JF02 - Brother Grimm (15 page)

‘The Little Mermaid? Hans Christian Andersen?’ Fabel’s tone sounded unconvinced, although there was a chorus of approval from around the table. He looked at the picture again. It was an icon. The legs folded, mermaid’s-tail-like, underneath the body as she sat on the rock. It would be a gift to a serial killer seeking to pose a victim: an instantly recognisable pose. Yet the girl on the beach hadn’t sat on or rested against a rock. There hadn’t even been a rock anywhere near her. But there was the note. There was the false identity. And there was the statement ‘I have been underground.’ At last he said, ‘I don’t know, Anna. It’s a possibility. But so much doesn’t fit. Can we keep looking?’

Each member of the team took a volume and flicked through it. Fabel selected the Andersen tales and speed-read ‘The Little Mermaid’. He thought back to the dead girl, her azure gaze. Lying, waiting to be found, by the water’s edge. Anna had a copy
of Grimms’
Children’s and Household Tales
, while Susanne scanned through
German Legends
. Suddenly, Susanne looked up as if stung.

‘You are wrong, Frau Kriminalkommissarin,’ she said to Anna. ‘Our killer is using the Brothers Grimm as his literary reference, not Andersen, nor Perrault. Our dead girl isn’t meant to be the Little Mermaid … she’s meant to be a Changeling.’

Fabel felt an electric tingle on his skin. ‘Go on …’

‘There’s a story here recorded by the Grimms, called “The Changeling” and another called “The Two Underground Women”.’ The current across Fabel’s skin was turned up a notch. ‘According to the notes that accompany these tales, there was a whole system of belief about how children – specifically unbaptised children – were abducted by “the underground people,” who would leave changelings in their stead. But listen to this – these “underground people” would often use water as their medium of transport, and many of these tales relate to changelings being left on the banks of the Elbe and Saale rivers …’

‘And Blankenese is on the shore of the Elbe,’ said Fabel. ‘What’s more, we have a direct mention in the note left in the girl’s hand of “underground people”, as well as the girl being left there with the identity of another missing girl. A Changeling.’

Werner let out a breath. ‘My God, that’s all we need. A literary psycho-killer. Do you think he intends to stage a killing based on each of the Grimms’ fairy tales?’

‘We’d better pray that he doesn’t,’ said Susanne. ‘According to the contents page of this version, the Grimms gathered more than two hundred stories.’

Möller was tall; taller than Fabel, and slim-framed. His hair was a pale butter-yellow flecked with ivory and his features were thin and angular. Fabel always felt Möller was one of those people whose appearance changed according to whatever style of clothes they happened to be wearing when you saw them: Möller had a face that could belong to a North Sea fisherman or to an aristocrat, depending on his outfit. As if aware of this fact, and to maintain an image in keeping with his imperious nature, Möller habitually adopted the style of an English gentleman. When Fabel walked into the pathologist’s office, Möller was putting on a green corduroy jacket over his Jermyn Street shirt. When he stepped round from behind his desk, Fabel half expected to see him wearing those green rubber boots that the British royal family seemed to prefer to Gucci.

‘What do you want, Fabel?’ Möller asked charmlessly. ‘I’m going home now.
Feierabend
. Whatever it is it can wait until tomorrow.’

Fabel remained silent and stood in the doorway. Möller sighed, but did not sit down again. ‘All right. What is it?’

‘You’ve done the post-mortem on the girl found on Blankenese Elbstrand?’

Möller nodded curtly, flipped open a file on his desk and pulled out a report. ‘I was going to give you this tomorrow. Happy reading.’ He gave a tired, impatient smile and slapped the report into Fabel’s chest as he made his way to the door. Fabel still didn’t move from the doorway but attempted a disarming grin.

‘Please, Herr Doktor. Just the main points.’

Möller sighed. ‘As I’ve already informed Kriminaloberkommissar Meyer, the cause of death was by asphyxiation. There was evidence of small blood-vessel damage around the nose and mouth, as well as the ligature marks around the neck. It would appear that she was strangled and smothered simultaneously. There were no signs of sexual trauma or any form of sexual activity in the forty-eight hours prior to death. Although she has been sexually active.’

‘Sexual abuse?’

