JF02 - Brother Grimm (2 page)

Fabel would know this girl so totally. Yet she would never know him. His awareness of her began with the total extinction of her awareness of anything. Her death. It was Fabel’s job to know the dead.

Still she gazed at him from the sand. Her clothes were old: not rags, but drab and worn. A baggy sweatshirt with a ghost of a design on its front, and faded jeans. And when the clothes had been new they had been cheap.

She lay on the sand with her legs partly pulled up under her, her hands folded and resting on her lap. It was as if she had been kneeling on the sand and had toppled over, her posture frozen. But she hadn’t died here. Fabel was sure of it. What he wasn’t sure about was whether her posture was an accidental arrangement of limbs or a deliberate pose struck by whoever had left her there.

Fabel was snapped back from his bitter thoughts by the approach of Brauner, the head of the Spurensicherung forensics team. Brauner walked across the wooden planking, elevated on bricks, that he had assembled as the sole ingress and egress to the crime locus. Fabel nodded a grim welcome.

‘What have we got, Holger?’ Fabel asked.

‘Not a lot,’ said Brauner, bleakly. ‘The sand is dry and fine and the wind shifts it about a bit. It literally blows away any forensic traces. I don’t think this is our primary locus … you?’

Fabel shook his head. Brauner looked down at the girl’s body, his expression clouded. Fabel knew that Brauner too had a daughter and he recognised the gloom in Brauner’s face as a shade of the dull ache he felt himself. Brauner drew a long breath.

‘We’ll do a full forensic before we pass her on to Möller for the autopsy.’

Fabel watched in silence as the white-overalled forensic specialists of the Spurensicherungsteam processed the scene. Like ancient Egyptian embalmers wrapping a mummy, the SpuSi technicians worked on the body, covering every square centimetre in strips of Tesa tape, each of which was numbered and photographed, then transferred to a polythene sheet.

Once the scene had been processed, the girl’s body was carefully lifted and zippered into the vinyl body bag, hoisted on to a trolley and half pushed, half carried across the yielding sand by two mortuary attendants. Fabel kept his gaze focused on the body bag, an indistinct smudge against the pale colours of the sand, the rocks and the uniforms of the mortuary men, until it disappeared from view. He then turned and looked back along the clean, blond sand towards the slender Blankenese lighthouse, out across the Elbe towards the distant green shores of the Altes Land, then back up at the manicured green terraces of Blankenese, with its elegant, expensive villas.

It occurred to Fabel that he had never viewed such a desolate scene.

The
Oberschwester
chief nurse watched him from the hall. She felt a leaden sensation coalesce in her heart as she did so. He sat, unaware of observation, leaning forward in the bedside chair, his hand resting on the grey-white wrinkled topography of the old woman’s forehead. Occasionally his hand would run gently and slowly through the white hair; and all the while he spoke into her ear in a low, gentle murmur that only the old woman could hear. The chief nurse became aware of one of her subordinates standing behind her. The second nurse also smiled with a bitter sympathy as she took in the scene of middle-aged son and elderly mother wrapped in their own exclusive universe. The chief nurse indicated the scene with a small thrust of her chin.

‘He never misses a day …’ She smiled joylessly. ‘None of mine will bother their backsides about me when I’m that age, let me tell you.’

The other nurse gave a small knowing laugh. The two women stood in silence for a moment, each taking in the same picture, each wrapped up in their individual, dully terrifying thoughts about their own distant futures.

‘Can she hear anything he says to her?’ asked the other nurse after a moment.

‘No reason to believe she doesn’t. The stroke has all but paralysed her and struck her dumb, but, as far as we know, her faculties are still in order.’

‘God … I’d rather die. Imagine being imprisoned in your own body.’

‘At least she’s got him,’ said the chief nurse. ‘He brings in those books of his each and every day and reads to her and then spends an hour just sitting there, stroking her hair and talking quietly to her. At least she’s got that.’

The other nurse nodded and gave a long, sad sigh.

