JF02 - Brother Grimm (10 page)

Fendrich smiled sourly. ‘So you’ve come to harass me again. I had enough of that with your Norderstedt colleagues.’ He sat down behind the desk. ‘I wish you people would believe me: I had nothing to do with Paula’s disappearance. I wish you would just leave me the hell alone.’

Anna raised her hand in a placatory gesture and smiled disarmingly. ‘Listen, Herr Fendrich. I know you had, well,
issues
with the Norderstedt police investigation three years ago, but we’re Polizei Hamburg, and we’re murder-commission detectives. We’re not investigating the Paula Ehlers case other than to find out if there is any connection with the dead girl. Our interest in talking to you is as background to a totally different investigation. You might hold some piece of information that could be relevant to this new case.’

‘So you’re telling me I am in no way a suspect in either of these cases?’

‘You know we can’t make an absolute statement like that, Herr Fendrich,’ said Fabel. ‘We don’t know who we’re looking for yet. But our interest in you at the moment is as a witness, not a suspect.’

Fendrich shrugged and slumped back in his chair. ‘What do you want to know?’

Anna ran through the basic facts about Fendrich.
When she asked him if his mother was still living with him, Fendrich looked as if he had been stung.

‘My mother died,’ he said, for the first time breaking eye contact with Anna. ‘She died six months ago.’

‘I am sorry.’ Fabel looked at Fendrich and felt a true empathy with him, thinking about the scare he’d just had with his own mother.

‘She had been ill for a very long time.’ Fendrich sighed. ‘I live alone now.’

‘You changed schools after Paula’s disappearance,’ said Anna, as if to ensure the momentum didn’t go out of the interview. ‘Why did you feel the need to move on?’

Another bitter laugh. ‘After your colleague – Klatt was his name – after Klatt had made it very clear that I was a suspect, the suspicion stuck. Parents, students, even my colleagues … I could see it in their eyes. That dark doubt. I even got a couple of threatening phone calls. So I left.’

‘Didn’t you think that would add to the suspicion?’ Anna asked, but with a sympathetic smile.

‘Didn’t give a damn. I’d had enough of it. No one ever thought for a moment that I was deeply upset too. I was very fond of Paula. I thought she had enormous potential. No one seemed to take that into account. Except your colleague Klatt, who somehow managed to make it sound …’ Fendrich struggled for the word ‘…
corrupt
.’

‘You taught Paula German language and literature, is that right?’ asked Anna.

Fendrich nodded.

‘You say she showed particular academic promise … that that was the focus for your interest in her.’

Fendrich tilted his head back defiantly. ‘She did. Yes.’

‘Yet none of her other teachers seemed to be aware of it. And her school records show only average performance in almost all of her classes.’

‘I’ve been through all this God knows how many times before.
I
saw the potential in her. She had a natural talent for the German language. It’s like music. You can have an ear for it. Paula had a good ear. She could also express herself wonderfully when she put her mind to it.’ He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the cluttered desktop and fixing Anna with an earnest gaze. ‘Paula was a classic underachiever. She had the potential to become a real somebody and was in danger of becoming a nobody, of becoming lost in the system. I admit other teachers in the school missed it. And her parents were incapable of seeing it. That’s why I devoted so much time to helping her. I saw a real opportunity for her to escape from the confines of her family’s limited expectations.’

Fendrich leaned back in his chair and made an open-palmed gesture with his hands, as if he’d finished his address to a court. Then he let his hands fall heavily on to the desktop, as if the last of his energy had been expended. Fabel watched him but remained silent. There had been something about the earnestness – almost the passion – with which Fendrich had spoken of Paula that disturbed him.

Anna let the subject drop and moved on to the details of Fendrich’s alibi for the time of Paula’s disappearance. His answers were exactly as he had given three years ago and were in the file. But, during Anna’s questioning, Fendrich became increasingly impatient.

‘I thought this was about a new case,’ he said when Anna had finished. ‘All you’ve done so far is go over the same old stuff. I thought this was about another girl. About a murder.’