‘Nothing to suggest anything other than normal sexual activity. There was no evidence of the type of internal scarring indicative of early sexual abuse. The only other fact revealed by the autopsy is that her teeth were in a bad way. Again I explained this to Herr Meyer. She hadn’t seen a dentist much, and when she did, it was obviously for emergency treatment when she was in pain. There was extensive caries, gum erosion and a lower left molar had been extracted. There were also two ancient fractures. One on the right wrist and the other in the left hand. They had been left to heal themselves. They would be consistent not only with neglect, but active abuse. The wrist fracture is consistent with it having been severely twisted.’

‘Werner told me that she hadn’t eaten much in the two days before her death.’

Möller snatched the report back from Fabel and flicked through the pages. ‘Certainly not in the previous twenty-four hours, other than some rye bread consumed an hour or two before death.’

For a moment, Fabel was somewhere else: in a dark, frightening place with a young girl fearfully eating her last, insubstantial meal. He knew no detail about this girl’s life, but he did know that it had been as unhappy as it was short. Möller handed him back the report, raised his eyebrows and nodded towards the door.

‘Oh, sorry, Herr Doktor.’ Fabel moved to one side. ‘Thanks. Thank you very much.’

Fabel didn’t head back to the Mordkommission. Instead he drove home, parking his BMW in the underground space reserved for his apartment. He still couldn’t get the girl’s blue eyes out of his mind. More than the horror of the second murder scene, it was the almost alive gaze of the girl on the Blankenese shore that haunted him. The Changeling. The unwanted and false child substituted for the loved and true one. Again, he imagined her final hours: the frugal meal that she had consumed, more than likely served to her by her killer; then she had been strangled and smothered. It made Fabel think of the ancient sacrifices that would turn up every so often in the peat bogs of Northern Germany and Denmark: bodies preserved for three millennia or more in the dark, thick, damp soil. Many of them had been garrotted or deliberately drowned. Even those bodies whose accoutrements suggested high rank revealed they had been fed a meagre final, ritual
meal of grain gruel. What had this girl been sacrificed to? There was no evidence of a sexual motive, so what was it that she’d had to surrender her life for? Had it been that she had had to die simply because she looked so much like another girl, also most likely dead?

Fabel let himself into his apartment. Susanne was working late at the Institut and wouldn’t be over till later. He had brought home the books from Otto’s shop and set them down on the coffee table. He poured himself a glass of crisp white wine and slumped on to the leather sofa. Fabel’s apartment was in the attic of what had once been a grand and solid villa. It was situated in the trendy Pöseldorf part of the Rotherbaum district of the city. He could step out of the front door and within a minute’s walk he would be amongst some of the best restaurants and cafés in Hamburg. Fabel had stretched himself to afford this apartment, sacrificing space for a fantastic view and a great location. He had also bought it at a time when the economy had been shaky and property prices in the city had dropped: he had often reflected bitterly that the German economy and his marriage had slumped at the same time. Fabel knew he could never have afforded a place like this now, even on his Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar’s salary. The apartment was a block back from the Milchstrasse, and the floor-to-ceiling picture windows looked over Magdalenen Strasse, the Alsterpark and the vast lake of the Aussenalster. He gazed out of the window at the city and the vastness of the sky. Hamburg lay spread out before him. A dark forest in which a million souls could become lost.

Fabel phoned his mother. She said she was well
and complained about the continual fussing, and told him that she was getting worried that Lex was losing business by staying with her instead of getting back to his restaurant on Sylt. Again Fabel felt reassured by his mother’s voice on the phone. An ageless voice that he could separate from the whitening hair and the reducing briskness of movement. As soon as he rang off from talking with his mother, he called Gabi. Renate, Fabel’s ex-wife, answered the phone. Her tone, as always, lay somewhere between disinterest and hostility. Fabel had never quite understood why Renate was habitually like this with him. It was as if she held him responsible for her having an affair which blew their marriage into irreparable pieces. Gabi’s voice, on the other hand was, as usual, full of light. They chatted for a while about Fabel’s mother, about Gabi’s school work and their forthcoming weekend together.

After a while, Fabel asked: ‘Do you remember when I used to read you bedtime stories?’

