Poppenbutteler Schleuse.’

As he had been ordered, Niels had not gone back to the squat.

After the firebomb attack on the Mercedes, Harald had sped through the city on the stolen motorbike, ignoring Niels’s demands to slow down: going too fast could attract the attention of the police. But Niels knew that Harald was panicked, and that made him a liability. He had ignored Niels’s screaming in his ear to pull over until Niels had jabbed the muzzle of the automatic into his cheek. Once they were stopped, Niels had told Harald to ride slowly down to the river, making sure he did nothing to cause the police to pull them over. The original plan had been to ride out of the city and to dump the bike in woodland, setting fire to it to destroy any forensic evidence. But Niels had worked out that the police would soon have an alert out with a description of two men on a motorbike, so he had ordered Harald to head down to the docks, to a quieter section of waterfront, where a stone pier jutted out into the Elbe.

When Harald had dismounted and ripped the helmet from his head, he had thrown it down onto the concrete of the pier with such force that it had bounced.

‘He’s dead!’ Harald had screamed at Niels. ‘I mean, he’s fucking dead. They’ll send us down for life for this, Niels. And where did that fucking gun come from? Were you going to kill the guy anyway?’

Niels had not answered. Instead, he had looked around, at the pier, at the cobbled road leading to it, at the city behind it. He had been here before, doing exactly the same thing. And when he had been here before, he had had exactly the same feeling. In fact, Niels knew he had been here many thousands of times. But he also knew that he had never been here before.

Still without answering Harald, Niels had wheeled the motorcycle to the end of the pier. Tipping it over the edge, he had watched it sink into the dark water. He had then taken the helmet from his head and had swung his arm as hard as he could, like a discus thrower, sending it hurtling as far out into the river as he could manage. He had repeated the action with Harald’s scuffed helmet, which he had picked up from the ground. This time the effort had wrenched his shoulder and he’d cursed as pain stabbed deep into the muscles. He knew the helmets would float, but hoped that they would drift midstream, perhaps never being found.

‘If we get caught I’m going to tell them I knew fuck-all about the gun. Or that he was meant to be killed.’ Harald had shaken his head emphatically. ‘That’s all down to you Niels. I joined the Guardians to protect the planet, not to murder people.’

Niels had returned to watching where the motorbike had sunk into the Elbe. The water would only be two or three metres deep, but it was dark enough to conceal the bike. When he had turned back, it had been as if he had not heard, or had not been listening to, what Harald had just said. Niels had stared at Harald and tried to work out who and what he was. The very moment that the Mercedes’s owner had burst into flames, an epiphany had burst with equal violence in Niels’s brain. Now he understood the truth about everything. He had been shown in an instant that the environment he cared so deeply about was, in truth, some kind of projection of another, distant reality; and that it wasn’t Niels who had the disability. He realised that it was absolutely everyone else who did not experience the universe as Niels did. They were the deluded ones, not him.

Harald had looked stunned when Niels had pointed the gun at him and told him to stand at the end of the pier, at exactly the same point from which Niels had just pushed the motorbike into the water. It was evidence in itself, Niels had thought, that Harald did not exist, or at least did not exist in any real sense. He was bound to have known what was going to happen to him, standing there at the end of the pier, yet he had made no move to resist.

Niels had heard himself laugh again. He had never used a gun before so the first three shots had completely missed Harald, who now cowered and cried like a child. Niels had sighed and walked up to Harald and had pointed the gun at his head from less than a metre’s distance. Then he had fired four times into Harald’s skull.

Niels had stood and watched as Harald’s crouched body toppled backwards off the pier and into the Elbe. He’d sighed as he’d watched the dead ecoterrorist float away, a plume of dark crimson from his head blooming in the murky water: it had been a waste of effort throwing the helmets so far out and wrenching his shoulder. There was clearly a current here close to the pier that would have swept them upstream.

That was the thing about this false reality: you could never count on the logic of its physics.

Poppenbuttel lay to the north of the city centre in the Alstertal district of Wandsbek and marked the border between Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. This was yet another place that, at various stages of its career, had been German or Danish. It was now one of the less densely populated parts of Hamburg where the city landscape was broken up by large green spaces of park and woodland. The Poppenbutteler Schleuse had, for two hundred years, provided the city with two services: its primary function, as part of an integrated system of sluices and locks, had always been to control the flow of the Alster river into the centre of Hamburg, ensuring a constant water level in the city. But people knew it best for its secondary role: behind the sluice gates of the Poppenbutteler Schleuse, something between a deep pond and a small lake had formed; almost a miniature version of the Small, Outer and Inner Alster lakes in the city centre. Each weekend and on holidays, people would swim or hire a boat to take out onto the lock pond’s placid water. It was sheltered by a thick curtain of trees, and green-cocooned by the Henneberg Park. It was, Fabel reflected as he parked his car, the ideal place to dump a body: conveniently within the city and connected to a network of roads, yet offering seclusion.