JF02 - Brother Grimm (14 page)

He lay in the dark, thinking; spreading his mind over the city outside. His thoughts roamed over the lonely woodland park to the south. ‘Hänsel und Gretel’. Children lost in the dark of the forest. Out along the dark Elbe towards the pale sands of the Blankenese Elbstrand. A girl lying by the shore. That was the start. Fabel was meant to get that. These were the overture notes and he had missed their meaning.

His tired mind misfired, jumbling unconnected things together. He thought of Paul Lindemann, the young policeman he’d lost on their last major case, and his thoughts turned to Henk Hermann, the uniformed Kommissar who had secured the scene in the Naturpark, and then to Klatt, the KriPo
Kommissar from Norderstedt. Two outsiders to the Mordkommission team, one of whom he believed would become a permanent insider. But he did not yet know which one it would be. There was the sound of laughter outside. Somewhere down on the Milchstrasse people were coming out of a restaurant. Other lives.

Fabel closed his eyes. ‘Hänsel und Gretel’. A fairy tale. He remembered the radio interview he had heard when driving back from Norddeich, but his tired brain locked out the name of the author. He would ask his friend Otto, who owned a bookstore down in the Alsterarkaden.

A fairy tale.

Fabel fell asleep.

The Jensen Buchhandlung was situated in the elegant covered Arcades on the Alster. The brightly lit bookstore exuded Northern European cool, and would have looked just as much at home in Copenhagen, Oslo or Stockholm as it did in Hamburg. The interior styling was simple and contemporary, with beechwood bookshelves and finishings. Everything about it suggested organisation and efficiency, which always made Fabel smile, because he knew the owner, Otto Jensen, to be totally disorganised. Otto had been a close friend of Fabel’s since university. He was tall, gangly and eccentric: a moving focus for chaos. But concealed in the tangle of bungling physicality was a supercomputer mind.

The Jensen Buchhandlung was not busy when Fabel arrived, and Otto had his back to the door, stretching his near-two-metre frame to stack books on the shelves from a new stock box. One dropped from his grasp and Fabel lunged forward and caught it.

‘I suppose lightning reactions are a prerequisite for a crime fighter. It’s most reassuring.’ Otto smiled at his friend and they shook hands. They enquired about each other’s health, about their respective
partners and children, then chatted idly for a few minutes before Fabel explained the purpose of his visit.

‘I am after this new book. A novel. A
Krimi
, I suppose. I can’t remember the title or the author, but it’s based on the idea of one of the Grimm brothers being a murderer …’

Otto smiled knowingly. ‘
Die Märchenstrasse
. Gerhard Weiss.’

Fabel snapped his fingers. ‘That’s the one!’

‘Don’t be impressed by my amazing knowledge of fiction – it’s being punted big time by the publishers at the moment. And I think you would offend Herr Weiss’s literary sensibilities by describing it as a
Krimi
. It’s based on an “art imitating life imitating art” premise. There are more than a few members of the literary establishment getting themselves worked up about it.’ Otto frowned. ‘Why on earth would you want to buy a historical murder thriller? Isn’t Hamburg serving you up enough of the real thing?’

‘If only it weren’t, Otto. Is it any good? This book, I mean.’

‘It’s provocative, that’s for sure. And Weiss knows his stuff about folklore, philology and the work of the Brothers Grimm. But his style is pretentious and overblown. Truth is, it really is just a common-or-garden thriller with literary pretensions. That’s my opinion, anyway … Come and have a coffee.’ Otto led Fabel to the Arts section of the shop. There had been some changes since Fabel’s last visit: an aisle had been removed to open up the space. The gallery above now looked on to an area with leather sofas and coffee tables piled with newspapers and books. There was a counter in the corner with an espresso machine.

‘It’s all the thing, nowadays,’ grinned Otto. ‘I came into this business because I love literature. Because I want to sell books. Now I serve
caffè lattes
and
macchiatos
.’ He indicated a sofa and Fabel sat down while Otto went over to the coffee bar. After a couple of minutes he came back with a book jammed under his arm and carrying two coffees. He put one down in front of Fabel. Otto, unsurprisingly, had spilled some of the coffee and it swirled in the saucer.

