JF02 - Brother Grimm (47 page)

Fabel’s confusion showed on his face. They had sent a SchuPo unit to secure Biedermeyer’s home. It was a ground-floor apartment in Heimfeld-Nord and the uniformed officers had confirmed that it was empty and that there was nothing unusual about it, except that one of the two bedrooms looked like it had been converted to accommodate an elderly or disabled person.

‘I don’t understand,’ Fabel said. ‘There is no basement in your apartment.’

Biedermeyer’s cold grin broadened. ‘That’s not my home, you fool. That is merely the place I rented to convince the hospital authorities to release
Mutti
to my care. My real home is where I was brought up. The home I shared with that poisonous old bitch. Rilke Strasse, Heimfeld. It’s by the Autobahn. That’s where you’ll find her … That’s where you’ll find Paula Ehlers. In the floor, where
Mutti
and I buried her. Bring her out, Herr Fabel. Bring my Gretel out of the darkness and we will both be free.’

Fabel gestured to the SchuPos who grabbed the unresisting Biedermeyer’s arms and placed them behind his back, handcuffing them once more.

‘You’ll find her there …’ Biedermeyer called to Fabel as he and his team left the room. Then he laughed. ‘And while you’re there, could you turn off the oven? I left it on this morning.’

The house sat on the fringe of the Staatsforst woodland, near where the A7 sliced through it. It was large and old and presented a depressing prospect. Fabel guessed that it had been built in the 1920s but it lacked any feeling of character. It was set in a large garden that had been left to grow wild. The house itself looked as if it had been unloved for some time: the exterior paint was dull, stained and flaking, as if its skin was diseased.

Something about it reminded Fabel of the villa in which Fendrich and his late mother had lived. This house, too, looked lost, displaced; as if it now sat in surroundings and in a time that no longer suited it. Even its position with the swathe of woodland to its rear and the Autobahn hard by its side seemed incongruous.

They had taken two cars, and a SchuPo unit accompanied them. Fabel, Werner and Maria went directly to the front door and rang the bell. Nothing. Anna and Henk Hermann were behind them and they beckoned to the SchuPos who brought a door-ram from the boot of their green and white Opel patrol car. The door was solid: made from oak that had stained
almost black over the years. It took three swings of the ram before the wood splintered from the lock and the door slammed in against the vestibule wall.

Fabel and the others exchanged a look before they entered Biedermeyer’s home. They all knew they were on the threshold of an exceptional madness and each prepared him or herself for what lay within.

It started in the hall.

The house was dark and gloomy inside and a glass door separated the vestibule from the hall beyond. Fabel pushed the door open. He did so cautiously, even though no danger waited for him. Biedermeyer was now safely locked up in his cell: yet he wasn’t; his colossal presence was here, too. It was a large, narrow hall with a high ceiling, from which hung a pendant light with three bulbs. Fabel switched the lights on and the hall was filled with a bleak, jaundiced glow.

The walls were covered. It was a patchwork of pictures and printed and handwritten pages. Sheets of yellow paper had been pasted to the plaster; each was covered with tiny red-ink handwriting. Fabel examined them: all the Grimms’ fairy tales were here. All written out in the same, obsessive hand and all free of a single error. A perfect madness. Between the handwritten sheets there were printed pages from editions of the Grimm Brothers’ writings. And pictures. Hundreds of illustrations of the stories. Fabel recognised many of them from the originals that Gerhard Weiss had collected. And there were others, from the Nazi time, similar to those that the author had described. Fabel noticed that Anna Wolff had stopped to examine one: it was from the 1930s and the old witch was depicted with caricature Jewish features, bent-backed and stoking
the fire beneath the oven while casting a greedy, short-sighted eye over the blond, Nordic Hänsel. Behind her an equally Nordic Gretel was poised to shove the witch into her own oven. It was one of the most nauseous images Fabel had ever seen. He couldn’t begin to imagine how it made Anna feel.

They moved down the hall. Several large rooms led off it and a staircase ran up one side. All the rooms were empty of furniture, but Biedermeyer’s insane collages had spilled into them and up the side of the staircase, spreading across the wall like damp or rot. There was a smell. Fabel couldn’t quite place what it was, but it lurked in the house, clinging to the walls, to the clothes of the police officers.

