Brother Grimm

by Craig Russell

  Fabel turned to Brauner. ‘I hope you get a good impression from this, Holger. This guy was no peeping Tom. He had a purpose here.’

  14.

  3.20 p.m., Sunday, 21 March: Hausbruch, South Hamburg

  By the time Fabel and Werner arrived, the local SchuPo uniformed police had informed Vera Schiller that a body had been found and the indications were that it was her husband. A search of the man’s pockets had produced a wallet and a Personalausweis identity card: Markus Schiller. Holger Brauner and his SpuSi forensics team had examined the two dumped vehicles and confirmed that the male victim had been murdered inside the Mercedes. There was a ‘shadow’ on the passenger seat where the passenger, the girl, had blocked the man’s arterial spray from soaking the leather upholstery. There were traces of blood in the sills of the car’s bonnet and Brauner had surmised that the girl had been taken out of the car and that her throat had been cut while she was held down on the bonnet. ‘As if it were a butcher’s block,’ had been how Brauner had described it. The SpuSi forensics team had retrieved the briefcase from the car. It had contained nothing more than a pile of fuel receipts, a receipt for an on-the-spot speeding penalty and some brochures on commercial baking equipment and products.

  * * *

  The Schiller residence was set in huge grounds that backed on to the wooded fringes of the Staatsforst. The drive up to the house led through a dense mass of trees that crowded broodingly on to and over it before opening out on to vast, manicured lawns. Fabel had the feeling of again entering a clearing in woodland. The house itself was a large nineteenth-century villa with a pale-cream painted exterior and large windows.

  ‘There’s obviously money in the bun business,’ muttered Werner as Fabel parked on the immaculate gravel drive.

  Vera Schiller answered the door herself and conducted them through a marble-floored and pillared hall and into a spacious drawing room. At Frau Schiller’s invitation, the two policemen sat down on an antique sofa. Fabel’s tastes ran more to the contemporary, but he could recognise a valuable antique when he saw one. And it wasn’t the only one in the room. Vera Schiller sat opposite them and crossed her legs, resting her hands, palms down, on her lap. She was an attractive, dark-haired woman in her late thirties. Everything about her – her face, her posture, her polite half-smile when inviting them in – communicated an overdone composure.

  ‘First of all, Frau Schiller, I know this must be very distressing for you,’ began Fabel. ‘Obviously, we will need you to identify the body formally, but there is little doubt it is your husband. I want you to know how sorry we are for your loss.’ He shifted awkwardly: this sofa had been uncomfortable for the best part of two centuries.

  ‘Are you?’ There was no hostility in Vera Schiller’s voice. ‘You didn’t know Markus. You don’t know me.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ said Fabel, ‘I am sorry, Frau Schiller. Really.’

  Vera Schiller gave a brusque nod. Fabel couldn’t tell whether this was a dam she had hastily thrown up to hold back her grief, or whether she really was quite simply a cold fish. He produced a transparent evidence bag from his pocket. Markus Schiller’s photograph on his Personalausweis ID card was visible through the polythene. He handed it to her.

  ‘Is this your husband, Frau Schiller?’

  She gave it a swift glance and then held Fabel’s eyes in a too-steady gaze. ‘Yes. That’s Markus.’

  ‘Have you any idea why Herr Schiller would be in the Naturpark so late in the evening?’ asked Werner.

  She gave a bitter laugh. ‘I would have thought that was obvious. You found a woman as well, I believe?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fabel. ‘A woman called Hanna Grünn, as far as we can ascertain at the moment. Does that name mean anything to you?’

  For the first time there was something akin to pain in Vera Schiller’s eyes. She reined it back in and both her false laugh and her answer dripped acid.

  ‘Fidelity, to my husband, was a concept as abstract and difficult to understand as nuclear physics. It was something that simply lay beyond his capacity to comprehend. There were countless other women, but yes, I recognise the name. You know, Herr Hauptkommissar, what I find really so distasteful about all this isn’t that Markus was having a liaison with another woman – God knows I’ve grown accustomed to that – but that he didn’t have the courtesy, or the imagination, or indeed the taste to raise his sights above our own factory floor.’

  Fabel exchanged a quick glance with Werner. ‘This girl worked for you?’

  ‘Yes. Hanna Grünn has worked for us for about six months. She worked on the production line, under Herr Biedermeyer. He would be able to tell you more about her than I. But I remember her starting. Very pretty in an obvious, provincial sort of way. I recognised her immediately as Markus’s kind of meat. But I didn’t think he would have fucked the help.’

  Fabel held her gaze. The obscenity didn’t sit comfortably with Vera Schiller’s dignity and composure. Which was, of course, why she had used it.

  ‘I’m sure you understand, Frau Schiller, that I have to ask where you were last night?’

