JF02 - Brother Grimm (25 page)

‘A very talented, very remarkable man created this for me,’ explained Weiss. ‘A uniquely talented artist. And a lycanthrope.’

Fabel laughed. ‘A werewolf? There’s no such thing.’

‘Indeed there is, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar. Lycanthropy exists – not as a supernatural occurrence of transformation from man to beast, but as a recognised psychiatric condition. People who
believe
they turn into wolves.’ Weiss tilted his huge head and contemplated the sculpture. ‘The sculptor was a close friend of mine. He was otherwise perfectly sane, except when there was a full moon. Then he would have a seizure – a fit – in which he would twist and thrash, tearing at his clothes, then fall asleep. That was all that happened. It was observed by others, including myself. Nothing more
than a fit caused by the subtle changes of pressure in brain fluid caused by a full moon. But what we saw was not what he experienced. So I asked him to capture the moment, as it were.’ Weiss’s eyes cast a dark searchlight over the sculpture. ‘And this is what he crafted.’

‘I see.’ Fabel examined the artwork again. He had decided: it was hideous. ‘What happened to him? Was he successfully treated?’

‘Unfortunately not. He spent more and more time in institutions. Ultimately he could take no more of it and hanged himself.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Weiss’s vast shoulders moved dismissively in something too small to be called a shrug. ‘You have an interesting name, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar. Fabel. Quite appropriate to my line of work – fables, as it were.’

‘I believe it’s Danish in origin. It’s more common in Hamburg than in any other German city, although I’m Frisian originally.’

‘Fascinating. What can I do for you, Herr Fabel?’ Weiss stressed Fabel’s name, as if still playing with it.

Fabel explained to Weiss about the murders he was investigating, and how they clearly had a ‘Grimm Fairy Tale’ theme. And that, perhaps, they were inspired by Weiss’s novel,
Die Märchenstrasse
. There was a moment’s pause when he had finished, and in that moment, Fabel suspected there was the merest hint of satisfaction in Weiss’s expression.

‘It is also clear that we are dealing with a serial offender,’ Fabel concluded.

‘Or offenders …’ said Weiss. ‘Has it never crossed your mind that you are perhaps dealing with two people? If these killings are united by a Grimm-related
theme, then it’s worth remembering that there were, after all, two Brothers Grimm.’

‘Obviously, we hadn’t ruled that out.’ The truth was that Fabel had not fully considered that it might be a team. It certainly wasn’t unknown for two killers to work together, as he knew only too well from a recent investigation where there had been. It could also explain why Olsen had a motive for the Naturpark murders but not for the others. Fabel changed tack.

‘Have you had any, well,
odd
correspondence recently, Herr Weiss? It could be that our killer – or killers – has sought to make contact with you.’

Weiss laughed. ‘Odd correspondence?’ He stood up, looming high in the room, and went across to a wooden escritoire that sat against the only wall free of bookshelves. Above the escritoire the wall was covered with framed, old-fashioned illustrations. Weiss picked up a fat file, carried it over and thumped it on to the desk before sitting back down. ‘That’s only the last three or four months. If you were to find anything in that that wasn’t “odd”, I’d be very much surprised.’ He made a ‘help yourself’ gesture.

Fabel flicked open the folder. There were dozens of letters, some with photographs, some with cuttings that the sender thought would be helpful to Weiss. Most seemed to relate to Weiss’s
Wahlwelten
fantasy novels: people with sad, empty lives sought the solace of living out an alternate, literary existence by having Weiss incorporate them into one of his stories. There was a sexually very explicit letter from a woman asking Weiss to be her ‘big, bad wolf’. It was accompanied by a photograph of the correspondent, naked except for a red hood and cape. She was an over-weight
woman of about fifty, whose body had obviously submitted some time ago to an unequal battle with gravity.

‘And that pile is tiny compared with what comes in electronically to my personal and my publisher’s websites,’ explained Weiss.

‘Do you reply to these?’

‘Not now, no. I used to. Or at least to those that were reasonably sane or decent. But now I just don’t have the time. That’s why I started to charge set fees to include people as characters in my
Wahlwelten
novels.’

Fabel gave a small laugh. ‘So how much would you charge me to have a part in one of your novels?’

