‘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.
Chapter Seventeen
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.
By the time Fabel got there the uniformed branch had sealed off the scene with tape, but Holger Brauner and his team had not yet arrived to set up a forensics tent. Fabel parked off Saseler Damm, next to a canoe-hire stall. As he walked along the water’s edge he passed a couple of uniforms talking in calm tones to a pale-faced middle-aged man who clutched a fishing rod as though it was a lifeline.
Werner Meyer was waiting for Fabel on the towpath beside the lake. Behind him, twenty metres along the path, the naked body of a young woman lay face down. Her head was turned to one side and her wet hair streaked across her face. Unlike the torso washed up by the storm, this was a body you would have had to take a close look at to ascertain that she was in fact dead. If it hadn’t been for the inclement weather, you could have mistaken her for a sunbather.
‘I take it our chum with the rod found her?’
‘Yep,’ said Werner. ‘Where have you been? I was trying to get you on your cellphone. I couldn’t get through.’
‘Really?’ Fabel frowned. ‘I had it on all morning. Who fished her out?’
‘A couple of local uniforms. The guy fishing called it in with his cellphone. The uniforms thought she might have been a suicide but then they saw the marks on her neck and throat. And, of course, the Network Killer is pretty much front of mind.’
‘Let’s have a look.’ Fabel took the latex gloves that Werner handed him and snapped them on. They lifted the barrier tape and stepped through. Squatting down beside the body, Fabel eased the wet strands of dark hair from the face. She was about thirty, Fabel reckoned, and looked like she had kept herself in good physical shape. He examined her hands, starting at the fingernails, checking the fingers for breaks and the palms, backs and wrists for abrasions. Nothing. From what he could see, there was no evidence of any defensive injuries. Just like the others.
Fabel rolled the body onto its back. Gently, as if he was afraid to hurt someone who was clearly far beyond hurting. Her skin was bright and pale against the wet asphalt of the towpath. He again eased back a wet cable of hair from the face. Her eyes were closed and her lips, faintly blue-tinged, were parted. She had been pretty in life. Fabel eased back her eyelids: the white of the eyes were red with ruptured blood vessels — petechial haemorrhages, a sure sign of strangulation. He examined her face and worked his way down to her neck. There was another petechial haemorrhage, this time a diamond of livid skin on her throat, just above the jugular notch where her collarbones came together to meet her sternum. He could see that there was only a little bruising on her neck, where her killer had gripped with his fingers before digging his thumbs in to crush her larynx. The bruising was limited, Fabel reckoned, because death had been quick and she hadn’t had time to bruise.
‘He does it clean, I’ll give him that,’ Fabel said to Werner, straightening himself up. ‘He leaves us nothing to go on.’
‘Except he looks like he’s playing games now,’ said Werner. ‘And that’s what will get him caught. These nut-jobs always end up doing stuff like that. It’s like they want to get caught.’
‘What are you talking about, Werner?’
‘Well, I’d say it was pretty obvious that he’s trying to open up communication. That text, I mean. The one you asked me and Anna about. That must have been him.’
‘But why now? Why does he suddenly change his pattern? He’s never tipped us off before. Anyway, the weird thing about that was that the message seemed to come from Susanne’s number.’
Fabel took out his cellphone and flipped it open. ‘See?’ he said and scrolled through his text messages. ‘Wait a minute, I’ll get it…’ He frowned.
‘What’s up, Jan?’ asked Werner.
‘The damnedest thing-’
‘Oh, shit…’ Werner interrupted Fabel’s thought by tapping him on the arm with the back of his hand and nodding in the direction they had come along the towpath. Fabel turned to see Horst van Heiden striding purposefully towards them.