Fabel took the first room on the left and beckoned for Werner to take the one opposite. Maria headed along the hall and Anna and Henk went up the stairs. Fabel examined the room he was in. The dark wooden floor was dusty and, like the other rooms, there was no furniture nor any sense of habitation.

‘
Chef
…’ Anna called. ‘Come and see this.’ Fabel climbed the stairs, followed by Werner. Anna stood by an open doorway which led into a bedroom. Unlike the other rooms, this one clearly had been occupied. The walls, like the ones in the hallway, were thick with handwritten pages, pictures and extracts from books. There was a camp bed in the middle of the room, along with a small side table. But none of these were the focus of Fabel’s attention. Two walls of the room had been lined with shelving. And the shelves were filled with books. Fabel stepped closer. No. Not books.
A
book.

Biedermeyer must have spent years, and practically all his money, buying editions of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
. Antiquarian copies sat alongside brand-new
paperbacks; gold-embossed spines sat next to cheap editions; and next to the hundreds of German editions from nearly two hundred years of publication sat French, English and Italian copies. Titles in Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese and Japanese lettering were interspersed with those in the Roman alphabet.

Fabel, Werner, Anna and Henk stood speechless for a moment. Then Fabel said: ‘I think we had better find the basement.’

‘I think I’ve found it, or at least the way into it.’ Maria was behind them at the doorway. She led them back down the stairs and along the hallway. The room at its far end was, or had been, the kitchen of the house. It was a vast room with a cooking range against one wall. Its comparative cleanliness and the faint electric hum from the large, new-looking refrigerator suggested that, like the bedroom/library above, it was the only other functioning living space. There were two doors, side by side. One was open and led into a pantry. The other was padlocked.

‘I reckon this will lead us to the basement,’ said Maria.

‘And to Paula …’ Anna stared hard at the door.

Werner left the kitchen and headed to the front door, where the two SchuPos were standing guard. He came back a minute later with a crowbar.

‘Okay.’ Fabel nodded towards the padlocked door.

As soon as the lock had been prised and the door opened, Fabel became aware that the smell he’d noticed before intensified significantly. Steps led down into the darkness. Werner found a light switch. When he turned it on, there was the sound of strip lights fizzing into life below them. Fabel led his team down into the basement.

It was a bakery. A proper, working bakery. Just as Biedermeyer had said, he had installed a vast Italian baking oven. The tray-trolley outside it would have been capable of holding dozens of loaves. In contrast to the house above, everything down here was clean. A preparation table, its surface of burnished stainless steel, gleamed under the strip lights, as did the pastry machine next to it. Fabel looked at the concrete floor. Paula was under there.

That smell. The smell of something burning. Fabel remembered Biedermeyer telling him to switch the oven off, because he’d left it on in the morning. Fabel had thought he’d been joking, but he obviously had put something in to bake before going to work in the Backstube Albertus, thinking he would have been back mid-afternoon.

Fabel’s world slowed down.

The adrenalin that surged up within him stretched every second and he travelled a greater distance in that moment than he had throughout the whole investigation. He turned to look at his colleagues. They were standing, looking down at the concrete floor as if trying to see through it to where Paula lay. Not Paula, Gretel. Fabel looked back at the tray-trolley that should have been inside the oven, not outside it. And nothing bakes for a whole day.

‘Oh, Jesus …’ he said as he reached for the cloth that lay on the preparation table. ‘Oh, Christ, no …’

Fabel wrapped the cloth around the handle of the oven and turned it. Then he swung the door open.

A tidal wave of heat and a sickening stench rolled over Fabel and into the basement bakery. It was the clinging, suffocating stench of roasted flesh. Fabel stood back, holding the cloth over his nose and
mouth. His universe folded in a thousand times upon itself until there was nothing in it but himself and the horror before him. He did not hear Henk Hermann retching, Maria’s stifled cry or Anna Wolff’s sobbing. All he was aware of was that which lay before him. In the oven.

There was a large metal tray sitting in the bottom of the oven. On the tray, trussed up in a foetal position, lay the naked and half-cooked body of an elderly woman. The hair was all but gone and just a few frazzled balls clung tight to the roasted scalp. The skin was blackened and split. The heat had desiccated and drawn tight the tendons and the body had pulled even tighter in on itself.

Fabel stared at the corpse. This was Biedermeyer’s masterpiece: Brother Grimm’s final tale that brought everything full circle.

The conclusion of Hänsel and Gretel: the old witch cast into her own oven.

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