Inside the room the old woman and her son were both oblivious to the fact that they were being observed by others. She lay unmoving, incapable of moving, on her back, presenting her son, who sat hunched forward in the bedside chair, with her faintly noble profile of high arched brow and aquiline nose. Every now and then, a trickle of saliva would dribble from the corner of the thin lips and the solicitous son would dab it away with a folded handkerchief. He smoothed the hair back from her brow once more and leaned in close again, his lips almost touching her ear and his breath, as he spoke low and soft and gentle, stirring the silver strands of hair on her temple.

‘I spoke to the doctor again today, mother. He told me that your condition has stabilised. That’s good, isn’t it,
Mutti
?’ He didn’t pause for the answer that he knew she was incapable of giving. ‘Anyway, the doctor says that after your big stroke, you had what they call a series of “stuttering” strokes … like tiny little strokes that did the damage. He also said that these are over now and you won’t get any
worse if I make sure your medication is maintained.’ He paused and let his breath out slowly. ‘What that means is it would be possible for me to look after you at home. The doctor wasn’t too keen on the idea to start with. But you don’t like strangers looking after you, do you,
Mutti
? I told the doctor that. I told him that you’d be much better off with me, with your son, at home. I told him I’d be able to arrange for your care when I’m at work, and the rest of the time … well, the rest of the time you’d have me to look after you, wouldn’t you? I told him that the nurse can visit us in the cosy little apartment I’ve bought. The doctor says I might be able to take you home towards the end of the month. Isn’t that great?’

He let the thought sink in. He scanned the pallid grey eyes that moved sluggishly in the immobile head. If there was any emotion behind the eyes, it could not break through to be read. He drew even closer, eagerly tugging the chair in tighter to the bed, making it squeak on the polished hospital floor. ‘Of course, we both know that it won’t be like I told the doctor, don’t we, mother?’ The voice remained gentle and soothing. ‘But there again, I couldn’t tell the doctor about the other house …
our
house. Or that what I’ll really do is leave you to lie in your own shit for days on end, could I? Or that I will spend hours exploring what capacity you have left to feel pain. No, no, that wouldn’t do at all, would it,
Mutti
?’ He gave a small, childlike laugh. ‘I don’t think the doctor would be too keen on me taking you home with me if he knew that, would he? But don’t worry, I won’t tell him if you don’t … but of course you
can’t
, can you? You see, mother, God has gagged and bound you. It’s a sign. A sign for me.’

The old woman’s head remained motionless, but a tear oozed from the corner of her eye and sought out the creases in the skin of her temple. He dropped his voice even lower and infused it with a conspiratorial tone. ‘You and I will be together. Alone. And we can talk about the old days. About the old days in our big old house. About when I was a child. When I was weak and you were strong.’ The voice was now a hiss: venom breathed into the ear of the old woman. ‘I’ve done it again,
Mutti
. Another one. Just like three years ago. But this time, because God has bound you up in the prison of your own hideous body, you can’t interfere. This time you can’t stop me, and I’ll keep on doing it and doing it. It will be our little secret. You will be there at the end, mother, I promise you that. But this is just the beginning …’

Out in the hall, the two nurses, neither of whom could have guessed the nature of what had passed between son and mother, turned away from the hospital room and the pathetic tableau within it of a deteriorating life and a constant filial devotion. In that instant, the intrusion through a window on to a sadder life ended and they returned to the practicalities of rotas, charts and the medication-dispensing round.

The crisp bright cold of the morning had yielded to a damp sodium-coloured sky that had indolently shouldered its way in from the North Sea. A faint drizzle now freckled the panes of Fabel’s office windows and his view out towards the Winterhuder Stadtpark seemed to have had the life and colour sucked from it.

Two people sat across the desk from Fabel: Maria and a stocky, hard-looking man in his mid-fifties, whose scalp gleamed through its black and grey bristle covering.

