Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘You look full of the joys,’ she said as Fabel stepped out of the car.

‘So what have we got, Anna?’

‘Like I said, a wash-up. And be warned: it’s a stinker. It was found by the flood-defence team working here. The boss is a guy called Kreysig.’

‘Lars Kreysig?’

‘You know him?’ asked Anna.

‘More know of him, but I have met him. He’s a bit of a legend in the Hamburg Fire Service. A lot of people are breathing today who wouldn’t be if Kreysig hadn’t been there to pull their fat out of the fire. Literally. He still here?’

‘We asked him to hang about until you arrived. What was that crap you were listening to in the car?’

Fabel stopped and turned to face Anna. ‘You have no soul, Commissar Wolff, do you know that? No appreciation of the finer things in life. Leave me alone, Anna… Susanne’s been having a go at me all the way to the airport about my car.’

‘Really? Personally, I like antiques. Anyway, Susanne’s good for you. You’re less grumpy these days. You ready for this?’

They made their way across to where a white forensic tent had been set up, stepping over pipes and hoses and avoiding the dark rainbow puddles of oil and water and the black tangles of flotsam washed up from the flood.

‘I’ve already had the pleasure,’ said Anna when they reached the tent. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll wait for you here.’

Fabel nodded: Anna was tough, and she had seen more than her fair share of violent deaths, but her Achilles heel was dealing with a messy corpse. And Fabel knew that there was nothing messier than a body that had been in the water for anything more than a few days. In water, the processes of decomposition are greatly accelerated: the flesh softens and the body swells with trapped gases, rising and bobbing on the surface like some putrid buoy.

There was a table with forensic kits set up outside the tent. Anna handed Fabel a white paper oversuit, latex gloves, blue stretch overshoes and a cup-filter face mask. She took a perfume atomiser from her jacket pocket and sprayed a puff into the inverted cup of the mask.

‘You’ll need it,’ she said. ‘This one’s ripe. And keep your forensic suit zipped up. If that stink gets on your clothes, you’ll never get it off.’

‘I’ve dealt with floaters before, Anna. I know the drill.’ Fabel smiled as he said it: he had noticed Anna’s pale face grow paler, obviously as she recalled her time in the tent.

Fabel looked up at the sky, still steel-grey after the storm, then around the clean-up site with its temporary village of generators, cranes, trucks and fire engines. He took a long deep breath, tried to play in his head a few bars of From Gagarin’s Point of View to ease the flutter in his chest. Then, putting the strongly perfumed face mask over his nose and mouth, he stepped into the white forensic tent.

Even with the mask and the strong scent of the perfume, the stench hit him as soon as he entered the tent. He recognised the smell immediately; there was no other odour in the world like it: at once rancid and sour and sickly sweet. Fabel had come across it with a couple of other water-recovered bodies and a black-stage corpse found in the woods. Black was the fourth stage of putrefaction, between ten and twenty days after death. And the smelliest. Despite an extractor fan working full tilt, the air in the forensic tent fumed with the stench of putrid flesh.

Fabel often wondered how the Hamburg Harbour Police could put up with dealing with so many floaters. There was a demarcation of responsibility for discovered corpses between the Harbour Police and the ordinary Polizei Hamburg: the high-water mark. Any body found above the water mark was the responsibility of the City Police; below, it belonged to the Harbour Police. Rumour had it that more than a few bodies washed up along the shore had been given a nudge by the boot of a squeamish City Police officer and rolled back below the high-tide mark and into the Harbour Police’s jurisdiction.

‘Hi, Jan, how are you?’ Holger Brauner was a shortish, powerfully built man in his forties. From behind his mask, the head of the Polizei Hamburg’s forensic squad greeted Fabel gleefully as he entered the tent. Brauner, it seemed to Fabel, was irrepressibly cheerful. They had been friends for years and Fabel had never been able to square the joie de vivre of the friend with the grim task of the colleague.

Fabel did not answer at once. All his attention was focused on an effort not to vomit. The source of the odour lay on the wet asphalt: a torso, the skin puckered and greenish-black in patches, violet and greenish-white in others. It had no head, no legs, no arms. The flesh where the amputations had taken place was puckered and fluffed; nauseatingly pink and raw-looking. The torso looked as if it belonged to someone morbidly obese, the belly stretched taut and the breasts pushed out sideways, but Fabel knew that it was the pressure of the gases within that had distended and bloated the body.

‘I’m doing better than she is. How can you stand the stink?’ asked Fabel between controlled breaths.

Brauner mimicked taking a deep appreciative sniff. ‘I love the smell of putrescine and cadaverine in the morning. Did you know that cadaverine is also what gives semen its smell? It’s there at the beginning and end of life.’

‘You need to get some hobbies, Holger.’ Fabel nodded towards the torso. ‘Washed up by the flood?’

‘Well, I don’t think she swam here…’ Somewhere behind his mask Brauner gave a small laugh.

‘The loss of the head and limbs… no chance that’s accidental? A boat or something?’

‘No. Clearly done deliberately. And reasonably expertly. Disarticulative amputation of the arms, transfemoral amputation of the legs. Neat job, actually.’

‘When we catch her killer I’ll pass on your appreciative critique of his work.’ Fabel’s voice was tight as he unconsciously tried to keep his breaths short and shallow. ‘Whoever it was, he clearly doesn’t want us to identify her. Or at least wants to slow us down.’

‘Yeah…’ said Brauner absently, tilting his head as he examined the severed neck. ‘ Soooo last century. Who needs fingerprints these days? We can match her to a missing person through familial DNA.’

‘ If she’s reported missing and we can trace a relative.’ Fabel noticed what looked like a network of tattoos and then saw where some of the skin had burst, exposing slimy fat and flesh that looked like overcooked chicken. He felt a sudden strengthened surge of nausea and looked away.

‘We have anserita cutis. Goose skin,’ said Brauner. ‘And there is some evidence of skin maceration. But no significant adipocere in the subcutaneous layer. So I can tell you that this body has been in the water for more than one or two weeks but less than six.’

‘Are those tattoos on the skin?’

‘No, those lines are the work of our old friends bacillus prodigiosus and bacillus violaceum. Nature’s tattooists… chromogenic bacteria that pigment the skin red and purple respectively. It’s a sign of lengthy immersion in water.’

‘Any idea of the cause of death?’ asked Fabel.

‘Having her head cut off would have done it,’ said Brauner. ‘Didn’t they teach you anything at murder-detective school?’

‘Very funny. I’m guessing that the removal of the limbs and head were post-mortem. Any signs of violence on the body?’

‘Sorry, Jan, you’ll have to wait for the autopsy. With a ripe floater like this, it takes close examination to sort out what’s been done pre- or post-mortem. There could be bullet holes in there, but closed up and hidden by the swelling. And water corpses like these get buffeted about, hit by boats and nibbled at by all sorts in the water. The autopsy will also establish if decomposition is exclusively due to aquatic bacteria, so we’ll know if she spent any length of time on land after she died.’