JF02 - Brother Grimm (22 page)

Laura walked naked into the pool room. She left the main lights off and let the darkness and quiet cloak her. Laura breathed in deeply and looked out across the glossy obsidian of the pool to the vast window that framed the nightscape of a heavy sky. She could swim into that sky, her mind free and clear. She turned on only the underwater lights. A pale blue luminescence bloomed along the edges of the pool. Laura stepped into the shallow end, letting the cool, almost cold water make her skin go tingle-tight,
raising goosebumps and pinching her nipples to hard points. She started to walk towards the deeper part of the pool, the water rippling a pale electric blue around her.

It was then that she saw it.

A shape. More like a large, dark shadow in the pale blue gloom of the pool. There was something lying at the bottom. There was something lying at the bottom of the pool and it just didn’t make sense. Laura moved forward towards it, frowning. She tried to think of what on earth could have found its way there and who could have left it. She drew closer and still could not make out what the motionless object was. She was about two metres from it when the shape unfolded and thrust up and out of the water in a single motion. It loomed massive in the dim blue light, surging up and towering above her and closing the gap between it and her in a second. Time slowed. Her brain tried to make sense of what was happening. A man shape? No. Surely too big. Too fast. His body was dark. Dark with words. He – it – was covered in words. Thousands of words in the old Germanic lettering. Spanning the vast chest; spiralling and coiling around the arms. It didn’t make sense. A story in the shape of a giant man was surging towards her. It was upon her now. A hand gripped her throat while the other pushed her head down and into the blue-lit water. Yes. A man. A man – but a huge, dark hulk of a man, covered in words in old-fashioned writing. His grip was unshakeable but not crushing, as if he knew how to apply just enough pressure to control without damaging. The hands were vast and immeasurably powerful. Her head was under water. Now the fear came. She tried to scream and her nose and mouth
filled with the faintly chlorinated water and the fear became the blinding panic of her survival instinct. She thrashed wildly, clawing at the arms and body of her attacker, but it was as if he were made of stone. She gasped and with each gasp her slim frame became even more inundated. As the water filled her lungs the contortions, and the fear, faded. Her limbs ceased to flail. The serenity and the beauty of her face was restored.

The most profound joy filled Laura von Klosterstadt’s dying mind. This was right. This was what had to be. Punishment and forgiveness. Her mother had always been right: Laura was bad. Worthless. Unfit to be a mother. Unfit to be a bride. But now she was absolved. Laura’s joy in death came from her awareness of two facts. Now she would never age. Now she would be with her child.

Fabel gazed up at the building which thrust upwards from the trees that flanked it and loomed over the vast open area of grass that lay before it. The impossibly high arches of the red-bricked frontage seemed stretched, as if the whole structure was being pulled skywards by some unseen hand. The clouds scudded past the huge domed roof. Fabel had always been fascinated by this building: if you didn’t know what it had been originally built as, and if it didn’t have its current function emblazoned across it, above the high arches, in metre-high letters, then you could spend hours guessing its primary purpose. Fabel always felt it looked like a high temple of some ancient lost religion: part Egyptian, part Greek, part alien.

The Planetarium had, originally, been constructed as nothing more than a water tower. But, at the time when it had been built, there had been the surging confidence of a recently united Germany and the dawn of a new century, combined with the then near-religious zeal of civic engineering. Now, a century on, the building remained, having watched over the failure of the last century and having seen Germany disunite and reunite. The
monumental water tower was now the Planetarium and Winterhude’s most famous landmark.

Fabel surveyed the vast area of park that lay in front of the Planetarium. Two hundred metres away, a temporary fence of metal poles linked with police tape fanned out: on one side a line of policemen, on the other a growing crowd.

‘It looks like the word’s already got out who our victim is.’ Maria Klee joined Fabel on the steps. ‘There’s no doubt we’ll have press and TV here before long.’

