JF02 - Brother Grimm (6 page)

Anna gave a knowing smile. ‘Okay,
Chef
.’

Fabel found Susanne at her desk in her office, gazing bleakly at a report on the screen of her computer. Her raven-black hair was tied back from her face and she was wearing her glasses, behind which her eyes were shadowed with tiredness. On seeing Fabel her smile was weary but warm. She stood up, crossed her office and kissed him on the lips.

‘You look as tired as I feel,’ she said, in her Munich accent. ‘I’m just about to wrap up here. What about you? You coming over later?’

Fabel made an apologetic face. ‘I’ll try. It might be late. Don’t wait up for me.’ He walked over and slumped into the chair opposite Susanne’s. She took the hint and sat back down at her desk again.

‘Okay … let’s have it.’

Fabel ran through the events of the day. He spoke
of a girl long lost, a girl found, a family reunited in death only to be torn apart again. When he finished, Susanne sat in silence for a moment.

‘So you want to know if I think the person who killed the girl you found this morning killed this other girl who went missing three years ago?’

‘Just an opinion. I won’t hold you to it.’

Susanne let out a long slow breath. ‘It’s certainly possible. If the intervening period was not so long, I would say it was probable. But three years leaves us with a long gap. As you know, the first escalation in offender behaviour is the biggest step … the leap from fantasy to commission.’

‘Committing their first murder.’

‘Exactly. Then it just gets easier. And the offending escalates quickly. But, there again, that’s not always the case. Sometimes the first murder is committed in childhood or very early adulthood and there can be decades before a second murder is committed. Three years is an odd gap.’ Susanne frowned. ‘That would tend to make me believe that we are dealing with separate killers, but the close resemblance of the two girls and the identity of the first being given by the killer to the second really bothers me.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel, ‘let’s assume for the moment that we are dealing with the same killer. What does the three-year gap tell us?’

‘If it is the same perpetrator, then I think, given the premeditated cruelty of confusing the identities of the two girls, that it is highly unlikely that the delay has been self-imposed. I don’t believe that this hiatus is the result of guilt or any inner turmoil or repulsion at what he or she has done. I think it’s more likely to be an external pressure … some
restraint or obstacle that has put a check on the escalation of his psychosis.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well … it could be a physical, geographical or personal restraint. By physical, I mean he may have been confined – in prison or by illness in a hospital. The geographical obstacle may be that he has been working and living outside the area for the last three years and has only recently returned. If that were to be the case, and if the opportunity were to have presented itself, I would have expected the subject to have committed similar offences elsewhere. And what I meant by personal restraint is that there may have been a personality in the subject’s background who has been able to prevent recommission of homicidal behaviour. Someone dominant who has been able to contain the subject’s homicidal psychosis … perhaps without even knowing about the first killing.’

‘And now that person is out of the picture?’

‘Perhaps. It could be a domineering parent or spouse who has died … or perhaps a marriage that has failed. Or it could simply be that our killer’s psychosis has developed to such an extent as to be beyond any external control. If that is the case, then God help the person who was holding him in check.’ Susanne slipped off her glasses. Her dark eyes were heavy-lidded and her voice drawled with fatigue, her southern accent more pronounced, swallowing the ends of her words. ‘There is one other explanation, of course …’

Fabel was there before her. ‘And that explanation is that our killer has not been inactive for the last three years … that we just haven’t found his victims or made a connection between them.’

Fabel had woken early but had lain awake, staring at the ceiling while the pallid light of morning had slowly and reluctantly bloomed across it. Susanne had been asleep when he had come back from the Präsidium. Their relationship had reached that awkward stage where they had keys for each other’s apartments, and Fabel had therefore been able to let himself into Susanne’s Övelgönne flat and slip silently into her bed while she slept. The exchange of keys had been a symbol of the exclusivity of their relationship and the permissiveness they allowed each other in accessing the most personal of territory – but they had not yet made the decision to live together. In fact, they had not even discussed the option. They were both intensely private individuals who had, for different reasons, dug invisible moats around themselves and their lives. Neither was yet ready fully to lower the drawbridge.

