JF02 - Brother Grimm (32 page)

Maria gave a small jump when there was a knock at the door. Then she gave an irritated sigh. Oskar. She thought he’d taken the hint. She put the door on the chain before opening it. She felt almost disappointed when she saw that it wasn’t her date. Unhitching the chain, she held the door wide to admit Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, but she was already
reaching into the drawer of the cabinet by the door where she kept her service SIG-Sauer.

‘Our literary friend has been busy again. We’ve got a male victim. This time in Sternschanzen Park – under the water tower there.’

‘You notify Fabel?’

‘Yep. But he’s in Ostfriesland. He told me to get you out to the locus right away to start things moving. He’s heading back now and will meet us at the Präsidium later.’ Anna smiled as she watched Maria, her SIG-Sauer in one hand as she gazed down at her black evening dress, as if it would suddenly come to her where she could clip the holster. ‘Nice dress. We’ll wait while you get changed.’

Maria smiled her thanks and headed towards the bedroom.

‘Oh, and Maria,’ said Anna, ‘this one’s sweet – the bastard’s gouged his eyes out.’

The Schutzpolizei and the Spurensicherungsteam had already put up a white screen barrier fifty metres out from the murder scene. The body itself was protected by a second ring of forensic screens. The scene was lit up by arc lights and the low hum of the mobile generator that powered them buzzed in the background. Sternschanzen Park remained an ongoing battleground between the young, upwardly mobile families who were moving into the increasingly trendy area, and the drug dealers and users who haunted the Park after dark. Tonight, the arc-light-illuminated trees loomed menacingly above the scene and, beyond the trees, the red-brick Wasserturm water tower thrust upwards into the night. It was, Maria noted, an almost identical setup to the last death scene, in the Winterhuder
Stadtpark, in the shadow of the Planetarium: also originally a water tower. The killer was trying to tell them something. Maria cursed the fact that she didn’t share Fabel’s ability to interpret the perverse vocabulary of the psychotic.

The duty SpuSi forensic team leader wasn’t Brauner, but a younger man she had not met before. Maria forced the thought that this was the night for deputies from her head. As she entered the protected scene, her hands sheathed in latex gloves and her feet encased in forensic overshoes, she and the forensic team leader exchanged businesslike nods and he introduced himself as Grueber. He wore glasses behind which large, dark eyes glittered; he was almost boyish-looking with a pale complexion and very dark hair that flopped carelessly over his high, broad brow. Maria mentally christened him ‘Harry Potter’.

In the centre of the protected scene a man lay, as if laid out by an undertaker, in a pale grey suit, white shirt and gold-coloured tie. His hands were folded across his chest and a large lock of blonde hair had been placed between them, just as the rose had been left between Laura von Klosterstadt’s hands. Beneath the folded hands, Maria could see a small bloom of dark red on the white shirt.

The eyes were gone. The bruised lids sagged into the sockets, not fully covering them. Blood had crusted around where the eyes had been, but not as much as Maria would have expected. Maria found that she was drawn to the eyeless face. It was as if taking away the eyes had taken away the humanity. Even if he had been lying with his eyes closed, there would have remained something human about the corpse.

‘Shot?’ she asked Grueber, indicating the bloodstain under the hands. There were no other obvious
wounds on the body to suggest a struggle or a frenzied knife attack.

‘I haven’t examined it yet,’ Grueber, the forensic chief said; he moved round the body and knelt down beside it. ‘Could be a bullet, or it could be a single stab. But whatever removed the eyes wasn’t sharp. My guess is that they were forced out by the killer’s thumbs. You’ve got a real “hands-on” killer here.’ He stood up and turned to face Maria fully. ‘The victim is about thirty-five to forty, male, obviously, one metre seventy-seven tall, and I’d say he’s somewhere about seventy-five kilos. There’s capillary rupture around the nose and lips as well as the obvious strangulation trauma to the neck, so that looks like our cause of death.’

‘The thing with the eyes. Pre- or post-mortem?’

‘Difficult to say at the moment, but the relative lack of blood would suggest it was done after death or immediately before. Although there wouldn’t be masses of blood anyway.’

Anna Wolff came into the canopy with Henk Hermann. She winced as she looked at the eyeless face. Hermann knelt down by the body.