Fabel moved down to the grassed area. A large white forensic tent had been assembled to protect the locus, and Fabel and Maria slipped on the protective overshoes the SpuSi forensic technician handed them before opening the flap and stepping inside. Holger Brauner was bent over the body and stood up as they entered. A young woman lay naked on the grass, her legs together and her hands folded over her breast. Her hair was a striking gold and had been brushed out and fanned around her head like a sunburst. Fabel noticed that a small section of the radiating hair had been deliberately cut away, leaving a gap. Even in death, the beauty of the woman’s face and perfectly formed body was extraordinary. Her eyes were closed, a red rose lay between her folded hands and her breast and she looked for all the world as if she were asleep. Fabel looked down at her, at the perfect structure of bone and flesh: an architecture that would soon collapse and crumble into dust. But, for now, the pallor of death on her face seemed only to give her skin a porcelain flawlessness.

‘I take it you need no introduction,’ said Holger Brauner, squatting down again by the body.

Fabel gave a small, bitter laugh. He had struggled to establish the identity of the first victim; there would be no such struggle with this one. Almost anyone in Hamburg could recognise her. As soon as he had seen her face, Fabel knew that he was looking at Laura von Klosterstadt, the ‘supermodel’ who could be seen on billboards and magazines all over Germany. As the ‘von’ suggested, Fabel knew that Laura came from an aristocratic family. But the prominence of the von Klosterstadts did not come from the family’s tired nobility but from its very contemporary commercial and political clout. This, Fabel knew, was going to get messy. Already there was a media storm brewing outside this scene-of-crime tent and Fabel’s radar could even now sense top brass heading full speed towards him.

‘God,’ he said at last, ‘I hate celebrity murders.’

‘How about a celebrity murdered by a serial killer you’re tracking?’ Brauner handed Fabel a clear evidence bag. It contained a tiny slip of yellow paper.

‘Oh God, no,’ said Fabel. ‘Tell me it isn’t.’

‘’Fraid so.’ Brauner rose to his feet. ‘It was protruding slightly from her hands. That’s why I suggested to the first team out here that they should call you in. This is your guy again, Jan.’

Fabel examined the paper through the plastic. Same paper. Same tiny, obsessively neat writing in red ink. This time it had only one word on it:
Dornröschen
.

‘Briar Rose?’ Maria had moved in closer to examine the note.

‘A tale by the Brothers Grimm. Better known these days as “Sleeping Beauty”, because of its Hollywood make-over.’

‘Look at this …’ Brauner indicated the dead
woman’s hand, where she held the rose. A thorn had been pushed deep into the fleshy part of the thumb. ‘No blood. This was done deliberately, post-mortem.’

‘It was how Briar Rose, or Sleeping Beauty, was put to sleep. She pricked her thumb.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be on a spindle, not a rose,’ said Maria.

Fabel stood up again. Laura von Klosterstadt lay still, although Fabel half expected her to give a contented sleepy sigh and roll on to her side. ‘He’s mixing metaphors – or condensing story elements, however you want to put it. Sleeping Beauty did prick her thumb on a spindle, on her fifteenth birthday, but as she slept she and her castle became surrounded by briar roses – a beautiful but impenetrable defence. I suppose the Planetarium is meant to represent the castle.’ He turned back to Brauner. ‘Can you hazard a guess at a cause of death?’

‘Not at this stage. There’s very little to indicate violence, other than some slight bruising on the neck, but it’s not enough to suggest strangulation. Möller will be able to tell you when he does the post-mortem.’

Fabel pointed vaguely at the fan of golden hair. ‘What do you make of this with the hair? Cutting a section out of it. I can’t see any connection to the Sleeping Beauty story.’

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ said Brauner. ‘Maybe a trophy. She certainly has beautiful hair, maybe it’s something he sees as characterising her.’

‘No … no, I don’t think so. Why start taking trophies now? He took nothing from the other three bodies.’

‘Nothing that we know about,’ said Brauner. ‘But
maybe this thing with the hair is something else. Some kind of message.’

The sky had brightened slightly as Fabel and Maria stepped out of the tent and the red brickwork of the Planetarium looked rain-washed and sharp in the cold light.

