JF02 - Brother Grimm (18 page)

‘Are you all right, dear?’ asked Frau Wallenstein. ‘You don’t look well.’

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ said the younger woman.
‘I’ve not been well, for a long time, but it’s all right now. I’ll be fine now.’

‘Oh,’ said Frau Wallenstein, unsure what to say next and a little regretful that she had started the conversation. The young woman looked so strange. Maybe it was drugs. Frau Wallenstein was an avid viewer of
Adelheid und ihre Mörder
and
Grossstadtrevier
. They always showed people who used drugs as looking like that. But maybe the poor woman had simply been ill.

‘I’ve been to see my little girl.’ The younger woman’s smile was faltering, as if it struggled to cling to the lips. ‘I’ve been to see my little girl today.’

‘Oh, that’s lovely. How old is she?’

‘She’s sixteen, now. Yes, sixteen.’ The younger woman searched her pockets and Frau Wallenstein noticed that the blouse beneath the jacket was faded and worn, and that she didn’t seem to have a handbag of any kind. The woman produced a creased, dog-eared photograph. She held it out to Frau Wallenstein: it showed a small, unremarkable toddler with the same kind of lustreless blonde hair as its mother.

‘Yes,’ said the pale woman. ‘My little Martha. My little baby. She was always such an energetic little thing. A scamp. That’s what I used to call her when she was a toddler: my little scamp …’

Frau Wallenstein was now decidedly uneasy, but she was worried about the young woman. She looked so forlorn. Frau Wallenstein was relieved to hear the rumble of the U-Bahn train approaching. The young woman stood up and looked down the tunnel towards the sound of the arriving train. She seemed suddenly alert. Frau Wallenstein stood up too, but more slowly, leaning heavily on her stick.

‘So where is your little girl now?’ she asked, more to fill the final few moments of their acquaintance until the train arrived than anything else. The young woman turned to her.

‘That’s where I’m going now … to be with my little Martha. I’m going to be a good mother now …’ The young woman’s face was animated; suddenly happy. The U-Bahn train emerged from the tunnel, still travelling fast. The younger woman smiled at Frau Wallenstein. ‘Goodbye, it was so nice talking to you.’

‘Goodbye dear,’ said Frau Wallenstein and was about to say something else, but the younger woman had stepped forward to the edge of the platform. And she didn’t stop. Frau Wallenstein stared at the space on the platform where the woman should have been standing, but she was gone.

There was a sickening, reverberating thud as the train hit the body. Then the screams of others on the platform echoed in the U-Bahn station.

Frau Wallenstein stood still, leaning on her walking stick to ease her aching arthritic knee and stared at where a young woman with whom she had been talking just a minute before had been standing.

She had thrown herself in front of the train. Why on earth had she done that? What kind of world had this become?

It took just over half an hour for Fabel and Werner to drive out to Buxtehude. The sky had brightened and now bathed the small town in a stark light, but an angry wind still snapped and tugged at Fabel’s raincoat as he and Werner made their way from the car to a small restaurant on Westfleth, in Buxtehude’s Altstadt. Buxtehude looked as if it were a small Dutch town that had, somehow, been shunted east until it had almost collided with Hamburg. The River Este split into the Ostviver and Westviver as it flowed through the town’s Altstadt, where it was channelled into canals and spanned by a half a dozen Dutch-style bridges. Even the building the restaurant was in seemed to have shrugged up its shoulders to squeeze in between its neighbours, and Fabel guessed that it had looked out over the canals and bridges for at least two centuries.

As they had driven into the town, something else about Buxtehude had resonated with Fabel: even the street names Gebrüder-Grimm-Weg, Rotkäppchenweg and Dornröschenweg – Brothers Grimm Way, Red Riding Hood Way and Sleeping Beauty Way – seemed to conspire to remind Fabel of the dark tones that
lurked in the shadows of this investigation. Every time Fabel heard mention of the Brothers Grimm, he envisaged Jacob Grimm as the fictionalised character in Weiss’s book: the respected and influential historical figure was being displaced by Weiss’s pedantic monster. Weiss’s theories seemed to be working.