‘I’ll bet analysis will prove that this is the missing section of Laura von Klosterstadt’s hair.’ He turned to Grueber. ‘Is it okay to move the hands? I’m guessing we’ll find a note from our killer under one of them.’

‘Let me do it,’ said Grueber. ‘Like I said, I reckon your killer is very “hands on”. Maybe the victim got his hands on the killer in return. We could have skin cells under the fingernails.’ He carefully eased up one hand and laid it slightly to one side, then removed the hair and put it into an evidence bag. He lifted the second hand. A small slip of yellow notepaper lay beneath it.

‘That’s it,’ said Hermann. Grueber used tweezers to lift the slip and place it in a clear plastic evidence bag. He handed it to Hermann who turned it to the arc light and peered at it.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Lass mir dein Haar herunter
. Again the writing was small, tight and in the same red ink.

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.’ Hermann read it out loud.

‘Great,’ said Maria. ‘So he’s chalked up number four.’

‘Number five,’ said Anna, ‘if you include Paula Ehlers.’

Grueber examined the shirt front, carefully easing open a button and looking at the wound below. He shook his head. ‘Weird … he wasn’t shot. Looks like a single stab wound. Why didn’t he defend himself?’

‘And what’s the thing with the eyes?’ Henk Hermann. ‘It looks like our guy is collecting trophies now.’

‘No,’ said Maria, looking up at the water tower. ‘He’s not taken them as trophies. This –’ she indicated the corpse with a slight movement of her head ‘– is meant to be the Prince. In the Rapunzel fairy tale, the Princess is locked away in a tower by her enchantress stepmother. When she finds out that Rapunzel and the Prince are having secret trysts, the enchantress tricks the Prince and, as he falls from the tower, his eyes are pierced by thorns and he is blinded.’

Anna and Henk made impressed faces.

Maria smiled a bitter smile. ‘Fabel’s not the only one who’s been reading up on his fairy tales …’

By the time Fabel made it to the Präsidium, they already had an identity for the eyeless man in
Sternschanzen Park – Bernd Ungerer, a catering-equipment salesman from Ottensen – and photographs of the body and the scene had been processed and were up on the inquiry board. Fabel had called Maria on his cell phone and asked her to assemble the whole team, including Petra Maas, Hans Rödger and Klatt, the Norderstedt KriPo officer.

It was two in the morning when everyone was gathered in the Mordkommission’s main office. Everyone looked as if they were under the influence of the same cocktail of tiredness, adrenalin and coffee. All except the newest team member, Henk Hermann, who couldn’t have looked fresher, or more eager.

Once Maria had gone through all they knew about the victim and the forensic details to date, Fabel scanned the incident board. He moved back and forth between the von Klosterstadt murder scene and the Sternschanzen images, then to the other scene-of-crime images from the Naturpark Harburger Berge and the Martha Schmidt body on Blankenese beach. There was what seemed like an interminable silence, and then he turned to the team.

‘Our killer is trying to tell us something,’ he said at last. ‘I couldn’t work out what it was, and then the water towers gave it away. He’s linking the murders. Not just with the Grimm fairy-tale theme. He’s telling us what he’s going to do next … or at least he’s dropping hints.’ Fabel moved over to the Martha Schmidt images. He slammed his hand against the image of the dead girl. ‘We’ve always suspected that he killed Paula Ehlers. Well, now I’m convinced of it. That’s why he used the changeling story for Martha Schmidt. He chose Martha because she looked so much like Paula Ehlers and themed
the death with “The Changeling” Grimm fairy tale … to show us that there’s a body we haven’t found. He used Martha’s face as an advertisement that he’d killed Paula.’ Fabel paused and laid his hand on a second picture: a general shot of the Elbstrand beach where Martha had been found. ‘But he wasn’t just being retrospective in his confessions, he was being predictive.’ Fabel pointed to the background of the shot, where the terraces of Blankenese rose steeply from the shore. Part of a building jutted out above the trees and bushes. ‘This is the swimming-pool annexe to Laura von Klosterstadt’s villa. He had already chosen Laura as a victim and posed Martha’s body in sight of Laura’s house. Laura was already his Sleeping Beauty, sequestered from the likes of poor Martha, the “underground people” changeling – elevated above her by wealth and by social standing.’ He moved over to the von Klosterstadt murder section of the board. ‘And here we have a victim that is posed beneath an icon from two Grimm fairy tales, the tower. He’s mixing his metaphors here, but in a controlled way. The Planetarium in Winterhuder Stadtpark doubles as Rapunzel’s tower and Dornröschen’s castle …’ He moved to the close-up image of where Laura von Klosterstadt’s hair had been cut. ‘And then he places her hair in the hands of his next victim, and gouges out his eyes to fit with the Rapunzel tale.’

