Hamburg press would have everyone believe that I am some kind of unprincipled sexual adventurer. Well, my private life is my private life. I am unmarried and I am fortunate enough to enjoy the company of beautiful and intelligent women. I always have. And for some reason that I have never been able to grasp, they enjoy mine. But I am not married and never have been, so I am betraying no marriage vows. Unlike, it must be said, more than half of my upright married colleagues in the Hamburg Senate. Nor do I trick doe-eyed ingenues into bed or pay for cheap and nasty dalliances in the Reeperbahn. I’m not cheating on anyone and I treat the women with whom I am involved with respect and dignity.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Fabel. ‘Your personal life is your own affair.’
‘Of all of the women with whom I have been involved over the years there have been only three for whom I had deep feelings. Genuinely deep feelings. One died a long time ago, while the second affair withered on the vine, as it were. The third is the woman with whom I was involved up until just two weeks ago.’ Muller-Voigt stood up, crossed the room to a bureau and came back holding a framed photograph. He fiddled with it for a moment before handing it over; Fabel realised that it was a digital photo frame and Muller-Voigt had been selecting the image he wanted to show him. It was a photograph of a young woman with dark hair and strikingly blue eyes. She was flashing a white-toothed grin at the camera but looked a little uneasy. Shy. She was also, Fabel could see, very beautiful.
‘This is Meliha,’ said Muller-Voigt. ‘I’ve been seeing her for the last three months. As you can see, she is considerably younger than me.’
‘She’s a very attractive woman,’ said Fabel and held the frame out to return it to Muller-Voigt. The politician made no move to take it.
‘Look at her very carefully, Fabel. She’s disappeared.’
‘Missing? How long?’
‘Not missing. Disappeared. Like I said, I was involved with her until two weeks ago, and then she disappeared without trace.’
‘And you think she might be the body washed up after the storm?’
‘I don’t know…’ Muller-Voigt shrugged, but there was nothing dismissive in the gesture nor in his expression. Fabel could see that he was a man in pain. ‘She could be.’
‘So you last heard from her two weeks ago?’ asked Fabel.
‘Yes… no…’ Muller-Voigt made an exasperated gesture. ‘It’s complicated. I got an email from her two days ago. Breaking it off with me. Or that’s what it seemed to be.’
‘Listen, Herr Muller-Voigt, I’m getting confused. You say this woman has been missing for two weeks, and now you’re telling me that you received an email from her two days ago.’ Fabel frowned. ‘One thing is for sure, she’s not the body washed up after the storm. That woman had been in the water for at least two weeks…’
‘Which is exactly how long Meliha has been missing. Listen, Fabel, I choose my words very carefully. When I say Meliha has disappeared, I mean exactly that. I know you think that I’m approaching you because I’m trying to pull strings to have this looked into discreetly and so avoid scandal. But that’s not it at all. Someone has, systematically, erased all trace of Meliha ever having existed. And I can’t report her missing if she doesn’t exist any more. And as for that email, I know it’s fake.’
‘Can I see it?’ asked Fabel.
Muller-Voigt gave a bitter laugh. ‘No. It doesn’t exist any more, either. I didn’t print it out because I never print anything out unless it’s absolutely essential. Environmental grounds, obviously. You’ll have heard of the Klabautermann Virus, I dare say?’
Fabel nodded. ‘Of course. I know the officer who’s been tasked with finding the people behind it.’
‘I have absolutely no idea what these people get out of destroying other people’s data,’ said Muller-Voigt. ‘Probably just the challenge of proving they’re even smarter nerds than the smart nerds who design the software… but, sadly, there are people out there who devote their time to developing ever more virulent, ever more destructive computer viruses. This latest one, the Klabautermann Virus, has been specifically targeted at official intranets and secure government email servers in the north of Germany. Now what is the point of that — other than to disrupt ordinary people’s lives? And the little bastards behind it may not even be anywhere near the north of Germany. They could be in San Jose or Mumbai or Beijing. Or just some spotty pubescent nobody in a back bedroom in Bonningstedt. Whoever they are and wherever they are, they infected the City and State government email. Because I’m logged into it, it got into my laptop and wiped all of my email folders — but not before sending itself to every contact in my address book. In short, thanks to the Klabautermann Virus, I don’t have the email any more.’
‘What makes you convinced it wasn’t her? asked Fabel.
‘I just knew it wasn’t her. You can tell. Everyone has a… I don’t know… a style when writing an email.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘And, I know this sounds mad, but it was too grammatical. Meliha is Turkish. I don’t mean Turkish-German, she’s a Turkish national. Her German was excellent but she made mistakes, like all non-natives. This email was… well, too perfect. And, in any case, email just wasn’t our medium.’
‘Mmm…’ said Fabel. He remembered what Kroeger had said at the briefing about identifying fakes on the internet. Maybe Muller-Voigt could have seen through a phoney email. ‘I have to say I don’t know what I can do, Herr Muller-Voigt. It doesn’t sound like a homicide to me. And, to be frank, not much of a missing-person case, either. But I can get in touch with the local police and get them to look into it.’
Fabel stood up.
‘Listen, Fabel…’ Muller-Voigt stepped forward, as if to block his exit. ‘I don’t know what you think of me, but I do know that you don’t take me for the hysterical type. If anything I’m well known for being the opposite. I am telling you that I am absolutely convinced that a woman I was involved with has been abducted or murdered. I am also telling you that not only can I not offer objective evidence that this has happened, I can’t even offer objective evidence that Meliha existed in the first place.’ Muller-Voigt stood back and indicated the sofa. ‘Please, Fabel, I need your help.’
‘You must know where she lives,’ said Fabel, but he remained standing.
‘I was never there. I had an address for her, but when I called there the flat was empty. I don’t mean she wasn’t in, I mean the flat was unoccupied. I asked a neighbour about her and only succeeded in making the woman suspicious. I left before she called the police. But she did say that the apartment had been empty for more than a month.’
‘You say Meliha was a foreign national?’
‘Turkish, yes.’
‘And she was here in Germany legally?’
‘As far as I am aware.’
‘Then there will be a record of her entering the country. What is her full name?’ asked Fabel, taking his notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket.
‘Meliha Yazar. She was from somewhere just outside Istanbul. I think it was Silivri.’
Fabel wrote it down.
‘Is there any reason she would lie to you about where she lived?’
‘None that I can think of. I know this sounds insane, but I don’t think she was lying. I think she lived in that apartment. You see, I met Meliha at an environmental conference. At the Hamburg Congress Center.’
‘She was involved with the environmental movement?’
Muller-Voigt nodded. ‘She was a campaigner, an activist, or at least said she was. From what I could gather, she had some kind of Earth-sciences degree from Istanbul. She told me that she worked as a researcher for an environmental protection agency but she was always pretty evasive when I asked which one. The truth is, I suspected she might be some kind of investigative reporter and I was pretty guarded around her at first. I definitely believe that she was into stuff that placed her in danger.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
Muller-Voigt looked at his half-empty whisky glass and put it down on the table. ‘I’m going to make some coffee,’ he said decisively. ‘It’s a long story…’
