Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘So I gather. Your sniffing around on my behalf was noticed.’

‘Menke?’

‘Yep. He knew all about your enquiries. Your ex-boyfriend was obviously so cagey that he felt he needed to cover his back.’

‘So what did Menke tell you?’ asked Anna.

‘Less than you’ve told me, but enough for me to see that if Meliha Yazar had been snooping around Pharos, then Muller-Voigt might be right about her being in danger. Menke’s promised to send me some information over later.’

‘But?’ Anna raised an eyebrow.

‘But I think our interest is unwelcome. To be fair, I haven’t confided in Menke about Muller-Voigt or his concerns about Meliha Yazar. Menke did tell me that the Pharos Project meets all the criteria of a destructive cult. Particularly its dictatorial control over its members. Menke wasn’t too specific, but it seems it’s the same old thing: conversion becomes indoctrination becomes brainwashing. He did say that Korn has added his own twists here and there. The other thing that distinguishes Pharos is its financial clout. The inner chamber of the Project are all board members of the various companies in the Korn business empire. And from what you’ve said, that includes the developers of Virtual Dimension.’

‘Maybe we should make your unofficial snooping into Meliha Yazar an official investigation. If you think she might be the wash-up. We could get familial DNA…’

Fabel shook his head. ‘It’s not as straightforward as that… Anyway, I still think it might be a wild-goose chase.’ He looked at his watch and saw it was eleven-thirty. ‘It’s late. I’m heading home. We’ll pick this up in the morning.’

Fabel tried ringing Susanne’s cellphone again as he came out of the elevator and crossed the Presidium’s basement garage. He cursed when he once more got her answering service: he left a message, telling her that this was his temporary cell number and asking her to check in with him.

Fabel hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and he didn’t feel like cooking for himself so he decided to eat somewhere on the way home. Driving through the night-time city, his mind wandered and ranged over everything that had happened over the last forty-eight hours. Two bodies in the water. Two different MOs. He guessed that the press would be all over the second body by the morning and van Heiden would be on the phone to him again to state the obvious. But the strange thing was that his conversation of the night before with Muller-Voigt, and everything he had found out since about the Pharos Project, were what really haunted his thoughts.

It was only after Fabel stopped his BMW that he realised what he had done. It had been as if he had been on autopilot. He had driven down to the harbour. He knew why he had done it and he felt a leaden sadness coalesce in his chest. He had been working late and had wanted to eat something on the way home so, as he had so many times before, he had driven down to the harbour to buy a beer and something hot to eat from Stellamanns’ Schnell-Imbiss snack bar.

Dirk Stellamanns had run the harbourside snack stand since his retirement from the Polizei Hamburg. Like Fabel, Dirk was a Frisian by birth and, as the experienced officer, he had shown Fabel the ropes when he had first entered the service. He had taken him under his wing, and the two had only ever talked to each other in Frisian Low Saxon. Throughout the years, and despite Fabel’s rise through the ranks, the two men had remained close. Then, after his retirement, Dirk had set up his immaculately kept snack stand — a caravan with a serving window and canopy and surrounded by parasol-topped waist-high tables — smack bang in the middle of what had been his old beat, in the shadow of the dockside cranes that loomed above it.

Fabel visited regularly to grab a beer and something to eat, particularly when something was troubling him. Seeing Dirk, and hearing his accent that was as broad and flat as the landscape they had both grown up in, had always cheered Fabel up. Stellamanns had been that kind of man: no matter what life had thrown at him, he always seemed to remain cheerily philosophical about it.

Fabel stepped out of his car, stood in an illuminated pool of cobbled road, and looked over to a vacant patch of scrubland next to the dock road.

The summer before, on a particularly hot day, Dirk had been doing his best business of the season. He had built up a huge clientele of lorry drivers who would stop on their way into or out of the docks. He had been working over the stove when it happened: a massive heart attack that had killed him before he hit the caravan floor.

For those few minutes while his mind had been preoccupied with other things Dirk had still been alive in Fabel’s subconscious, his snack stand still open for business as usual.

The world was changing around Fabel. And, like everyone else, he sometimes lost track of the changes. People he had thought of as constants, as always being there, suddenly were no longer there. It depressed and annoyed him that, for a moment, he had forgotten that Dirk had died. He had often done the same thing when he had thought of his childhood home in Norddeich; that his long-dead father was in fact still alive and sitting in his study, bent over some old map of the coast, his glasses perched precariously on the tip of his nose. It was what you did: you had an entire universe in your head, the one you grew up with, and it stayed there, unchanged.

‘It’s not here any more.’

Fabel turned, startled. The young woman had stepped out from nowhere and into the pool of light. He looked up and down the roadway but could see no sign of another parked car.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s not here any more,’ the young woman repeated. ‘The snack stand.’

‘Oh… yes. Yes, I know.’

‘I was looking for it myself,’ she said. For a moment Fabel wondered if she was a prostitute, even though this was not one of the regulated areas. But she was smartly dressed in a dark grey jacket-and-skirt business suit and court shoes, as if she worked in a bank or insurance company. She had neat, shortish blonde hair and regular features: attractive but not particularly memorable.

‘It’s not been here for a while,’ said Fabel.

‘Nor have I,’ she said.

‘Where are you parked?’ asked Fabel. ‘I didn’t see…’

‘Oh, over there…’ She made a vague gesture with her hand, indicating further down the road towards the docks. ‘Are you a policeman?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s just that “ Where are you parked? ” is a very policeman kind of thing to ask. And the guy who ran the stand was an ex-policeman. He used to get a lot of his former colleagues as customers. And you don’t look like a trucker.’

‘I guess not. What brings you down here?’

‘Like I said, I was looking for the Schnell-Imbiss myself. I was peckish.’

‘It’s a bit out of the way.’

‘Nowhere is really out of the way. Did you know him well? The guy with the stall, I mean?’

‘Very.’

‘He was a nice man,’ she said. ‘He was very…’ she struggled for the right word ‘… avuncular.’

Fabel realised he was feeling increasingly uneasy. There was something about the girl that disturbed him. It was almost as if she was flirting with him, but the lack of expression in her face made him think of Reisch, the man with the wheelchair and a terrifyingly clear view of his immediate future.

‘I still don’t really understand what you are doing here,’ he said. He took out his police ID and flipped it open. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to see your card.’

‘And if I do mind?’

‘I’d still like to see it.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re so concerned about me being here. I’m not the one who’s living in the past, forgetting that their friend is dead.’