When Susanne awoke the following morning, she smiled sleepily and welcomingly at Fabel and they made love. For Fabel and Susanne, there was a golden time in the mornings when they did not discuss work but chatted and joked and shared
breakfast as if they each worked in some innocuous, undemanding career that made no intrusion into their personal lives. They had not planned it. They had not made a rule about where and when they should talk about their work in parallel fields. But, somehow, they had fallen into the habit of greeting and beginning each new day afresh. Then they would each descend, down their separate but parallel paths, into the world of derangement, violence and death that was the stuff of their professional everyday.

Fabel had left the apartment shortly before Susanne. He had arrived at the Präsidium just after eight and reviewed the case files and his notes from the previous day. For half an hour he added detail to the sketch he already had in his mind. Fabel tried to objectivise his view, but no matter how hard he tried, the stunned and weary face of Frau Ehlers crept its way back to the front of his mind. And as it did so, Fabel’s anger grew anew: the embers of the fury of the previous evening rekindled and burned even more intensely in the cold, bright air of a new day. What kind of beast derived gratification from inflicting such psychological torture on a family? Especially a family whose daughter, Fabel believed, he had already murdered. And Fabel knew he must prolong their agony: he could not rely on the failed identification of a victim who had been missing for three years. There was still a remote chance that time, and whatever traumas and abuses she had suffered in the intervening period, had wrought subtle changes to her appearance.

Fabel waited until nine a.m. before he picked up his phone and pressed the dial button pre-set to the Institut für Rechtsmedizin. He asked to be put
through to Herr Doktor Möller. Möller was the forensic pathologist with whom Fabel had dealt on the majority of his cases. Möller’s arrogant, abrasive manner had earned him the dislike of almost every murder detective in Hamburg, but Fabel had a great deal of respect for his expertise.

‘Möller …’ The voice on the other end of the phone sounded distracted, as if answering the phone was an unwelcome interruption to some infinitely more important task.

‘Good morning, Herr Doktor Möller. Kriminalhauptkommissar Fabel here.’

‘What is it, Fabel?’

‘You’re about to do an autopsy on the girl we found on Blankenese beach. There’s some confusion over her identity.’ Fabel went on to explain the background, including the scene at what should have been a routine identification at the Institut the night before. ‘I am concerned that there is still a chance that this dead girl
is
Paula Ehlers, albeit a very remote chance. I don’t want to distress the family any further, but I need to establish the dead girl’s identity.’

Möller was silent for a moment. When he spoke his voice lacked its usual imperiousness. ‘As you know, I should be able to do that from dental records. But I’m afraid the quickest and surest way would be to have cheek swabs taken from the missing girl’s mother. I’ll get a DNA comparison rushed through the lab here at the Institut.’

Fabel thanked Möller and hung up. He made another call, to Holger Brauner, and, knowing that he could rely on Brauner’s tact, asked him if he could take the cheek swabs from the mother himself.

By the time Fabel had hung up, he could see, through
the glazed partition that separated his office from the main open-plan area of the Mordkommission, that Anna Wolff and Maria Klee were now both at their desks. He buzzed through to Anna and asked her to come into his office. When she came in he pushed the mortuary photograph of the dead girl across his desk to her.

‘I want to know who she really is, Anna. I’d like to know by the end of the day. How have you been getting on so far?’

‘I’ve got a check running on the BKA database of missing persons. The chances are that she’ll be listed. I’ve put a filter on the search for females between ten and twenty-five and prioritised any cases within a two hundred kilometres’ radius of Hamburg. There can’t be that many.’

‘This is your thing for today, Anna. Drop everything else and concentrate on establishing this girl’s identity.’

Anna nodded. ‘
Chef
…’ She paused. There was an awkwardness in her stance, as if she was unsure of what she was going to say next.

