Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘Thanks, Holger. Give Anna Wolff your report when it’s ready.’ Fabel turned to leave the tent.

‘How is Anna, by the way?’ asked Brauner. ‘I mean, how is she coping?’

‘Fine. She’s fit and she’s been back on duty for six months. You know Anna.’

‘What d’you reckon?’ asked Anna when Fabel emerged from the forensics tent. ‘Dismemberment like that suggests an organised killer.’

‘Could be anything,’ said Fabel. ‘It could be our guy, but it could also be an organised-crime killing, a sex murder… or just a disgruntled husband with a meat saw and a rowing boat.’ He paused and they both turned to look back at the tent: there was the sound of whistling from inside.

‘He was at The Lion King last night, apparently,’ explained Anna. ‘A sucker for a catchy tune, he tells me. Brauner’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’

‘Yep,’ said Fabel. ‘Holger’s a good guy.’

‘Yeah… but you have to admit he’s a bit weird. You know that if he wasn’t a forensic specialist I’d probably have him on a list of potential serial-killer suspects.’

Fabel gave a small half-hearted laugh. Then, looking up at the sky, took a long breath. The air felt cool and clean and fresh, but the sickly-sweet smell of death lingered in his nostrils.

‘Awful in there, wasn’t it?’

Fabel nodded. ‘I hate floaters. You smell them for a week. You and Henk take this one. Let me see the forensics and autopsy when they come in. Like you say, it’s not the Network Killer’s MO. That’s all we need — someone else dumping bodies in Hamburg’s waterways. It’ll do the tourist industry no end of good. Talking about the Network Killer, how are you getting on with possible contacts?’

Anna shrugged. ‘We’ve nailed down another thirty identities on social-network sites that the victims visited. We’ve got a court order to get the IP addresses from the site administrators. We should have them by lunchtime.’

‘Okay, good — we’ll talk about it in the office. Where’s Lars Kreysig?’

Anna pointed to a group of men at the far side of Elbestrasse, leaning against a fire appliance. Even at this distance, Fabel could see the weariness in their posture. As Anna and Fabel approached, one of the firemen straightened up and smiled weakly.

‘Principal Chief Commissar Fabel?’ The man who spoke was taller than Fabel. Lean, with lines engraved deep in a long face topped with unruly prematurely grey hair.

‘Yes. Herr Kreysig?’

‘Call me Lars. I expect you want to talk to me about the floater?’

‘You’ve given Commissar Wolff all the details of when you found the body; I wanted to ask you if you could hazard a guess as to where it came from. The direction in the river, I mean.’

‘I’m not the one to ask.’ Kreysig called over his shoulder to the group of men leaning against the fire appliance. ‘Sepp… could you come here a minute?’ Kreysig turned back to Fabel. ‘My deputy, Sepp Tramberger, is one of your colleagues. Or, at least, he’s from the Harbour Police. He’s on attachment to this special flood-response unit. I tell you, no one knows the way the Elbe works better than Sepp. When he’s not on the river in real life he’s on it virtually.’

‘I don’t get you…’ said Fabel.

‘He’s created a “Virtual Elbe”. In his free time. A computer model of the river and its currents. He’s put it together with some boffin from the university. You can see it on the internet. Or a version of it, anyway. It’s really very impressive.’

Tramberger joined them and, after introducing him to Fabel and Anna, Kreysig repeated Fabel’s question. Tramberger was a shortish, stocky, scoured-looking man with blond hair buzz-cut to a stubble and a face that looked like it had been beaten by more than weather. Fabel knew that most Harbour Police officers had their master’s tickets, meaning that the Harbour Police was largely made up of ex-sailors who had seen a fair bit of the world before patrolling the wharves and quays of Hamburg. Tramberger looked off somewhere in the indeterminate distance and screwed up his leathery face in the contemplative expression that Fabel associated with plumbers about to deliver an open-ended estimate.

‘Hard to say…’ Tramberger rubbed his chin. ‘It depends on how long the pathologist says she was in the water.’

‘More than two weeks, less than six, according to our crime-scene specialist,’ said Fabel.

More chin rubbing, more frowning into empty space.

‘The thing about floaters is that they don’t start out as floaters. They sink. Sometimes to the bottom, or they hover a metre or so above it. If the water temperature is low then they stay there. Sometimes for good. But if the water temperature is warmer, and if they’re unruptured, then they come back up to the surface and bob along. If your girl was in the water for more than a week, then my guess is she was dumped somewhere upstream. But not far. The body wasn’t too churned or chopped-up. And it didn’t look as if it had been scavenged much by fish and eels. Maybe just the other side of the river and a little upstream.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fabel.

‘When you get more info from the pathologist,’ said Tramberger, ‘why don’t you let me know? I could run the data through the computer and see if we can back-trace it. I’d be able to give you a more accurate location for her being dumped in the river.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’

‘Is this another victim of that internet killer you’re looking for?’ asked Kreysig with dull curiosity. He looked exhausted to Fabel.

‘Maybe,’ said Fabel. ‘But I doubt it. Our guy doesn’t dismember his victims — but who knows?’

‘It’s quite apt, isn’t it?’ said Kreysig.

‘What?’

‘The name they’ve given this storm.’ Kreysig’s weary expression suggested that his comment should have been obvious. ‘The storm… the federal weather bureau has given it the name Stortebeker.’

Fabel made a puzzled face.

‘It’s apt that a storm named Stortebeker,’ said Kreysig, ‘has given up a headless body.’

‘Oh… I get you. Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘What was all that about?’ asked Anna as they left the firemen and headed back to the scene of crime. ‘All that gobbledegook about Stortebeker.’

Fabel stopped and turned with an expression of mock shock. ‘First you call my music crap and now you tell me you don’t know who Stortebeker was?’

‘Of course I know. Klaus Stortebeker, Hamburg’s Robin Hood of the sea and all that crap. What’s that got to do with the floater?’

‘You obviously don’t know the legend of Stortebeker’s execution…’

Anna made a couldn’t-care-less face. ‘So demote me.’

‘Klaus Stortebeker was the greatest-ever thorn in the flesh for Hanseatic Hamburg. He and his fellow Victual Brother pirates robbed only Hanseatic ships and shared their booty equally. Simon of Utrecht was made Burgemeister of Hamburg, built a fleet of new warships and hunted Stortebeker down.’ Fabel waved his hand vaguely towards the east. ‘You know where the new Elbphilharmonie is being built? Well, it was down there that they executed them. Back then, long before the Speicherstadt was built, that was all just one long stretch of sandbank. That was where they executed all Hamburg’s captured pirates.’

‘Anyway…’ said Anna impatiently.

‘ Anyway, when Stortebeker was due to be executed, by beheading, along with seventy-odd of his men, he asked for a last favour: that the Hamburg Senate would release as many of his men as he could walk past after his head was cut off. The legend is that after he was beheaded, his headless body stood up and walked past eleven of his men before the executioner tripped it up.’