‘Herr Fabel, one of the main lessons of the fairy tale is to be very careful what you wish for. I might include you in one of my works just because I find you an interesting character, with an unusual name. Unlike the people who pay for inclusion, you have met me. I have an
idea
of you. And once you are in one of my stories, I have total control over you. I and I alone decide your fate. Whether you live or die.’ Weiss paused and the black eyes sparkled beneath the heavy bridge of his brow. The werewolf sculpture remained frozen in its snarl. A car passed by on the street outside. ‘But normally I charge five thousand Euros for a half-page mention.’ Weiss smiled.

Fabel shook his head. ‘The price of fame.’ He tapped the file on the desk. ‘May I take these away with me?’

Weiss shrugged. ‘If you think they’ll help.’

‘Thanks. I’m reading
Die Märchenstrasse
at the moment, by the way.’

‘Are you enjoying it?’

‘I’m finding it interesting, let’s put it that way,’ said
Fabel. ‘I’m too focused on any possible connection to these murders to assess its literary merits. And I do think it’s possible that there is a connection.’

Weiss leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers together, stretching the two index fingers against each other and tapping his chin. It was an overdone gesture of thoughtfulness. ‘It would sadden me greatly if that were so, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar. But the main theme of all my work is that art imitates life and life imitates art. I cannot
inspire
someone to commit murder through my writing. They’re already killers or potential killers. They may seek to imitate a method or a setting … or even a theme, but they would murder anyway, whether they read my books or not. Ultimately, I do not inspire them. They inspire me. Just as they have always inspired writers.’ Weiss allowed his fingers to rest gently on the leather-bound volume of fairy tales that sat on his desk.

‘Like the Grimm Brothers?’

Weiss smiled and again something sparkled darkly in his eyes. ‘The Grimm Brothers were academics. They sought absolute knowledge – the origins of our language and our culture. Like all men of science of their time, a time when science was emerging as the new religion of Western Europe, they sought to lay our past under a microscope and dissect it. But there is no absolute truth. There is no definitive past. It’s a tense, not a place. What the Grimm Brothers discovered was the same world that they themselves lived in; the same world we inhabit now. What the Grimms discovered was that it’s just the frames of reference that differed.’

‘What do you mean?’

Weiss rose again from his leather chair and beckoned for Fabel to follow him across to the wall
covered with pictures. They were all illustrations from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books.

‘The fairy story has inspired more than literary interpretation,’ explained Weiss. ‘Some of the finest artists lent their talents to illustrating the tales. This is my collection – Gustave Doré, Hermann Vogel, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Fernande Biegler, George Cruickshank, Eugen Neureuther – each with a subtly different interpretation.’ Weiss drew Fabel’s attention to one illustration in particular: a woman was stepping into a stone-flagged room; a key tumbled from her grasp in horror as she did so. A tree-stump chopping block and an axe sat in the foreground of the picture: both were covered in blood, as was the stone floor around it. The dead bodies of several women, all in nightgowns, were hung around the walls, as if from meat hooks.

‘I am guessing,’ said Weiss, ‘that this type of scene, perhaps not to such excess, is not unfamiliar to you, Herr Fabel. It is a murder scene. This poor woman here –’ he tapped on the glass that protected the illustration ‘– has clearly stumbled upon the lair of a serial killer.’

Fabel found himself fixed to the image. It was in the familiar style of a nineteenth-century illustration, but it struck too many resonances with Fabel. ‘Where is this illustration from?’

‘It’s the work of Hermann Vogel. Late 1880s. It is, Herr Fabel, an illustration for Charles Perrault’s “La Barbe bleue” – “Bluebeard”. A French tale of a monstrous nobleman who punishes the curiosity of women by killing and mutilating them in a locked room in his castle. It is a story. A fable. But that does not stop it being a universal truth. When
Perrault wrote his version down, the memories of real atrocities committed by noblemen were still very much alive in the French psyche. Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France and comrade-in-arms of Joan of Arc, for example, who sodomised and murdered hundreds of boys to feed his perverted, and unchecked, lusts. Or Cunmar the Accursed, who ruled Brittany in the sixth century. Cunmar – or Conomor, if you prefer – is perhaps the closest historical reference for Bluebeard. He decapitated each of his wives, finally cutting off the head of the beautiful, pious and heavily pregnant Triphine. Incidentally, the tale exists throughout Europe: the Grimm brothers recorded it as “Fitcher’s Bird”, the Italians call it “Silvernose” and the English Bluebeard is called “Mr Fox”. All of them relate to feminine curiosity leading to the discovery of a hidden, bloody chamber. A murder room.’