They sat by the window and looked out over the Fleth Haven canal, edged by trees and white fences, and across to the Ostfleth. A small, nineteenth-century river-sail freighter was moored on display and its multicoloured pennants flapped and snapped restlessly in the stiff breeze. Fabel glanced at the menu and ordered a tuna salad and a mineral water; Werner, on the other hand, studied the entire menu before asking for the Schweineschnitzel and a pot of coffee. Fabel smiled as he thought of how, in that small act of thoroughness, Werner had so clearly illustrated the difference between them. As policemen. As people. As friends.

‘I’ve been reading this book,’ Fabel spoke to Werner but kept his gaze focused out of the window, watching the wind tease the old sailboat with memories of its Ewer fleet days, carrying tea, flour, wood along North German waterways. ‘By a guy called Gerhard Weiss. It’s called the
Märchenstrasse
. It’s all about Jacob Grimm – well, it’s not actually – but it’s all about murders being based on Grimm Fairy Tales.’

‘Shit. There’s a connection?’

Fabel turned from the window. ‘I don’t know. It’s a bit too close for comfort, though, isn’t it?’

‘I would say so.’ Werner put his coffee cup down and frowned. ‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’

‘I only started reading it last night. And I only found out about the book by pure chance. It was
away on the edge of this whole thing, but now that I’ve started reading it …’

Werner’s face suggested Fabel had dropped an easy ball. ‘It needs to be looked into, if you ask me. For all we know, our killer may be working his way through this book instead of the Grimm Fairy Tales,
Deutsche Sagen
and all the other stuff the Grimms put together.’

‘A serial killer using a study guide?’ Fabel’s laugh had a bitter edge. ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

‘Jan, you know we’re going to have to check out this author guy …’

‘Weiss.’ Fabel filled the gap. He turned and looked back towards the boat. Boats like these had plied their trade on the rivers and canals since before Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm travelled Germany collecting tales, legends and myths. And before them, other boats had met here and bartered goods when those tales, legends and myths had been given voice for the first time. An ancient land. An ancient land and Europe’s heart, was how Fabel’s father had explained Germany to him as a child. A place where things were felt more acutely, experienced more intensely, than anywhere else. ‘I will,’ said Fabel eventually.

The contrast with the Schiller villa was as stark as it could be. The Grünn family lived on the outskirts of Buxtehude, in a rented apartment in a block of six. The block, the grounds around it and the Grünns’ apartment itself were clean and well-kept. But when Fabel and Werner joined Herr and Frau Grünn and Hanna’s eighteen-year-old sister Lena in the living room, it was as if the apartment’s capacity had been exceeded.

It wasn’t just the apartment that contrasted with
the circumstances of Fabel’s last interview: unlike with Vera Schiller, the sense of loss here was raw and immediate. Fabel couldn’t help making another comparison: with the Ehlers, who had thought they had found their missing child, dead, only to find they had been the victims of a hoax of intolerable cruelty. Unlike the Ehlers, the Grünn family could at least experience the release of intense grief. They would have a body to bury.

Erik Grünn was a large, stocky man with a shock of ash-blond hair that had not been thinned by his fifty-two years. His wife Anja and his daughter both showed hints of Hanna Grünn’s beauty, but in lesser proportions. All three answered the detectives’ questions with a leaden politeness. It was clear that the Grünns were eager to help, but it was also clear that the interview was not going to yield much. Hanna hadn’t told them a great deal about her life in Hamburg, other than that she’d been hopeful of getting a modelling contract soon. In the meantime, she had told them, she was getting on well at the Backstube Albertus and was expecting promotion soon. This, of course, Fabel knew to be false from what he had been told by Biedermeyer, Hanna’s immediate boss at the bakery. It became obvious to Fabel that Hanna had kept in touch with her family, but that the contact had been limited, and she had kept a great deal of what was going on in her life to herself. Fabel had felt awkward, almost guilty, as he had explained the circumstances of Hanna’s death: that she had been having an affair with her boss and that he had been the other victim. He had gauged their reactions: Frau Grünn’s shock was genuine, as was the dark shame that clouded Herr Grünn’s expression. Lena simply stared at the floor.

