JF02 - Brother Grimm (5 page)

‘The truth is, Kommissar Klatt, we won’t know for sure until the parents make a positive ID of the body … but yes, it looks like it.’

‘It was always just a matter of time.’ There was a resigned sadness on Klatt’s broad face. ‘But you always hope that this is the one you’ll bring back alive.’

Fabel nodded. Klatt’s sentiments echoed his own. The only difference was that Klatt had a chance: on the whole, he dealt with the living, while Fabel’s job as a murder detective meant that someone had to die for him to become involved. For a fleeting moment Fabel wondered what it would be like to transfer back to a general KriPo office. The female officer returned with the coffee.

‘Did you think there was a chance you’d find her alive?’ asked Anna.

Klatt thought for a moment. ‘No, I suppose not. You know the statistics. If we don’t find them within the first twenty-four hours, then the chances are that they’re never coming back. It’s just that Paula was my first missing kid. I got involved. Maybe too involved. It was tough to see a family in so much pain.’

‘She was an only child?’ Anna asked.

‘No, there’s a brother … Edmund. An older brother.’

‘We didn’t see him at the Ehlerses’ home,’ said Fabel.

‘No. He’s about three years older. He’s nineteen or twenty now. He’s doing his national service in the Bundeswehr.’

‘I take it you checked him out thoroughly.’ Fabel made it a statement, not a question. Whenever there’s a murder, the first rank of potential suspects is the victim’s immediate family. Fabel was being careful not to suggest that Klatt didn’t know his job. If Klatt was annoyed, he showed no indication of it.

‘Of course. We got a full account of his movements that day. All corroborated. And we went over them again and again. What’s more, he was truly worried sick about his sister. You just can’t act as well as that.’

Yes, you can, thought Fabel. He had seen countless genuinely distressed lovers, friends or relatives of a victim who had turned out to be their killer. But he had no doubt that Klatt had examined Paula Ehlers’s family thoroughly.

‘But you did suspect Paula’s teacher …’ Anna checked through her own copy of the file.

‘Fendrich. He was Paula’s German teacher. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was a suspect …
it’s just that there was something about him that didn’t gel. But again he was pretty much in the clear as far as an alibi is concerned.’

Klatt went through the report with Fabel and Anna. It was clear that much of this investigation had etched itself into Klatt’s brain. Fabel knew what it was like to have a case like that: nights where he had desperately sought sleep yet was doomed to gaze up at the dark ceiling, unanswered questions swirling with images of the dead, the distraught and the suspected in the vortex of a restless, exhausted mind. When Klatt was finished and Fabel and Anna could think of no more questions, they rose and thanked him for his time.

‘I’ll see you later this evening,’ said Klatt. ‘I take it you’ll be there when the Ehlerses identify the body?’

Anna and Fabel exchanged glances. ‘Yes,’ said Fabel, ‘we’ll be there. You too?’

Klatt smiled sadly. ‘Yes, if you don’t mind. I’ll bring the parents down to Hamburg. If this is the conclusion of the Paula Ehlers case, then I’d like to be there. I’d like to say goodbye.’

‘Of course,’ said Fabel. But, he thought, this isn’t the conclusion of the Paula Ehlers case: this is just the beginning.

The Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, housing the main medical functions and facilities of Hamburg university, stretches back from Martinistrasse like a small town. The sprawl mixes high-rise and low-rise buildings of all ages and is woven through with a web of roadways. The largest of the meagre parking spaces lies right at the heart of the complex, but, because of the lateness of the hour, Fabel knew that he would be able to park close to the Institut für Rechtsmedizin – the Institute of Legal Medicine. Fabel knew the Institut well. It had become the focus for every form of science that had a legal application: serology and DNA testing, forensic medicine and a dedicated forensic-psychiatric experts service. It was not just through work that Fabel had contact with the Institut: for the last year he had been in a relationship with a criminal psychologist, Susanne Eckhardt. Susanne, who was officially based at the thirteen-storey-high Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Clinic, spent most of her time working out of the nearby Institut.