Fabel gestured for Anna to hand him the file. He took out a large glossy photograph taken at the scene where the dead girl had been discovered. He placed it squarely before Fendrich, keeping his eyes on the teacher’s face to gauge his reaction. It was a significant reaction. Fendrich muttered, ‘Oh Christ …’ and placed a hand over his mouth. Then he froze, his gaze locked on the image. He leaned forward and ranged his eyes over the photograph as if examining every pixel. Then his face relaxed in relief. He looked up at Fabel.

‘I thought …’

‘You thought it was Paula?’

Fendrich nodded. ‘I’m sorry. I got a shock.’ He stared at the picture again. ‘My God, she’s so like Paula. Older, obviously, but so very like her. Is that why you think there’s a connection?’

‘It’s more than that,’ explained Anna. ‘The killer left something to mislead us about the dead girl’s identity. To make us believe this was Paula.’

‘Can you give us an account of your movements from Monday afternoon to Tuesday morning, Herr Fendrich?’

Fendrich pursed his lips and blew air through them as he considered Fabel’s question. ‘Not much to tell. I went to work as usual, both days. Monday evening I came straight home, did some marking, read. Tuesday … did some shopping at the Mini-Markt on my way home on Tuesday. Got home about five, five-thirty … Then I was here all evening.’

‘Can anyone else confirm this?’

A sliver of flint entered Fendrich’s eyes. ‘I see … You couldn’t get me for Paula’s disappearance, so now you’re trying to tie me into this.’

‘It’s not like that, Herr Fendrich.’ Again Anna sought to placate him. ‘We need to check all the facts otherwise we’d be seen not to be doing our job properly.’

The tension in Fendrich’s angular shoulders eased and the defiance dulled in his eyes, but he still looked unconvinced. He looked again at the photograph of the dead girl. He looked at it for a long, silent time.

‘It’s the same man,’ he said at last. Anna and Fabel exchanged looks.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Anna.

‘What I mean is that you’re right … There is a connection. My God, this girl could be her sister, they’re so alike. Whoever killed this girl must have known Paula. Known her pretty well.’ Pain had returned to Fendrich’s dull eyes. ‘Paula’s dead. Isn’t she?’

‘We don’t know that, Herr Fendrich …’

‘Yes.’ Fabel cut across Anna’s answer. ‘Yes, I’m rather afraid that she is.’

Buxtehude was a joke. It was a place ‘
wo sich Fuchs und Hase gute Nacht sagen
’. A place where nothing ever happened.

For Hanna, to come from Buxtehude had a clear and unambiguous meaning. It meant to come from the back of beyond. To be a hick. To be a nobody. Hanna Grünn had come from Buxtehude, but as she sat and waited in her five-year-old VW Golf, in the middle of this creepy forest car park, she reflected bitterly that she hadn’t come far from Buxtehude. Only as far as that stupid bloody bakery.

From about the age of fourteen, Hanna had always attracted the boys. She had grown tall and full-figured with long blonde hair, and had been the most sought-after girl at her school. Hanna wasn’t clever, but she was smart enough to realise that and to use other resources to achieve what she wanted. And what she principally wanted was to get the hell out of Buxtehude. She had gathered clippings about Claudia Schiffer’s career: how Claudia had been plucked from obscurity while at a disco, about her first modelling contracts, about the phenomenal sums she had earned, about the exotic places she
had been to. So the eighteen-year-old Hanna had left Buxtehude behind and set off, with the unshakeable conviction of youth, to launch a career in modelling in Hamburg. It hadn’t taken long, however, for Hanna to realise that every agent’s reception she waited in was populated by other Claudia Schiffer clones. At her first interview she had shown the portfolio of shots taken of her by a local photographer before she left home. A tall, skinny queer and a woman in her late forties, who was clearly a former model, had all but sniggered as they looked through Hanna’s pictures. Then they had asked where Hanna came from. When she had replied, ‘I come from Buxtehude,’ the bastards had actually laughed.