‘What about the double murder in the Naturpark Harburger Berge? How is that connected?’ asked Anna.

Fabel rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. ‘It could be that the connection is confined to the location. Two murders, one place: two characters, one story. The link is the story, “Hänsel und Gretel”. But I don’t
think that’s it. To begin with, I actually thought that the killings in the Naturpark sat removed from the other murders; that they were inspired by Olsen’s sexual jealousy. But that’s not it either. I believe that the Naturpark murders are a single act and that they are connected to another or others – but not with the murders to date. The link is with some murder still to be committed, and I believe that there will be a cross-reference – another fairy-tale link – back to one or more of the killings we’ve already seen. And I have a feeling that the link we shall see emerge has something to do with the missing eyes.’

After the briefing, Fabel sat in his office alone. The only illumination was his desk lamp, which cast a bright disc on to the desktop. Into this pool of light, Fabel placed the sketchbook on which he had already replicated the inquiry board, adding his own, more subjective comments.

Everything else was shut out. His entire consciousness telescoped down into this small, bright focus. Fabel updated the sketchbook with the details of the latest killing. More would emerge about this newest victim over the coming days, but for now they knew that Bernd Ungerer was a forty-two-year-old salesman for a catering equipment company based in Frankfurt. Ungerer, apparently, was the company’s sole representative for Hamburg and the North of Germany. He was married, with three children, and lived in Ottensen. Fabel stared at the bald facts he had laid out: in what kind of world did a middle-aged salesman end up stabbed in the heart and with his eyes ripped from his head?

Fabel gazed long and hard at the bright white page with its black felt-tip pen notations and its red
felt-tip pen lines, connecting names, locations, comments. He started to write the bizarre formulae of the investigation: Paula Ehlers + Martha Schmidt =
The Changeling
; Martha Schmidt ‘placed beneath’ + Laura von Klosterstadt ‘placed above’ =
The Changeling/Sleeping Beauty
. Hanna Grünn + Markus Schiller =
Hänsel und Gretel
; Bernd Ungerer + Laura von Klosterstadt =
Rapunzel
.

There was at least one equation missing. He stared at the page, willing it to come out at him. He wrote down: Grünn/Schiller + Bernd Ungerer? = ? He scored it out and wrote Grünn/Schiller + ? = ?; Ungerer + ? = ? No matter how hard Fabel stared at it, the page refused to yield more. He felt an anxiety clench tight in his belly: the pieces that were not yet there would come in the form of more deaths. Someone else would have to pay in fear, in pain and with their lives for Fabel’s inability to see the full picture.

Olsen. Fendrich. Weiss. Was there another equation there? Was Fabel wrong to think that this was a solo killer? Was it Olsen plus Fendrich, Weiss or another? He opened his desk drawer and took out a copy of Weiss’s book. He had read
Die Märchenstrasse
from cover to cover; but now his focus was specific. Weiss had titled a chapter ‘Rapunzel’. Again, the narration was in the voice of the fictively elaborated Jacob Grimm.

Within Rapunzel, as within each of these tales, there lies an articulation of elemental Good and Evil; an understanding of the forces of Creation and Life; of Destruction and Death. I have found within these ancient fables and tales such commonality of theme as to suggest that their origins lie not simply in our unlettered pagan
past but in the earliest articulations of the most elemental of forces. The nascence of some of these tales must, indeed, lie deep in some early community of man, when and where our numbers on the Earth were few. How, otherwise, are we to explain why the tale of Cinderella exists in almost identical forms not only throughout Europe but also in China?