Weiss paused, as if appreciating the illustration anew. ‘Hermann Vogel, the artist of this piece, was German. Even although he was illustrating a French fable, he couldn’t help introducing something of his own cultural background … the chopping block and the axe is borrowed from the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” tale. The fact is that this tale is told across Europe and the details are always broadly the same. There must have been real events, whether they were the deeds of Cunmar the Accursed or not, to inspire them. My point is this: these cautionary tales for children, these ancient fables and legends – they all prove that the serial rapist or killer or child-abductor is not a modern phenomenon. The big, bad wolf has nothing to do with wolves.’ Weiss laughed. ‘Funnily enough, the curse that earned Cunmar the epithet “Accursed” was supposed to
have been that he was turned into a werewolf for his sins … Eventually all history blurs into myth and legend.’

Weiss took a novel from the bookshelf before him. Unlike the others, it was new: a modern hardback in a glossy dust jacket. Fabel could see that it was written by another author. He did not recognise the name, but it was English or American rather than German. Weiss dropped it on top of his correspondence file. ‘Today we continuously reinvent these tales. The same stories, new characters. This is a bestseller – a story about the hunt for a serial killer who ritually dismembers his victims. These are our fairy tales today. These are our fables, our
Märchen
. Instead of elves and kobolds and hungry wolves lurking in the dark corners of the woods, we have cannibals and dissectors and abductors lurking in the dark corners of our cities. It is in our nature to guise our evil as something extraordinary or something different: books and films about aliens, sharks, vampires, ghosts, witches. The fact of the matter is that there is one beast that is more dangerous, more predatory, than any other in the history of nature. Us. The human being is not only the planet’s top predator, it is the only creature that kills for the sheer pleasure of it, for sexual satisfaction or as organised groups to satisfy abstract concepts of religious, political or social dogma. There is nothing more deadly or menacing than the ordinary man or woman in the street. But that is something, of course, you know only too well through your work. All the rest. All the horror stories and the fables and the belief in greater malevolence – it’s all a veil drawn over the mirror we have to look in every day.’

Weiss sat down again and indicated that Fabel
should do the same. ‘The thing we need fear most is our neighbour, our parent, the woman or man next to us on the U-Bahn … ourselves. And the most difficult thing we can do is to face up to the monstrous banality of that fact.’ Weiss turned the heavy sculpture on his desk slightly so that the snarling jaws faced Fabel. ‘This is what lies within us, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar. We are the big, bad wolves.’

Fabel sat and stared at the sculpture, drawn to its hideous beauty. He knew that what Weiss was saying was right. He did, as Weiss had said, see the evidence of it in his work. The monstrous creativity of which the human mind was capable when it came to tormenting others. To killing others.

‘So you’re saying that the serial killer isn’t a modern phenomenon – it’s just that we didn’t have that name for them?’

‘Exactly. We are all born arrogant, Herr Fabel. We each believe we reinvent the world anew when we are born into it. The sad truth is that we are merely variations on a theme … or at least on a common experience. The good and the evil there is in the world came into it with the very first man. It evolved with us. That is why we have these ancient folk tales and myths. The Grimm Brothers recorded, they didn’t create. None of their fairy tales were their invention, but ancient folk tales they gathered as part of their linguistic research. The existence of these tales and the warning implicit in each one to “never wander far from home” and to “beware of strangers” proves that the serial killer is no mere side effect of modern life, he has been with us throughout our history. And they must have been inspired by real events. The true origins of these
fairy tales must lie in actual abductions and murders. Just as the truth of lycanthropy, the myth of the werewolf, lies in the inability of previous generations to recognise, define or understand psychopathy. The fact is, Herr Fabel, everyone accepts that we frequently make fiction out of fact. What I assert is that we also make fact out of fiction.’