The story had been the same at most of the other agencies. Hanna had felt as if the life she had envisioned for herself was evaporating. There was no going back to Buxtehude, but what had been, in her mind, the certainty of a modelling career now became a dream, fast on its way to becoming a total fantasy. Eventually she had worked her way through the phone books until she had found an agency in Sankt Pauli. Hanna wasn’t so green that she hadn’t realised the significance of the agency’s offices being above a strip club. The sign on the door had confirmed that the agency specialised in ‘models, exotic dancers and escorts’, and the stocky, leather-jacketed Italian who ran the agency had looked more like a gangster than a figure from the fashion industry. He had, to be fair, spelled it out. He had told Hanna that she was a looker with a great body and he could get her lots of work, but it would be mainly video work. ‘Real fucking – you understand?’

When Hanna had told the Italian that she wasn’t interested he had simply shrugged and said, ‘Okay.’
But he had handed her a card and said that if she ever changed her mind she should get in touch. Back in the bedroom of her shared apartment, Hanna had bunched her pillow to her mouth to stifle the huge, uncontrollable sobs that racked her body. What had depressed her most was the businesslike, matter-of-fact way the Italian had told her that the video work would involve ‘real fucking’. He hadn’t been particularly seedy, he hadn’t been lecherous: he had simply been laying out a job description for her, just as if he had been discussing the details of an office job. But what had got to her most was that it was clear that he thought that was all she was worth. All she should expect. It was then that she started looking around for an ordinary job; and without secretarial skills, without her Abitur, her choices had been very limited.

It was then that Hanna had got the job in the Backstube Albertus: on a production line with fat, stupid, middle-aged women who had been strangers to any kind of ambition all their lives. Now, day after tedious day, she stood, her lustrous blonde hair gathered up under an elasticated bakery hat, her perfect body concealed in a formless white bakery coat, as she iced birthday cakes with an ever-increasing sense of doom.

But not for much longer. Soon Markus would take her away from all that. Soon she would have the wealth and lifestyle she had always wanted. Markus owned the bakery and if fucking the boss was what it took to get what she wanted, then that was what she would do. And now she was so close: Markus had promised to leave that frigid cow of a wife of his. Then he would marry Hanna.

She looked at her watch. Where the fuck was he? He was always late, mainly because of his wife. She
looked around at the dense mass of trees that crowded around the car park, a darker black against a black, moonless sky. She hated meeting him here: it was so creepy. She thought she saw something move in the trees. She peered into the darkness intently for a moment and then relaxed, letting go an impatient sigh.

He had tracked her here before, but had not been able to follow her up the road to the Naturpark car park for fear of being too conspicuous: the only other vehicle on an isolated road that led just to this car park. That was why he had come back during daylight and scouted out the site. So, tonight, when he had followed her long enough to establish where she was heading, he had overtaken her and got here first. His reconnaissance of the Naturpark had revealed a narrow service track used by the foresters for maintaining the woodland. He had ridden his motorbike halfway up the track and then killed the lights and engine, letting it coast for a moment before concealing it amongst the trees. Then he had walked the rest of the way, concerned that anyone already in the car park would hear the motorcycle’s approach. Now he was at the fringe of the trees, unseen, watching the whore as she waited for her married lover. He felt the thrill of a grim anticipation, a knowledge that soon the anger and the hate that ate at him like a cancer would be released. They were going to hurt. They were both going to know what it was like to experience real pain. She turned in his direction. He didn’t shrink back, didn’t move. She looked directly at him, peering into the dark, but the stupid bitch couldn’t see him. She would see him soon enough.

The sweep of a car’s headlights arced across the face of the trees and he drew back slightly. It was a Mercedes sports. Markus Schiller’s car. He watched as the car pulled up alongside the Golf and Schiller put down the window and made an apologetic gesture. From his concealed vantage point in the trees he watched as Hanna got out of the Golf, slammed the door, marched ill-temperedly to the Mercedes and climbed into the passenger seat.