‘I’d stick to books, Otto, if I were you.’ Fabel smiled at his friend. Otto handed him the book, sloshing some of his own coffee into his saucer.

‘This is it.
Die Märchenstrasse
.
The Fairy Tale Road
.’

It was a thick hardback. The book jacket was dark and brooding, with the title set in a Gothic Fraktur typeface. A nineteenth-century copperplate illustration was set, small, in the centre of the cover. It showed a small girl in a hooded red cape walking through a forest. Red eyes glowed in the darkness behind her. Fabel flipped the book over and looked at the back. There was a photograph of Weiss: the unsmiling face was hard and broad, almost brutish, above the bulk of his neck and shoulders.

‘Have you read anything of his before, Otto?’

‘Not really … I’ve flicked through a couple. He has had similar stuff published before. He has quite a following. A weird following at that. But he seems to have broken into the mainstream with this.’

‘What do you mean, a “weird” following?’

‘His previous books were fantasy novels. He called them the “
Wahlwelten Chronik
” – the “
Choose-Worlds Chronicles
”. They were based on the same sort of premise as this new one, but set in a totally fictitious world.’

‘Science fiction?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Otto. ‘The world Weiss created was almost the same as this, but the countries had different names, different histories, et cetera. More like a parallel world, I suppose. Anyway, he invited fans to “buy” a place in his books. If they sent him a few thousand Euros, he would write them into the story. The more they paid, the bigger part they played in the storyline.’

‘Why would anyone pay for that?’

‘It’s all to do with Weiss’s oddball literary theories.’

Fabel gazed at the face on the back cover. The eyes were incredibly dark. So dark it was difficult to distinguish the pupils from the irises. ‘Explain them to me … His theories, I mean.’

Otto made a face that suggested the difficulty of the task. ‘God, I don’t know, Jan. A mixture of superstition and quantum physics, I guess. Or I suppose, more accurately, superstition dressed up in quantum physics.’

‘Otto …’ Fabel smiled impatiently.

‘Okay … Think of it this way. Some physicists believe that there is an infinite number of dimensions in the universe, right? And that consequently there is an infinite number of possibilities – and infinite variations on reality?’

‘Yes … I suppose so …’

‘Well,’ Otto continued, ‘the scientific proposition has always been an artistic belief for many writers. They can be a superstitious bunch. I know for a fact that several well-known authors avoid basing characters on people they know, quite simply because they fear that their imaginings for the characters may become reflected in reality. You kill a child in
a book, and a child dies in reality, that kind of thing. Or, scarier still, you write a novel about horrific crimes and somewhere, in another dimension, your fiction becomes fact.’

‘That’s nonsense. So, in another dimension, you and I might simply be fictional characters?’

Otto shrugged. ‘I’m only laying out Weiss’s premise. Added to the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, he layers in this proposition that our concept of history tends to be shaped more by literary or, increasingly, screen portrayals of characters rather than by the historical record and historical or archaeological research.’

‘So, despite all his denials, Weiss is implying that, simply by writing this fiction about him, Jacob Grimm
is
guilty of these crimes in some other invented dimension. Or that Grimm will be judged guilty by future generations who will choose to believe Weiss’s fiction rather than documented fact.’

‘Exactly. Anyway, Jan …’ Otto tapped the book that Fabel held. ‘Happy reading. Anything else I can get you?’

‘As a matter of fact you can … Do you have any fairy tales?’

The conference room of the Mordkommission would have had the look of a library reading room had it not been for the scene-of-crime photographs that were taped to the incident board, alongside the blown-up images of the notes left in the hands of all three victims. The cherrywood table was completely covered with books of all sizes. Some had the glossy sheen of the freshly published, while others were handworn and a couple were clearly antiquarian volumes. Fabel’s contribution had been the books he had bought from the Jensen Buchhandlung – three copies of Gerhard Weiss’s thriller, a copy of Grimms’
Children’s and Household Tales
, a volume of Hans Christian Andersen and one of Charles Perrault. Anna Wolff had gathered the others from the Hamburg Zentralbibliothek library.

