JF02 - Brother Grimm (26 page)

Fabel watched Weiss as he spoke. He tried to work out what kindled the dark fire, the passion, in his eyes. ‘So, when you write about Jacob Grimm being a child-murderer, do you believe that your act of fictive creation translates into some kind of truth?’

‘What is the truth?’ Weiss’s knowing smile had a patronising edge to it, as if Fabel could not possibly possess the intellectual resources to deal with the question.

‘The truth,’ replied Fabel, ‘is an absolute, incontrovertible fact. I deal with the truth, absolute truth, every day. I understand what you’re trying to say – that sometimes truth is abstract or subjective. Jacob Grimm was not a murderer. The person I am seeking is a murderer: that is an incontrovertible fact. The truth. What I need to establish is how far, if at all, your book has inspired them.’

Weiss made a submissive gesture with his hands. Big, powerful hands. ‘Ask your questions, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar …’

The interview lasted a further twenty minutes. Weiss’s knowledge of myth and fable was encyclopaedic and Fabel found himself taking notes as the author spoke. But there was something about Weiss that Fabel did not like. There was a menace about him, not just in his size – he didn’t convey the same sense of pent-up violence that Olsen had – it
was something in the coal-black eyes. Something almost inhuman.

Finally, Fabel asked: ‘But these are all, when it comes down to it, just fairy tales. You can’t believe that they were inspired by real events?’

‘Weren’t they?’ said Weiss. ‘Take the Russian tale of Baba Yaga’s hut, where all the furniture is made out of bones. You’ve heard of Ed Gien, of course – the American serial killer who inspired the book and film
Psycho
as well as
The Silence of the Lambs
. When the police raided his farmhouse they found chairs and stools made out of human bones, as well as an almost complete body-suit made from the skins of dead women. Like I say, no one is unique. There will have been countless Ed Giens before. It is entirely likely that some early Russian version inspired the fable of Baba Yaga. And please bear in mind, Herr Fabel, that many of these fairy tales have been sanitised. Take your “Sleeping Beauty” victim. The original “Sleeping Beauty” tale didn’t have her awoken with a chaste kiss – it was a tale of rape, incest and cannibalism.’

When Fabel was back out on Ernst-Mantius-Strasse, Weiss’s correspondence file under his arm, he felt the need to pull a deep, cleansing breath into his body. He couldn’t work out why, but he had the feeling of having escaped a lair; that Weiss’s study, with its burnished, dark wood, had been closing in on him. The sun had broken through and bathed the pristine villas with a warm light. Fabel gazed at each as he walked back to his car; how many hidden rooms, how many dark secrets, lay behind the elegant façades? He flipped open his cell phone.

‘Maria? It’s Fabel. I want you to get me a full background on Gerhard Weiss. Everything you can find …’

‘I’m sorry,
Mutti
, I can’t stay as long tonight. I’ve got so many preparations to make. I’m a busy, busy boy these days, let me tell you.’ He nudged his chair even closer to the bed, glancing around conspiratorially, before whispering into her ear. ‘I did another one. I made another story come to life. She was so sad, this one. I saw it in her beautiful, beautiful face when she let me into that great big empty villa of hers. A princess in an ivory tower. I did her a great favour,
Mutti
. I really didn’t want this one to suffer. And now, of course, I have to prepare for you coming home. I’ve been busy with that, too.’

He paused and stroked the old woman’s hair. ‘But you will suffer terribly. I guarantee that.’ There were sounds outside the room: clog-soled footsteps as a duty nurse headed down the hall. He sat back in his chair and listened to them fade. ‘It’s a wondrous thing that I do, mother. I return them to being children again. In those precious moments I share with them – before they die, I mean – everything that they have become is lost … years of adult life wiped away, and they are once more small, frightened children. Lost little souls terrified by how little they
understand what is happening to them.’ He fell quiet for a moment and the room was silent other than the distant sound of a laughter-punctuated conversation that was taking place a little down the hall, and in another universe. After a while he continued. ‘The police came to see me,
Mutti
. They’re very, very stupid people, you know. They think they have all the answers and they have nothing. They have no idea of who they’re dealing with at all. What they are dealing with. They’ll never catch me.’ He gave a small laugh. ‘At least they won’t catch me until you and I have our fun together. What frightens you more, mother, the fact that you’re going to die, or the fact that you won’t die quickly enough? Does the pain frighten you? The
idea
of it? It will be great. That I can tell you: your pain will be very great indeed. And it’s nearly time,
Mutti
… nearly time …’

