‘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.’
‘And did the Senate release the eleven men?’
‘No. The Senate were all politicians, of course, and businessmen first and foremost… so naturally they didn’t keep their promise. Everyone got the chop. Mind you, after all seventy-plus were dead, the Mayor asked the headsman if he wasn’t exhausted after so much axe swinging. He made a joke to the effect that he still had enough strength to behead the Mayor and the entire Senate if necessary. Not famed for a sense of humour, either, are politicians or business types, so they had the executioner beheaded on the spot as well.’ Fabel smiled. ‘So, all in all, it’s appropriate that the German Weather Bureau has called this storm Stortebeker. And, like Kreysig said, it’s ironic that Stortebeker has delivered up a headless corpse.’
‘What can I say, Chef?’ said Anna dully. ‘It’s always an education…’
Chapter Eight
It was shortly after lunchtime when Fabel sat down with his team.
Just before he went into the briefing, he got a message on the Presidium’s internal email system that Criminal Director van Heiden, chief of the investigative branch and Fabel’s boss, wanted to see him at around three-thirty. After several years working with van Heiden, Fabel knew that around three-thirty meant three-thirty on the dot. As he was only too willing to admit, Fabel himself had a tendency to be punctilious about punctuality, but his boss’s timekeeping made the average atomic clock look sloppy. Fabel could guess what van Heiden wanted to see him about. The Criminal Director was as scrupulous about being kept informed of every development in every case that was remotely in the public eye as he was about timekeeping; he would no doubt have already been briefed about the body down by the Fischmarkt.
By the time Fabel walked into the main conference room at the end of the Murder Commission’s corridor, his team had already assembled. The conference room was large and decorated in neutral tones, clean but bland and somewhere between linen white and beige. In contrast, striking, vivid colours leapt from the two large frameless canvases on the side wall. The two abstract paintings were what Fabel described as ‘corporate art’: the kind of stuff you found in the reception areas of banks, insurance companies, ad agencies and accountancy firms in an effort to convince you that they were actually ‘quite edgy’.
The conference room’s large windows looked out over the treetops of Winterhude Stadtpark. A jug filled with iced water, a white vacuum coffeepot and cups, all of which looked as if they had come from Ikea, were neatly arranged on the cherrywood table. The officers sitting around the table had all set down their clipboards with notepads in front of them, like table settings.
Sitting there at the top of the conference table, an electronic whiteboard behind him, Fabel felt as if they were about to discuss monthly sales targets, or the launch of a new product line or ad campaign. It seemed to