Anna Wolff, Maria Klee and Werner Meyer were already there when Fabel arrived. Kommissar Klatt, from the Schleswig-Holstein KriPo also sat with them but, although the team chatted animatedly with Klatt, there was something about their body language that set the newcomer apart. Fabel had just sat down at the head of the table when Susanne Eckhardt arrived.
She apologised to Fabel for her late arrival with the formality that the two lovers automatically adopted when their professional paths crossed.

‘Okay,’ Fabel said in a decisive tone. ‘Let’s get started. We have two murder scenes and three victims. And given that the first victim bore a direct reference to Kommissar Klatt’s three-year-old missing-person inquiry, we have to assume, unfortunately, that there is a fourth victim.’ He turned to Werner. ‘What have we got so far?’

Werner ran through the details they had to date. The first victim had been discovered by a woman from Blankenese out for an early-morning walk along the beach with her dog. In the second case, the police had been tipped off by an anonymous telephone call to the Polizeieinsatzzentrale control room. The call had come from a phone booth at a service station on the B73 Autobahn. Fabel thought back to the motorcycle tyre marks on the track leading out of the Naturpark. But why would this man hide the cars to buy time and then call to tell the police where to find the bodies? Werner also explained that Brauner had got back to them about the two sets of boot prints. The ones that Hermann had pointed out on the Wanderweg didn’t match those found next to the car park. ‘The odd thing is,’ said Werner, ‘that although they were different boots, the size was the same. Huge … size 50.’

‘Maybe he changed boots, for some reason,’ said Anna.

‘We focus on the motorcyclist who used the foresters’ service path,’ said Fabel. ‘He was watching and waiting for them to arrive. That’s our premeditation.’

‘We’re still waiting for the autopsy results on the
first victim,’ continued Werner, ‘as well as the forensic reports on the cars we found dumped in the woods. But we do know that it’s likely the first victim was strangled, and the double murder obviously involved a weapon and a different form of killing. Our link between the murders is these small notes pressed into the victims’ hands.’ Werner stood up and read the contents of the notes out loud.

‘What we have to ascertain,’ said Susanne, ‘is whether this latest
reference
– the use of the Hänsel and Gretel story – is just some kind of sick one-off joke, because he abandoned his victims in the woods, or whether he really is making some kind of link to fairy tales.’

‘But there’s no “fairy tale” link in the first note,’ Fabel turned and stared at the blow-ups of the notes, as if concentrating on them would squeeze further meaning from the tiny, obsessively neat handwriting.

‘Unless we’re simply missing the reference,’ said Susanne.

‘Let’s stick with “Hänsel und Gretel” for the moment,’ Fabel continued. ‘Let’s assume our guy is trying to tell us something. What could it be? Who are “Hänsel und Gretel”?’

‘Innocents lost in the wood. Children.’ Susanne leaned back in her chair. ‘Neither of which fits with what we know about the victims. It’s a traditional German folk tale … one of the ones collected and recorded by the Brothers Grimm … it’s also an opera by Humperdinck. Hänsel and Gretel were brother and sister – again something that doesn’t fit with the two victims. They epitomise innocence in danger from corruption and evil, over which they ultimately triumph …’ Susanne made a ‘that’s it’ gesture with her hands.

‘I’ve got it!’ Anna Wolff had been flicking through one of the books on the table; she slapped her hand down on the open pages.

‘What?’ said Fabel. ‘The “Hänsel und Gretel” connection?’

‘No … No … sorry,
Chef
, I mean the first girl. I think I may have the “fairy tale” link. A young girl found on a beach, right? Beside water?’

Fabel nodded impatiently.

Anna held up the book so the others could see. On the page opposite the text was a pen-and-ink illustration of a sad-looking girl sitting on a rock by the sea. The illustration echoed the famous small statue that Fabel had himself seen when visiting Copenhagen.