Kriminaloberkommissar Werner Meyer had worked with Fabel for longer than anyone else in the team. Junior in rank but senior in years, Werner Meyer was not just Fabel’s colleague: he was his friend, and often his mentor. Werner shared the same rank as Maria Klee and together they represented Fabel’s immediate support in the team. Werner, however, was Fabel’s number two. He had much more practical experience as a police officer than Maria, although she had been a high-flyer at university, where she had studied law, and then later at the Polizeifachhochschule and Landespolizeischule police
academies. Despite his tough look and considerable bulk, Werner’s approach to police work was typified by a methodical thoroughness and an attention to detail. Werner was ‘by-the-book’ and had often reined in his
Chef
when Fabel had wandered too far down one of his ‘intuitive’ routes. He had always seen himself as Fabel’s partner and it had taken time, and dramatic events, to accustom him to working with Maria.

But it had worked. Fabel had teamed them because of their differences: because they represented different generations of police officer, and because they combined and contrasted experience with expertise, theory with practice. But what really made them work as a team was that which they shared: a total and uncompromising commitment to their roles as Mordkommission officers.

It had been the usual preliminary meeting. Murders took two forms: there was the hot pursuit, where a body was found quickly after death, or there was a strong and clear evidential direction to be pursued; then there was the cold trail, where the killer had already distanced himself or herself in chronology, in geography and in forensic presence from the murder event, leaving the police only scraps to piece together: a process that took time and effort. The murder of the girl on the beach was a cold-trail case: its form was nebulous, amorphous. It would take them a long time and a lot of investigative toil before they made any defined shape of it. The afternoon’s meeting had therefore been typical of initial case meetings: they had reviewed the scant facts that were available and timetabled further meetings to examine the awaited forensic and autopsy reports. The body itself would be the starting point: no longer a person but a store of physical information about
time, manner and place of death. And, on a molecular level, the DNA and other data retrieved from it would begin the process of identification. The major part of the meeting had been devoted to allocating resources to the various investigative tasks, the first of which was to get almost everyone on to the job of identifying the dead girl. The dead girl. Fabel was steadfastly committed to uncovering her identity, but it was that moment he dreaded most: when the body became a person and the case number became a name.

After the meeting Fabel asked Maria to hang around. Werner nodded knowingly at his boss and, in so doing, succeeded in further highlighting the awkwardness of the situation. So now, Maria Klee, dressed in an expensive black blouse and grey trousers, her legs crossed and her long fingers interlocked in a cradle around her knee, sat impassively and somewhat formally, waiting for her superior officer to speak. As always, her posture was one of restraint, confinement, control, and her blue-grey eyes remained impassive under the questioning arch of her eyebrows. Everything about Maria Klee exuded confidence, self-control and authority. But now there was something between Fabel and Maria that was awkward. She had been back at work for a month now, but this was their first major case since her return and Fabel wanted them to say what had been left unsaid.

Circumstances had forced Fabel and Maria into a unique intimacy. An intimacy closer than if they had slept together. Nine months before, they had spent several minutes alone, under a starry sky in a deserted field in the Altes Land on the southern shore of the Elbe, their breaths mingling, the self-assured Maria
Klee transformed into a little girl by her very real and reasonable fear that she was about to die. Fabel had cradled her head and maintained a constant eye contact with her, talking soothingly all the time, not allowing her to drift into a sleep from which she would not wake, never allowing her to take her gaze from his and down to where the hideous haft of a thick-bladed knife jutted from under her ribcage. It had been the worst night of Fabel’s career. They had closed in on the most dangerous psychopath Fabel had ever had to deal with: a monster responsible for a series of particularly vicious, ritualistic murders. The pursuit had left two policemen dead: one of Fabel’s team, a bright young officer called Paul Lindemann, and a uniformed SchuPo from the local Polizeikommissariat. The last officer the fleeing psychotic had encountered had been Maria: instead of killing her, he had left her with a potentially fatal wound, knowing that Fabel would have to make a choice between continuing his pursuit or saving his officer’s life. Fabel had made the only choice that he could.