Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

As Fabel crossed the street to his car, he did not need to turn to know that Victoria Kempfert was watching him from her window. She had been all prickles; defiant to the point of hostility. It was, he knew, part of the denial process that followed a trauma such as the one she had experienced. But there was more to it. There was something she had wanted to tell Fabel but had been too unsure or afraid to voice. Instead she had ring-fenced it with verbal barbs. He took his cellphone out and hit the speed dial for the Murder Commission, before realising that this was the replacement phone and did not have the number stored. It took him a moment to recall it and key it in: the irony of technology making life easier was that you forgot how to do things for yourself. He got hold of Anna Wolff.

‘Anna, I need you to run a couple of checks for me. And I need them quickly.’

‘Okay, anything for our number one suspect. The last time you had someone checked they ended up dead.’

‘When this is over, Commissar Wolff, I’m going to have you transferred to Buxtehude where the highlight of your week, of your month, will be a bicycle theft.’

‘Oh no!’ she said with mock horror. ‘That’s too far away from Billwerder prison. I’ll never get to visit you. Who do you want checked out?’

‘The guy who was burned in that arson attack in the Schanzenviertel. Daniel Fottinger. And the woman who was with him, Victoria Kempfert.’

‘Okay. You heading back in?’

‘I’ll be in later. I’ve got another house call to make.’ Fabel used his remote to unlock his BMW and slid in behind the driver’s seat. He checked his rear-view mirror. Yes. Still there. ‘Anna, there’s one more thing I need you to run through the computer. And keep this to yourself. I’m being followed. A new VW four-by-four. A Tiguan, I think. It’s been popping up in my rear-view mirror all day. I suspect it’s either one of ours or a BfV team. I just want to make sure.’

‘Shit… you don’t think anyone really suspects…’

‘I doubt it,’ said Fabel, ‘but they’re maybe keeping tabs on me just to keep things straight, as Criminal Director van Heiden would say.’

‘Index number?’

Fabel strained to make it out in the rear-view mirror and read it out to Anna.

‘Give me a couple of minutes,’ she said.

Hamburg’s architecture tells you in a very discreet, decorous way that this is a city where some serious money is made. Daniel Fottinger’s house lay where Nienstedten became Blankenese and somehow managed to scream massive wealth quietly. It was set in four hectares of some of the most expensive real estate in Germany. Given the business Fottinger had been in, Fabel had expected it to be the same kind of ultra-modern zero-carbon set-up as Muller-Voigt’s house in the Altes Land. Instead it was an elegant white aristocratic nineteenth-century villa with green shuttered windows and a double-storey aviary-cum-conservatory on its east side. Its grounds were laid out like an English park, its lawns punctuated by century-matured oaks.

It was not at all what Fabel had expected. But what he had expected was that Fottinger’s widow would not be alone. He was right.

At first, given the grandeur of the surroundings, Fabel assumed that the stocky, impeccably neat man with the shaven head and the goatee beard who opened the front door to him was the butler. But it was apparent from his tailoring and demeanour that this was no manservant. He showed Fabel into a huge, bright drawing room. Another, younger, man stood over by the far wall, next to a grand piano. He too was wearing a business suit, but his was grey and not of the same quality. The younger man was made distinctive by the contrast between his pale complexion and his extremely dark, short hair.

The only other person in the room was a woman of about thirty-five sitting on a rosewood settee. She was slim, with shoulder-length wavy hair of a vibrant auburn brushed back from her delicately modelled, pale and lightly freckled face. She wore a simple, black, sleeveless dress that clung to her slim figure in a way that only the most expensive fabrics could and her poise was so perfect that she gave the impression of sitting on the settee without actually touching it.

Fabel’s first impression of Kirstin Fottinger was that she was made of fine china.

In terms of attractiveness she was the equal of Fottinger’s mistress, but hers was a totally different type of beauty. Where Victoria Kempfert was the kind of woman men desired, Kirstin Fottinger was like a fragile, beautiful, expensive object to be collected and preserved. And there was something about her, thought Fabel, that made her seem otherworldly.

‘I’m glad you could make time to meet with me, Frau Fottinger,’ he said. ‘I know you must be in shock after what has happened.’

She smiled a polite porcelain smile. The truth was that she did not seem to Fabel to be in a state of much shock at all, and less grief. Perhaps it was a forced composure that had temporarily robbed her of expression.

‘Frau Fottinger has taken something to help. A mild sedative prescribed by her doctor,’ said the older man who had led Fabel into the drawing room.

‘And you are?’ Fabel turned to face him fully.

‘Peter Wiegand. I’m a friend of the family. I was also a business associate of Daniel’s.’

‘Peter Wiegand? You’re the deputy leader of the Pharos Project, aren’t you?’

‘I have worked with Dominik Korn for close to thirty years. My principal role is Vice President and Director of Operations of the Korn-Pharos Corporation. But yes, I am also active in the Pharos Project. Both Kirstin and her husband are members of the Project, so I am here to lend my support and comfort at this difficult time.’

‘I see.’ Fabel looked pointedly at the other man.

‘Oh, sorry…’ said Wiegand. ‘This is Herr Badorf. He is our chief of security for the group. I felt, given the violent circumstances of Daniel’s death, that I should bring him along.’

‘For the group?’ Fabel spoke directly to Badorf. ‘Does that mean for the Korn-Pharos Corporation or for the Pharos Project?’

‘I am not a member of the Project,’ said Badorf. Fabel noticed he had a southern accent. Swabian, he reckoned. ‘I work for the Korn-Pharos group of companies. Believe it or not, Principal Chief Commissar, one is not obliged or even pressured to join the Project just because one works for the Corporation.’

‘I see,’ said Fabel again. But he remembered what he had read in Menke’s file on the Project; the rumours about the Consolidation and Compliance Office, which sounded as if it had something to do with mergers and business etiquette but which was actually the secret police of the Pharos Project. As Fabel looked at Badorf he was pretty sure he was in the presence of a Consolidator. And a senior one at that. Fabel had had to phone ahead to arrange this meeting and he had known that, in doing so, he was giving the Project the opportunity to have someone present to coax the right responses from Kirstin Fottinger.

Fabel turned to the newly widowed redhead. ‘Frau Fottinger, I wonder if I might speak with you in private…’

‘I would rather that Herr Wiegand and Herr Badorf remained here. Herr Wiegand has been a great support to me.’

‘As you wish. May I?’ Fabel indicated the armchair opposite Frau Fottinger. It had been worth the attempt, but Fabel had known there was no way he would have been allowed to question Fottinger’s widow without someone from Pharos being present. She nodded and he sat down.

‘I know this is a very painful subject, Frau Fottinger, but were you aware of the relationship between your husband and Victoria Kempfert?’

‘I knew nothing about any such relationship until told about it after Daniel’s death.’ Her answer actually sounded rehearsed.