‘What’s up, Anna?’

‘That was tough. Last night, I mean. I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards.’

Fabel gave a cheerless smile and indicated that Anna should sit down. ‘You weren’t the only one.’ He paused. ‘You want to be put on something different?’

‘No.’ Anna’s response was emphatic. She sat down opposite Fabel. ‘No … I want to stay on this case. I want to find out who this girl is and I want to help find the real Paula Ehlers. It’s just that it was pretty hard to watch a family being torn into pieces for a second time. The other thing was – and I know
this sounds crazy – but I could almost sense Paula’s … well, not her presence, more her
lack
of presence in the home.’

Fabel remained silent. Anna was tracing out a thought and he wanted her to follow it through.

‘When I was a kid, there was this girl in my school. Helga Kirsch. She was about a year younger than me and a mousy little thing. She had the kind of face you never notice but would recognise as someone you knew if seen out of context. You know, if you saw her in town at the weekend or something.’

Fabel nodded.

‘Anyway,’ continued Anna, ‘one day we were all assembled in the school hall and we were told that Helga had gone missing … that she’d gone out on her bike and just disappeared. I remember that after that I started, well, noticing that she wasn’t there. Someone I’d never even spoken to but had taken up some kind of space in my world. It took a week before they found her bike, and then her body.’

‘I remember,’ said Fabel. He had been a young Kommissar at the time and had been involved at the edges of the case. But he had remembered the name. Helga Kirsch, thirteen years old, raped and strangled in a small field of dense grass next to the cycle path. It had taken a year to track down her killer, only after another young life had been snuffed out by him.

‘From the moment her disappearance was announced to the day her body was found there was this weird feeling in the school. Like someone had taken away a small part of the building that you couldn’t identify but you knew wasn’t there any more. After she was found there was this
grief
, I suppose. And guilt. I used to lie in bed at night and
try to remember if I had ever spoken to Helga, or smiled, or had any kind of interaction with her. And of course I hadn’t. But the grief and the guilt were a relief after that feeling of
absence
.’ Anna turned and looked out through Fabel’s window at the cloud-bruised sky. ‘I remember talking to my grandmother about it. She talked about when she was a girl during the Hitler time, before she and her parents went into hiding. She said that that was what it was like for them then: that someone they knew would be taken in the night by the Nazis – sometimes a whole family – and there would be this inexplicable space in the world. There wasn’t even the knowledge of death to fill it.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Fabel, even though he couldn’t. Anna’s Jewishness had never been a feature in his choosing her for the team, either positively or negatively. It simply hadn’t registered on Fabel’s radar. But every now and then, like now, he sat across a table from her and was aware that he was a German policeman and she was Jewish, and the weight of an unbearable history seemed to descend on him.

Anna turned back from the window. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have a point, really, just that it got to me.’ She stood up and held Fabel in her disconcertingly frank gaze. ‘I’ll get your ID for you,
Chef
.’

After Anna had gone, Fabel took out the sketch pad from his desk drawer, laid it on his desktop and flipped it open. He spent a moment looking down on the wide expanse of white paper it presented. Empty. Clean. Another symbol of a new case beginning. Fabel had used these sketch pads for more than a decade of murder investigations. It was on these thick, brilliant sheets, meant for a much more creative task, that Fabel would summarise incident
boards, note down abbreviated names of people, places and events, and trace lines between them. These were his sketches: his outlines of a murder inquiry into which he would invest first light and shade, then detail. First, he plotted the locations: the beach at Blankenese and Paula’s home in Norderstedt. Then he wrote down the names he had encountered in the last twenty-four hours. He listed the four members of the Ehlers family and in so doing gave form to the absence that Anna had described: three members of a family – father, mother and brother – accounted for; three people you could track down and find, to whom you could talk and of whom you could form a living image in your brain. Then there was the fourth member. The daughter. To Fabel she was still a concept, an insubstantial collection of other people’s impressions and memories; an image caught on film blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.