A Fear of Dark Water Read Free Page A

lined with huge storehouses containing imported rugs and textiles from Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan.
    She moved out of the puddle of light cast by the warehouse lamp and checked up and down the cobbled canalside path. No one. No sign of them. But, she knew, that meant nothing. It was their function to follow, to shadow you unseen. To find you without you knowing they were there until the last moment.
    And, of course, they had the kind of technology that you normally only expected the intelligence services of some superpower to have. Maybe they were watching her right now, able to see her in the dark. Maybe she was a bright infrared beacon in the cold dark of the Speicherstadt.
    So close. Meliha ran. Her feet hurt even more with every footfall. She had walked for kilometres to get here. No taxi. No public transport. Nothing that was connected to a computer system or radio network. She had crossed a city without crossing a circuit, without connecting with a technology: even avoiding the few parts of the city that had CCTV, taking circuitous detours to avoid the spots marked in red pencil on her map.
    She stopped suddenly, realising she was at the right block. The signs on the warehouse were in Turkish, English and German. This was the one. There was no alarmed keypad entry, just an old-fashioned brass keyhole in a sturdy, traditional German warehouse door: robust, dense wood, reinforced with brass plates. Reassuringly low-tech: a door that had protected the contents of the warehouse for more than a hundred years. She took the heavy key from her bag and unlocked the door. She slipped through it and into the warehouse’s darkness, with just one last check of the canalway outside.
    Maybe she was going to be all right, after all.
    Meliha took a small wind-up LED torch from her handbag and scanned the warehouse. She was in an entry foyer and a sign listing the tenants told her that what she was looking for – Demeril Importing – was on the third floor. She pushed through the glass-panelled doors and into the main warehouse. Over to one side of the warehouse was a large goods lift, but Meliha decided it was better to take the stairs and make as little noise as possible.
    When she reached the door of Demeril Importing, she took a second key from her bag and let herself in through an ornate Jugendstil door. She shone her torch around the warehouse. Textiles piled high: rugs, carpets, kilims. Rich Turkish designs revealed on the folded edges. Tags revealed names she knew so well: Kayseri, Yeşilhisar, Kirsehir, Konya, Dazkiri … Somehow the familiarity of the names gave her comfort. There was a robust, ornate wooden desk and a kilim-upholstered chair near the door; the desk was piled high with paperwork and ledgers, bills and orders impaled on two spikes. Business was done here as it had been done in the last century and the century before that. No computers. No websites. No electronics.
    Moving across the warehouse Meliha continued searching until she found an alcove at the back of the main storage area, filled with less carefully stacked carpets. She chose a lowish pile of carpets right over in the farthest corner of the alcove and lay down on them, switching her torch off. She could rest. She could rest, but not sleep. Sleep would be dangerous. She would be safe here until the morning. Then … well, then she would try to get in touch with Berthold. How she could do so without using a phone or any other electronic medium she had not yet worked out. But she must get to Berthold. Tell him what she knew. But now she could rest, but not sleep.
    She fell asleep.

    It probably had been the quietest of sounds. Maybe it had been the main door, three floors below: an indistinct, dull clunk that had fired into her sleeping brain like a bullet. Whatever the sound had been, she had been asleep and now she was totally, nerve-janglingly awake. For a sliver of a second she wondered if she had slept all night and if what she