‘Yes, I do,
Papi
. Don’t tell me you’re going to tuck me up with warm milk and read me
Struwwelpeter
when I come to stay.’

Fabel laughed. ‘No … No, I won’t. Do you remember you would never let me read you any Brothers Grimm stories? Even “Snow White” or “Sleeping Beauty”?’

‘I remember, all right. I hated those stories.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, really. They were scary. No … creepy. It was like they were supposed to be for children but they were really for grown-ups. It’s kind of like clowns, you know? They’re supposed to be funny and friendly, but they’re not. They’re dark.
Old dark … like those carved wooden faces they wear down in the South for Fasching. You can tell that these things are to do with all kinds of old stuff that people really used to believe at one time. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just something that came up today.’ Fabel steered the conversation back to family matters and arrangements for the weekend. He had gone as far as he ever would in bringing the shadow of his work into his relationship with his daughter. After he had hung up, he made himself some pasta, poured some more wine, and sat down to read, while he ate, the introduction to Gerhard Weiss’s book.

Germany is the heart of Europe and the Märchenstrasse is the soul of Germany. The Märchenstrasse is the history of Germany. The Märchenstrasse is Germany
.

Our language, our culture, our achievements and our failures, our grace and our wickedness: all these things are to be found on the Fairy Tale Road. It was always so and it always will be so. We are the children lost in the woods with only our innocence to guide us; but we have also been the wolves who prey on the weak. More than anything, we Germans have aspired to greatness: great good and great evil. These are the turns and twists we have always taken and the German folk tale is a tale of purity and corruption, of innocence and guile
.

This tale is a tale of a great man. A man who helped us understand ourselves and our language. This tale, for tale is all it is, follows
this great man down the Märchenstrasse, along the path he truly took; but it also asks the question: What if he strayed from the path and into the darkness of the forest?

Fabel flicked through the pages. The book was a fictionalised Reisetagebuch – the travelling diary of Jacob Grimm as he toured Germany in search of fairy tales to collect. Grimm was portrayed as a fastidious pedant who applied the same attention to detail to the murders he committed as he did to his work as a philologist and folklorist. Then Fabel came to a chapter that made him put down his wineglass. It was titled ‘The Changeling’.

The tale of ‘The Changeling’ is a cautionary one; it is also one of our most ancient. It not only articulates that greatest of fears, to lose one’s child, but also the horror of having something false, malevolent and pernicious inveigled into the family and home. Moreover, it cautions parents that they shall be punished for any lack of vigilance in their care of their charges. The Changeling tale has appeared in countless forms, throughout Germany, the Low Lands, Denmark, Bohemia, Poland and beyond. Even Martin Luther had an unshakeable belief in Changelings and wrote several treatises on how to scald, drown or beat them until the devil came to call them back unto him
.

I shirk not from hard work, but this has been the most challenging tale to re-establish as a living truth. As with each of the tales I have reenacted, I first busied myself assiduously and
enthusiastically with the preparations. For this tale, I needed to find two children: one to play the part of the Changeling while the other had to be a true child that I could steal from its mother
.

My brother’s and my researches had brought us to the North of Germany and we had found modest lodgings in a village near the Baltic coast. Lately, whilst in the village, I had observed a young woman with a florid complexion and flaxen hair who exemplified the robust, honest and earnest stupidity of the Northern German peasant. This woman bore with her a newborn child which she carried first in one arm, and then in the other. I knew, from the work of other eminent folklorists, and from my own research, that this habit of changing arms was known as carrying the baby ‘on the switch’. From the Rhineland and Hessen to Mecklenburg and Lower Saxony, it is a widely held superstition that carrying a baby ‘on the switch’ greatly increases the chances of its abduction by the Underground People. I guessed that this child was yet be baptised, and less than six weeks old, which is known to be the preference of the abductors. Moreover, neither this peasant woman nor her family had heeded the four precautions to protect a newborn from the Underground People. I have, of course, enumerated these in my volume
Deutsche Mythologie,
namely: place a key next to the infant; never leave women alone in the six weeks after giving birth for they are easily swayed by the devil; allow not the mother to sleep during the first six weeks unless someone
has come to keep vigil over the child; whenever the mother leaves the room, an article of the father’s clothing, particularly his breeches, should be lain across the child
.