A Fear of Dark Water Read Free

that. They lay scattered throughout the fabric of the world. And they were never more precious than when you found them for yourself.
    And that had become how she would live her life. She had searched for answers, for the truth. And now she was here, in a strange city in the cold north, being hunted because of the answers she had found.
    Meliha was in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt, a city within a city: the old bonded warehouses looming above her and the dark waters of the canal at her side. A light mounted high up on one of the warehouses cast a puddle of light and the Hamburg rain danced as little silver explosions on the cobbles. She tried to get her bearings. The warehouse she sought was somewhere near here. If she could make it to the warehouse, maybe they wouldn’t find her. At the very least, she’d have time to think through her next move.
    Meliha went through her pockets again. No cellphone. She had left it behind in the café she had had lunch in. She had left it on the table, switched on, and had placed her napkin over it. Then, when she had walked out of the café, she had left it behind.
    One more check. Illogical: she knew she’d left it in the café, but she had to check her bag and pockets again. Just to be sure.
    It could be that the staff in the café had found the phone and had put it to one side for her to claim it later. But the café had been in a run-down part of Wilhelmsburg, and Meliha guessed that it was more likely that someone had pocketed the phone on finding it. She thought about the obese pig of a man who had sat at the next table, making disgusting noises as he ate. It hadn’t been his eating habits that had most caught her attention, though: it had been the smartphone or hand-held PDA he had constantly tapped at with a stylus between overfilling his mouth.
    Maybe he had taken her phone. Or perhaps another café customer was walking around Hamburg with her phone in their pocket.
    Which was exactly what she wanted. Because when Meliha had rechecked her pockets, it had been to reassure herself that her cellphone was not there. Now it was out there somewhere, like a message in a bottle cast out on the sea. Maybe someone would understand the ringtone’s significance and decrypt the phone’s content. At the very least, it would send her pursuers on a false trail.
    She took the street plan from her pocket. A booklet: print on paper, not a hand-held satnav device or GPS navigator. She plotted her position from where she had come into the Speicherstadt, across the bridge and along Kibbelsteg, then into Am Sandtorkai. The warehouse was near. If she had calculated it right, it was just a block away and around the corner.
    The warehouses in the Speicherstadt were vast red-brick cathedrals of commerce dating back to the nineteenth century. But now it was all changing. They had extended the original Speicherstadt with a very twenty-first-century version of itself: the vast Kaispeicher A, the Speicherstadt’s most westerly warehouse which had once housed massive stores of tea and tobacco, was being built upwards and outwards and into the shape of a vast sailing ship that dominated the skyline. A building project that had lasted years and was transforming the storehouse into a massive concert hall, hotel, apartments. Like the Speicherstadt before it in the nineteenth century and the Köhlbrandbrücke in the twentieth, the Elbphilharmonie would become the landmark to define Hamburg in the twenty-first century and beyond, as distinctive as the Sydney Opera House, while reminding everyone of the city’s maritime past.
    Even this part of the original Speicherstadt was changing: ad agencies and trendy bar-restaurants were making inroads, mainly to be near the stylish new HafenCity development that extended to the old bonded-warehouse city.
    But the row of buildings outside which Meliha now found herself had remained largely unchanged. Just as there had been for two centuries, the cobbled canalside path was