Fabel lay, listening to Susanne’s even, deep breathing. More and more he found her presence comforting: the dreams did not seem to come so often when she was beside him. It was as if her being there consoled him into a deeper, better sleep. But tonight his mind raced. There was so much to do. This case was growing, spreading, like a dark malignancy and was squeezing into the few spaces that Fabel had left for a private life. So many things on his mental ‘to do’ list remained unchecked. His mother was ageing. His daughter was growing up. Neither was getting the time they deserved; the time Fabel wanted to give them. His relationship with Susanne was good, but it wasn’t taking the definite form that it should by this stage and he knew he wasn’t giving it the attention it needed. He was surprised by the sharp pang of panic in his chest at the thought of maybe losing her.

Fabel had phoned his mother several times over the last few days, but he needed to find the time to get back out to Norddeich to see her. Lex had been forced to succumb to the commercial pressures of his business and return to Sylt to run his restaurant. His mother had insisted that she was more than
capable of taking care of herself, but Fabel wanted to see her to make sure for himself.

He got up and sat for a moment on the edge of his bed. It seemed that everywhere he turned there was so much that clamoured for his attention. At least he had filled the gap in his team; but even that was causing problems. Anna was showing Henk Hermann the ropes, but Fabel’s unorthodox recruitment strategies had already ruffled the feathers of the bureaucrats within the Polizei Hamburg. Technically it should have been easy for Fabel to pluck Hermann from the ranks of the uniformed SchuPo branch – as a Polizeikommissar, Hermann had already undergone the required training at the Landespolizeihochschule, next to the Präsidium. But Hamburg’s uniform branch was always short of officers, and Fabel knew he would have a battle to transfer Hermann permanently to the Kriminalpolizei. In the meantime, Fabel had basically ‘seconded’ Hermann to the Mordkommission until this case was over, at which time Hermann could go through the appropriate course. A new team finding its way together was always a tense time and Fabel was also worried about how Anna Wolff would respond to having a new partner. She was very much the loose cannon in the team: it was an impulsiveness so clearly exhibited by her high-speed motorcycle pursuit of Olsen. It was also something that Fabel did not entirely discourage: Anna’s intuitive and impulsive approach to her work often gave her a perspective on a case that the others missed. But she needed a counterbalance and, until his death, Paul Lindemann had provided that. Even in that partnership there had, to begin with, been a friction between them. Fabel hoped that, now Anna
was more experienced, more mature, the transition would be easier with Henk Hermann. But, from her sullen response to the news of Hermann’s recruitment, Fabel knew that he was going to have to have a serious talk to her. No one was bigger than the team.

So much of this case seemed out of Fabel’s control. Olsen seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth: he had evaded arrest for over a week now. The first three killings had sparked the usual media interest, particularly the double murder in the Naturpark. But everything had changed with Laura von Klosterstadt’s murder. As a living person, Laura possessed the elements of high social status, celebrity and beauty. As a murder victim, these elements had combined like fissile material and Laura exploded into the number one Hamburg media story. Then, inevitably, the watertight security that Fabel had attempted to wrap around the case had been compromised. He suspected that his fears about van Heiden passing on so much information to Ganz had been justified. Not that Ganz would have wanted to fan the flames of publicity, but he was proving injudicious in his choice of confidants. The truth was that the leak could have come from any one of a hundred possible sources. Whatever the source, a few days earlier Fabel had switched on the television news to see it announced that the Polizei Hamburg were hunting the ‘Märchenmörder’, the ‘Fairy Tale Murderer’. The next day he had seen Gerhard Weiss being interviewed on NDR’s
Hamburger Journal
. Sales of Weiss’s book had apparently skyrocketed overnight and now he was announcing to the public that the Polizei Hamburg had already sought his advice on these latest murders.

