‘God,’ muttered Fabel. ‘How did he manage to get here even before the forensics team? He must have an always-on line to the ops room.’ He pulled a fake smile over his irritation and nodded a greeting as van Heiden drew near. ‘Herr Criminal Director, it’s not often we see you at a scene of crime.’
‘Do we have a name?’ asked van Heiden, nodding to the figure lying on the towpath.
‘We don’t even have any clothes, far less ID. It will take time to get a name for her.’
‘But she’s a victim of this maniac who uses the internet?’
‘Again, I can’t confirm that yet, but yes, my guess is that there’s a high probability that she is. The MO in dumping the body in an inner-city waterway fits.’
‘And, of course, he sent you that cryptic warning about where to find the body. I have to say, Fabel, it’s a pity you didn’t realise it was an advance notice of where the next body would be dumped. Not that I blame you… no one would have guessed.’
‘How did you…?’
‘I spoke to Frau Wolff.’ Van Heiden looked at the body again and frowned.
‘I take it you didn’t come down here to check up on my scene-of-crime skills?’ asked Fabel.
‘Quite,’ said van Heiden ‘We’ve got to get this lunatic, Fabel. I hear you’re going to execute those search-and-seizure warrants this afternoon.’
‘Well, Anna is. I’m going to have to oversee things here. We won’t be able to hold anyone, but the warrants mean we can get their computers into Kroeger’s department. We might just get lucky. I’m also going to give my cellphone to Kroeger.’
‘So he can trace who sent you the text?’ asked van Heiden.
‘Not quite…’ Fabel sighed. ‘I can’t find the text any more. I think I may have deleted it. Accidentally. But I don’t see how.’
‘I see…’ said van Heiden. It was a habit of van Heiden’s to drop an elliptical I see into conversations with his officers. It was up to you to interpret what lay in the ellipsis: I see… that I’ve got the wrong man for the job; I see… that you’ve really screwed up this time.
‘And we’re just assuming that the text is significant,’ said Fabel. ‘It could be a pure coincidence.’
Van Heiden gave Fabel a look: the kind of look he would have given someone who walked into the Presidium and claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘It would be a hell of a coincidence. I’ll get Kroeger onto it. You said you were looking for me this morning… why?’
‘It was just that, after our discussion this morning, I thought that I should update you on that car-burning attack in the Schanzenviertel. I’ve just had word that Fottinger died during the night. So we’ve got an unlawful killing, Fabel, which makes it your baby. But we may have a real job pursuing it as homicide, given that Fottinger was inside the cafe when the arson attack was carried out. He came out to the fire that killed him.’
‘That was maybe part of the plan — to set light to the car to draw him out into the street,’ said Fabel. ‘But I’m guessing that that’s not the only the reason you came all the way down here to see me.’
‘No — or, at least, not entirely. I wanted to ask you if Berthold Muller-Voigt said anything to you when you left the meeting together yesterday.’
‘What do you mean? Why?’
Van Heiden placed a hand on Fabel’s elbow and steered him a few steps further up the towpath, away from the crime scene and out of Werner’s hearing.
‘Listen, Jan. You know the rumours about Muller-Voigt’s past. The press accusations about his possible involvement with extreme leftist terrorists in the early eighties.’
‘I don’t think he had anything to do with that. I believe his involvement was never anything than purely political,’ said Fabel. He didn’t want to tell van Heiden that he had delved deeply into the politician’s past as part of the investigation that had first brought him into contact with Muller-Voigt.
‘Whether he had or not, I am uncomfortable with some of the information I have to share with him as part of the GlobalConcern Hamburg security committee. Whatever his background, Muller-Voigt is a conniving, manipulative swine. I know that you and he have had dealings in the past — I was just concerned that he was perhaps trying to get information out of you.’
‘Information about what?’
‘I don’t really know. All I do know is that, before you arrived, Muller-Voigt had been very persistent with Menke. He kept asking him about what extreme environmental groups the BfV were watching. Naturally, given Muller-Voigt’s colourful history, Menke wasn’t keen to share anything more than he had to.’
‘But Muller-Voigt is a senior member of the Hamburg government,’ said Fabel. ‘Whatever he was or wasn’t in the past, he is an elected and appointed public official. I would have thought we should be cooperating as much as possible.’
‘Of course…’ Van Heiden looked a little taken aback. ‘Of course we are cooperating. But Muller-Voigt’s questions were… I don’t know… they were irrelevant.’
‘Well, I can promise you that Muller-Voigt didn’t discuss anything like that with me in the lift. I got out at the Murder Commission, so we didn’t get a chance to talk much.’
‘Right…’ said van Heiden absently, rubbing his chin for a moment. ‘Right… I just wanted to ask. Muller-Voigt can be quite the slippery customer.’
Fabel didn’t know why he hadn’t told van Heiden what had really passed between him and Muller-Voigt. He just felt he had to keep it to himself, at least for the moment. He had, after all, promised the politician to keep everything unofficial and strictly to himself.
After van Heiden had left, Fabel supervised the management of the crime scene as he had before with so many crime scenes over the years. Holger Brauner arrived with his team and with his usual inappropriate good cheer examined the body, Tesa-taped anything extraneous on the victim’s skin, placed numbered tent cards, took photographs, zippered the remains of the young woman in black vinyl and removed her from the scene. The uniformed police kept the growing crowd of rubberneckers at bay. Thomas Glasmacher and Dirk Hechtner turned up at the scene, took statements from the fisherman and started a door-to-door in the immediate area.
It was the carefully rehearsed choreography of the beginning of a new murder enquiry. And Fabel directed the dance in the faint grey drizzle. No horror this time; no dismemberment or stench of putrefaction. Just the sadness of a young life lost.
Another thing Fabel had never learned to get used to.
Chapter Eighteen
Fabel made it back to the Presidium just in time to catch the start of Anna Wolff’s briefing. He and Werner had left Glasmacher and Hechtner dealing with the follow-up at the crime scene.
Henk Hermann was also just on his way into the briefing room.
‘Hi, Chef,’ he said as he saw Fabel approach. ‘I checked out that address with the housing authority. There’s no record of any Meliha Yazar as a tenant and it’s only been vacant a month. If she exists, she was never there.’
‘She exists, all right,’ said Fabel. ‘And that means she has to have lived somewhere. Thanks, anyway, Henk.’
‘By the way, you know that wash-up on the Fischmarkt… the torso?’
‘What about it?’
‘I didn’t know Schleswig-Holstein have an interest in it too,’ said Henk. ‘What’s their involvement?’
‘Henk,’ said Fabel impatiently, looking through the open door to the conference room, which was already filling with officers, ‘I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about.’
‘There was someone from the Polizei Schleswig-Holstein — Kiel division, I think — up at the mortuary to look at the Jane Doe torso. A Commissar…’ Henk frowned for a moment as he forced the name into his recall. ‘A Commissar Honer, I think. He showed them his ID and said he’d cleared it with you.’
Fabel stared at Henk for a moment as he processed the information. ‘Get a uniform unit up there right now to get a description or better still a shot from CCTV. I gave no one the okay to view the body, Schleswig-Holstein or not.’