‘This bastard’s getting cocky, Maria. There’s a message here all right.’ Fabel waved his hand in the direction of a wall of trees, but his gesture suggested that he was looking beyond them. ‘You can just about see this spot from the Polizeipräsidium. We’re exactly due south of it. In fact, the top of the Planetarium is clearly visible from the upper floors of the Präsidium. He’s flaunting himself in front of us – literally.’

Maria folded her arms across her body, tilting her head slightly. ‘Well, our prime suspect to date is Olsen, and we got very close to him. Maybe there’s a message in his choice of location. We got close to him, so he’s getting close to us. As you say, practically in view of police headquarters.’

‘Could be. Or it could be the choice of location has something to do with its history.’

‘The Stadtpark’s history?’

Fabel shook his head. ‘Not specifically. But this place, Winterhude. This is ancient ground, Maria. This goes way back to before Hamburg grew around it. There was a Stone Age settlement here. I suspect any deeper meaning is secondary to him doing this so close to the Präsidium, but there’s maybe something in the history of the place.’ When Fabel had been at university he had spent much of his summers here, in the Stadtpark, with a pile of books at his side. No one knew for sure where the name
‘Winterhude’ had come from, but ‘Hude’ was an old Plattdeutsch word that meant ‘protected place’. He had always found a strange comfort in being on ground that had been continuously occupied for six thousand years. It was as if it connected him to the history he was studying.

‘Or,’ said Maria, ‘it could simply be that it fitted with the kind of location he needed to play out his fantasy.’

Fabel was about to answer Maria when he saw a large Mercedes 4x4 drive over the grass and stop beside the police cordon. Two men got out. Fabel recognised them instantly.

‘Shit …’ Fabel got no satisfaction to see how accurate his ‘top brass’ radar had been. ‘That’s all we need.’

The two men from the 4x4 made their way across to Fabel and Maria. The first man was in his mid-fifties. The hair, cropped close to the scalp, was almost all white, as was the beard, except for the odd hints of a butter-blond past. He was dressed in a pale grey suit which, as always, he managed to wear as if it were a SchuPo uniform.

‘Good morning, Herr Kriminaldirektor,’ Fabel said to his boss, Horst van Heiden. The second man was shorter and plumper, with a scrubbed, pink complextion; Fabel, recognising the Interior Minister of the Hamburg senate, gave a brief nod. ‘Herr Innensenator Ganz …’

‘Good morning, Kriminalhauptkommissar Fabel.’ Van Heiden indicated the tent with a nod of his head. ‘Is it true?’

‘Is what true, Herr Kriminaldirektor?’ Fabel knew exactly what van Heiden was asking, but he was damned if he was going to willingly divulge case
information in front of Ganz. Fabel had had dealings with Ganz before: he was a career politician and, as the minister responsible for crime and security within Hamburg, he seemed to hold the police personally responsible for any high-profile case that raised public fears or caused the city-state government embarrassment.

Van Heiden’s face, never genial at the best of times, clouded. ‘Is it true, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar, that the body discovered this morning is that of Laura von Klosterstadt, the society model?’

‘There has been no positive identification made as yet, Herr Kriminaldirektor.’ Fabel looked at Ganz pointedly. ‘And I certainly do not want anything being announced publicly before we do.’

Ganz’s already florid complexion turned a deeper red. ‘I am here as much in a personal capacity as a professional one, Herr Fabel. I am a family friend of long standing. In fact, I attended Laura’s birthday party only this Saturday. I have known Peter von Klosterstadt for many years. If this is, indeed, his daughter, I would like to break the news to the family personally.’ He thought for a moment. There was something akin to unease in his expression. ‘I could positively identify the body, if you wish.’

‘I’m sorry, Herr Innensenator, this is still a protected crime scene. I’m sure you understand. Anyway, your presence in there may be seen as … well, inappropriate.’

‘Fabel …’ Van Heiden’s tone was more beseeching than threatening.

Fabel sighed. ‘Yes, the body would appear to be that of Laura von Klosterstadt. We have no exact time or cause of death, but it’s certainly foul play.’ He paused. ‘In fact, we are practically certain that
she has fallen victim to a serial killer who has taken at least three lives, perhaps four, previously.’