Fabel rose and stepped out of the bedroom and
into the lounge. The picture windows of his apartment framed the glittering nightscape of the Aussenalster lake and the lights of Uhlenhorst and Hohenfelde beyond. Even at this hour, he could trace the lights of a small boat as it made its way across the Alster. He always drew calm from this view. He thought of Laura von Klosterstadt, swimming towards her view. But where Fabel loved his outlook for the sense of connection it gave him with the city around him, Laura had spent a fortune on an architecture of remoteness, creating a panorama of sky and disconnecting herself from the landscape; detaching herself from people. What was it that made such a beautiful, intelligent young woman sequester herself?

Fabel could see Laura, swimming towards the sky, the night sky framed in those huge windows. But he could see only her. Alone. Everything about her home suggested isolation; a retreat from a life before cameras and the public eye. A lonely, beautiful woman making quiet, small waves in the silky water as she swam towards infinity. No one else. But there had to have been someone else there, in the water with her. The autopsy had revealed that she had been drowned in that pool, and the immediate pre-mortem bruising on her neck suggested that she had been held down. Möller, the pathologist, had suggested that it was a single hand, that the bruises corresponded to an extended thumb on one side, the grip of the fingers on the other. But, Möller had said, the span of the hand had been huge.

Big hands. Like Olsen’s. But like Gerhard Weiss’s too.

Who was it, Laura? Who was in the pool with you? Why would you choose to share the isolation
you so carefully built for yourself? Fabel stared out over the view before him and posed questions in his head to a dead woman; her family had been unable to answer them. Fabel had visited Laura’s parents on their vast estate out in the Altes Land. It had been an unsettling experience. Hubert, Laura’s brother, had been there and had introduced Fabel to his parents. Peter von Klosterstadt and his wife Margarethe had been the epitome of aristocratic coolness. Peter, however, looked frayed around the edges, the combination of jet lag and grief showing in his eyes and the dullness of his reactions. Margarethe von Klosterstadt, however, had been chillingly composed. Her lack of emotion had reminded Fabel of his first impressions of Hubert. Laura had clearly inherited her beauty from her mother, but in Margarethe’s case it was a harsh, uncompromising and cruel beauty. She would have been in her early fifties, but her figure and the firmness of her skin would have been the envy of a woman half her age. Fabel had had the feeling that she regarded him and Maria with a practised haughtiness, until he had realised that, even in repose, her features wore the same expression like a mask. Fabel had disliked her from the moment he saw her. He had also been disturbed by how powerfully sexually attractive he found her. The meeting had yielded little of any value, other than to point Fabel in the direction of Heinz Schnauber, Laura’s agent, who had probably been her closest confidant and who was totally distraught by Laura’s death. Predictably, as Margarethe von Klosterstadt had described it.

Fabel became aware of Susanne’s presence behind him. She slipped her arms around his waist and rested her chin on his shoulder as she shared his
view out over the Alster and he felt the warmth of her body against his back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a three a.m. voice. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

‘It’s okay. What’s the matter? Another bad dream?’

He turned his head and kissed her. ‘No. Just things on my mind.’

‘What?’

Fabel turned around, took her in his arms, and kissed her for a long time on the lips. Then he said:

‘I’d like you to come to Norddeich with me. I’d like you to meet my mother.’

Henk Hermann had made an effort to keep something resembling a conversation going, but, after so many monosyllabic responses, he had given up and watched the urban landscape slide by as Anna drove them up to Norderstedt. When they parked outside the Ehlerses’ family home, Anna turned to Hermann and put together her first full sentence since leaving the Präsidium.