‘What about other boyfriends? Was there anyone special?’ As soon as Fabel asked the question, he sensed tension between the three.

‘No one special.’ Herr Grünn’s answer was a little too quick in coming. ‘Hanna had her pick. She wasn’t into getting serious with anyone.’

‘And what about Herr Schiller? Did Hanna ever mention her relationship with him?’

It was Frau Grünn who answered. ‘Herr Fabel, I want you to know that we did not bring our daughter up to … to get
involved
with married men.’

‘So Hanna wouldn’t have discussed it with you.’

‘She wouldn’t have dared,’ said Herr Grünn. Fabel could tell that, even in her death, Hanna had incurred her father’s dark wrath. He wondered just how dark that wrath had been when Hanna was a child, and how much it had to do with her minimising contact with her family.

As they were leaving, Fabel and Werner expressed their condolences for a second time. Lena said to her parents that she would see the policemen out. Instead of saying goodbye at the door, Lena led them in silence down the communal stairs of the apartment building. She stopped in the entrance hallway and when she spoke her voice was low, almost conspiratorial.

‘
Mutti
and
Papi
don’t know, but Hanna had been with someone. Not her boss … someone before that.’

‘Did he have a motorcycle?’ Fabel asked. Lena looked slightly taken aback.

‘Yes … yes, he did, as a matter of fact. You know about him?’

‘What is his name, Lena?’

‘Olsen. Peter Olsen. He lives in Wilhelmsburg.
He’s a motorcycle mechanic. I think he has his own business.’ Lena’s pale blue eyes clouded. ‘Hanna liked her men to have money to spend on her. But I got the impression that Peter was a temporary thing. Money was Hanna’s thing. Oily hands weren’t.’

‘Did you ever meet him?’

Lena shook her head. ‘But she told me about him on the phone. Friday nights are when
Mutti
and
Papi
go out. She would phone then and tell me all kinds of things.’

‘Did she mention Markus Schiller at all?’ asked Werner. ‘Or his wife, Vera Schiller?’

There was a sound in the stairwell, like a door opening, and Lena cast an anxious look upwards. ‘No. No, I can’t say she did. Not directly. Hanna told me she had found someone new – but she wouldn’t tell me any more than that. It never occurred to me it might be her boss. But I did know she was worried about Peter finding out. I’m sorry, I’ve told you everything I know. I just thought you ought to know about Peter.’

‘Thank you, Lena.’ Fabel smiled at her. She was a pretty, bright eighteen-year-old who would now go through the rest of her life carrying the scars of this experience within her. Deep, unseen, but always there. ‘You really have been very helpful.’

Lena was about to head back towards the stair when she checked herself. ‘There is one other thing, Herr Hauptkommissar. I think Peter was violent. I think that’s why she was worried about him finding out.’

Tracking down Olsen had not been difficult. He didn’t have much of a record, but what he did have suggested someone who was quick to resolve problems with his fists. He had three recorded convictions for assault, as well as having been cautioned on a trading offence: he had sold on parts that came from a stolen motorcycle.

Wilhelmsburg is Hamburg’s biggest Stadtteil – its largest city division. It is effectively an island in the Elbe, Europe’s largest river island, and it bristles with bridges, including the Köhlbrandbrücke, which connect it to the main city to the north and Harburg to the south. Wilhelmsburg has a strange, undecided look to it, a combination of the rural and the heavy industrial: sheep graze in fields next to hulking industrial sheds. Wilhelmsburg also has a rough reputation often jokingly referred to as Hamburg’s Bronx, and more than a third of its population is immigrant in origin.

Peter Olsen sold and repaired motorcycles from a battered industrial unit down on the riverside in the shadow of the oil refinery. Fabel decided to take both Werner and Anna with him when he
went to question Olsen, and asked for a uniformed Schutzpolizei unit to join them. They hadn’t enough evidence to arrest him, but Fabel had managed to get a warrant from the Staatsanwaltschaft state prosecutor’s office to seize his motorcycle for forensic examination.