Fabel did not take the turn into the main entrance; instead he continued along Martinistrasse and turned
up Lokstedter Steindamm and on to Butenfeld. As he had suspected, there were a number of free spaces in the car park outside the Institut’s wide, two-storey pavilion. The Institut had a global reputation and the building had been radically extended recently to accommodate courses run for budding forensic pathologists and chemists from around the world. Three thousand bodies were forensically examined and one thousand autopsies were carried out here each year. It was here that the dead girl’s body lay, in the dark, in a chilled steel cabinet, waiting to be identified.

Fabel noticed that one of the other parked cars was Susanne’s Porsche: for once he and Susanne seemed to be working roughly the same hours which, hopefully, would mean that they might manage to see a little more of each other.

Fabel and Anna were admitted to the Institut by an older security officer whom Fabel recognised as a former Obermeister in the uniformed division. When they entered the main reception, they found a uniformed Hamburg police officer waiting with Klatt and Herr and Frau Ehlers. Fabel greeted them and asked Klatt if they’d been waiting long, to which he replied that they’d only arrived ten minutes before Fabel. An orderly arrived and led the small party to the identification room. The mortuary trolley on which the body lay had been dressed in a deep blue covering and a clean white sheet lay over the face. Fabel let Klatt lead the Ehlerses across to the body. Anna stepped forward and placed an arm around Frau Ehlers and spoke soothingly to her before signalling to the orderly who drew back the sheet. Frau Ehlers gave a sharp gasp and swayed a little in Anna’s grasp. Fabel saw Herr Ehlers tauten, as if a small electric current had caused all of his muscles to lock simultaneously.

It was the smallest of silences. Not even a second. But in that tiny, crystal quiet Fabel knew that the girl on the trolley was not Paula Ehlers. And when Frau Ehlers shattered the silence with a long, low, pain-filled cry, it was not a cry of mourning or loss, but of a desperation renewed.

Afterwards, they all sat in the reception area, drinking coffee from a dispensing machine. Frau Ehlers sat with her gaze not focused on anyone or anything in the here and now, but as if locked on to some far-distant moment in time. In total contrast, there was a wild, confused and angry expression on her husband’s face.

‘Why, Herr Fabel?’ Ehlers’s eyes searched Fabel’s. ‘Why do this to us? She looked so like Paula … so like her. Why would someone be so cruel?’

‘You’re positive it isn’t your daughter?’

‘It’s been a long time. And like I say, she’s so much like Paula, but …’

‘That girl is not my daughter.’ Frau Ehlers cut across her husband’s answer. Her eyes were still glazed and dreamy, but her voice was edged with a hard, uncompromising determination. It was more than an opinion: it was an incontrovertible, indisputable certainty. Fabel felt the steel of her will penetrate him and leave something of itself embedded. He felt a fury and hatred rise in him like a bitter bile. Someone had not only taken a young life, he had twisted a long-buried knife viciously in the heart of another family. And that was just the beginning: there was now every reason to suppose that the killer of the girl on the beach had, indeed, abducted and murdered Paula Ehlers three years before. Why else would he – or she – have involved the Ehlers family in his sick game? One body, two murder cases. He turned back
to the refreshed, raw hurt of Paula Ehlers’s parents: a family returned to the renewed torture of uncertainty and unreasonable, unfounded hope.

‘We are obviously dealing with a very disturbed and evil personality here.’ Fabel’s voice held a paler reflection of Ehlers’s frustration and fury. ‘Whoever killed this girl wanted us to be sitting here as we are now, angry and hurting and asking why. This is as much a scene of his crime as the beach where he left the girl’s body.’

Herr Ehlers simply stared uncomprehendingly at Fabel, as if he had just addressed him in Japanese. His wife fixed Fabel with a searchlight gaze. ‘I want you to get him.’ She switched the beam of her gaze from Fabel to Klatt and back again, as if distributing the burden of her words equally on both men. ‘What I really want is for you to find him and kill him. I know I can’t ask that of you … but I can demand that you catch him and punish him. I can expect at least that.’

‘I promise you that I will do everything I can to find this monster,’ said Fabel, and he meant it.

Fabel and Anna accompanied Klatt and the Ehlers out into the car park. The Ehlers climbed into the back of Klatt’s Audi. Klatt turned to Fabel; the sadness that Fabel had noticed in Klatt’s expression had returned, but this time it was keener, honed to a sharper edge by anger.

‘This dead girl is your case, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar. But there is clearly some kind of correlation between her death and the Paula Ehlers case. I would be obliged if you could keep me up to date on all developments that may have a bearing on the Ehlers case.’ There was an almost defiant tone in Klatt’s voice: he had a stake in this and he clearly
wasn’t going to let Fabel forget it. Fabel looked at the younger man: a junior officer in another police service; not too tall and a little too overweight. Yet there was a quiet determination and a sharp intelligence in the unassuming, forgettable face. Standing there in the car park of the Institut für Rechtsmedizin, Fabel made a decision.

‘Kommissar Klatt, it could well be that the killer of this girl simply picked Paula Ehlers’s identity because he knew about the case. Maybe he read about it at the time. The only connection between the cases may well be that we have a psychotic who reads the newspapers.’

Klatt seemed to weigh up Fabel’s words. ‘I doubt it. But what about the amazing similarity between the two girls? At the very least he must have made a very detailed study of the Ehlers case. But I’m pretty convinced that whoever picked this girl as a victim and branded her with Paula’s identity must have seen Paula in life. I don’t have your experience or specific expertise in murder inquiries, Herr Hauptkommissar, but I do know the Ehlers case. I’ve lived with it for three years. I just know the connection is more than a selection of a dead girl’s identity.’

‘So you expect us to give you every detail of our inquiry?’ asked Fabel.

‘No … just anything that you may feel is germane to the Ehlers case.’ Klatt maintained a calm and relaxed manner.

Fabel allowed himself a small smile. Klatt wasn’t easily rattled, nor was he intimidated by another officer’s seniority. ‘As a matter of fact, Kommissar Klatt, I think you’re right. My gut instinct is that you and I are looking for the same person. That’s why I’d like you to consider a temporary secondment to
my team for the duration of this investigation.’

Klatt’s broad face registered surprise for a moment, then broke into a grin. ‘I don’t know what to say, Herr Fabel. I mean, I’d be delighted … but I’m not sure how it would work …’

‘I’ll sort out the paperwork. I’d like you to continue your inquiries into the Ehlers case and to act as a liaison between us and the Norderstedt force. But I want you to be directly involved in this case too. There may be something that comes up in relation to the girl we found on the beach that we would miss but which may have a resonance with you because of your detailed knowledge of the Ehlers case. That means I’d prefer it if you moved into the Hamburg Mordkommission for the time being. I’ll arrange a desk for you. But I have to stress that this is an ad-hoc arrangement, exclusively for the duration of the inquiry.’

‘Of course, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar. I’ll have to speak to my boss, Hauptkommissar Pohlmann, about getting a couple of current cases reassigned …’

‘I’ll speak to your boss to clear the way for you and take any flak.’

‘There won’t be any,’ said Klatt. ‘Herr Pohlmann will be delighted that I’m being given the opportunity to see this case all the way through.’

The two men shook hands. Klatt indicated the couple sitting silently in his Audi with a nod of his head. ‘May I inform Herr and Frau Ehlers that we’ll be working together? I think that they’ll find it …’ He struggled for the right word. ‘… Reassuring.’

Fabel and Anna did not speak until Klatt’s Audi had turned out on to Butenfeld.

‘So we’ve got a new member of the team …’ said Anna in a flat tone positioned somewhere between a question and a statement.

‘Just for the duration of this inquiry, Anna. He’s not a replacement for Paul.’ Paul Lindemann, the member of Fabel’s team who had been shot and killed the previous year, had been Anna’s partner. The wound that still lay deep and sore within Fabel’s team was at its rawest with Anna.

‘I know that.’ Anna bristled slightly. ‘You rate him?’

‘Yep. I do,’ said Fabel. ‘I think he has all the right instincts about this case and he does have a head start on us. I think he’ll be useful. But, for the moment, that’s as far as it goes.’ He handed Anna the keys to his BMW. ‘Would you mind waiting in the car for me? I need to go back into the Institut for a moment.’