  Again a bitter laugh. ‘The enraged, cheated wife exacting revenge? No, Herr Fabel, I had no need to resort to violence. I didn’t know about Markus and Fräulein Grünn. And if I did I wouldn’t have cared. Markus knew there were limits beyond which he could not push me. You see, I own the Backstube Albertus company. It was my father’s business. Markus is …’ She paused and frowned, then shook her head, as if annoyed with her inability to adapt to a new reality. ‘Markus was merely an employee. I also own this house. I had no need to kill Markus. In one fell swoop I could render him incomeless and homeless. For someone with Markus’s expensive tastes, that was the ultimate threat.’

  ‘Your whereabouts last night?’ Werner repeated the question.

  ‘I was at a function in Hamburg, a catering-industry event, until about one a.m. I can give you full details.’

  Fabel took in the room once more. There was real money here. Lots of it. With the right connections, you could buy anything in Hamburg if you had enough money. Including a killer. He rose from the expensive discomfort of the sofa.

  ‘Thanks for your time, Frau Schiller. If you don’t mind I would like to visit your business premises and talk to some of the staff. I understand that you will probably close the Backstube Albertus for a few days, but –’

  Vera Schiller cut Fabel off. ‘We will be open tomorrow as usual. I will be in my office.’

  ‘You’re going to work tomorrow?’ If Werner was trying to hide his incredulity, he failed miserably.

  Frau Schiller stood up. ‘You can advise me of the arrangements for a formal identification there.’

  As they came out of the drive on to the main road, the crowding trees seemed to close behind them. Fabel tried to imagine Frau Schiller, now alone in the ornate drawing room, the sea-wall defence cracking, allowing her grief and her tears to come flooding through. But somehow he couldn’t.

  15.

  9.00 p.m., Sunday, 21 March: Pöseldorf, Hamburg

  When Fabel opened the door to his apartment, a classical CD was playing and he could hear noises from the galley kitchen. It filled him with an odd mix of feelings. It reassured him, comforted him, that he was returning to something more than an empty space. That someone waited for him. But, at the same time, he couldn’t help experiencing something of a sense of intrusion. He was glad that he and Susanne hadn’t yet made the decision to move in together, or, at least, he thought he was glad. Perhaps the time would be right soon. But not yet. And he suspected that she felt the same. But somehow deferring the decision worried Fabel: it was very much his role to be decisive in his professional life, but in his personal life he seemed incapable of making decisions – good ones, anyway, which was why he always tended to put them off. And he was only too well aware that his indecisiveness, his vagueness had, at least in part, led to the failure of his marriage to Renate.

  He slipped off his Jaeger jacket and uncl
ipped his gun and holster, laying both on the leather sofa. He moved through to the kitchen. Susanne was making an omelette to go with a salad she’d already prepared. Some chilled Pinot Grigo was already frosting two wine glasses.

  ‘I thought you’d be hungry,’ she said as he came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. She had her long dark hair up and he kissed her exposed neck. The sensual smell of her filled his nostrils and he drank it in. It was the smell of life. Of vigour. It was itself like good wine after a day with the dead.

  ‘I am hungry,’ he said. ‘But I need to shower first …’

  ‘Gabi phoned earlier.’ Susanne called through to him as he stepped into the shower. ‘Nothing important. Just a chat. She spoke with your mother: she’s doing well.’

  ‘Good. I’ll call them both tomorrow.’ Fabel smiled. He had been worried that his daughter Gabi would be resentful of Susanne. She wasn’t: they had hit it off from the start. Susanne had warmed immediately to Gabi’s intelligence and sharp wit and Gabi had been impressed by Susanne’s beauty, style and ‘super-cool job’.

  After they finished their meal, Fabel and Susanne sat and chatted about everything and anything but their work. The only reference Fabel made to the day’s events was to ask Susanne if she could attend his case conference the following afternoon. They went to bed and made love in a drowsy, lazy way before falling asleep.

  He was bolt upright in bed when he awoke. He felt the prickle of sweat on his back.

  ‘You okay?’ Susanne sounded alert. He must have woken her. ‘Another dream?’

  ‘Yes … I don’t know …’ He frowned in the darkness, peering out through the bedroom door and the picture windows, across the glitter of lights reflected on the water of the Aussenalster, as if to catch sight of his fleeing nightmare. ‘I think so.’

  ‘This is happening too much, Jan,’ she said, resting her hand on his arm. ‘These dreams are a sign that you’re not coping with … well, with the things you have to cope with.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ His voice was too cold and hard. He turned to her and softened the tone. ‘I’m fine. Honestly. Probably just that cheese omelette of yours …’ He laughed and lay back down. She was right: the dreams were getting worse. Every case now seemed to invade the landscape of his sleep. ‘I can’t even remember what it was about,’ he lied. Two faceless children, a boy and a girl, had sat in a clearing in the forest, eating a meagre picnic. Vera Schiller’s villa loomed through the trees. Nothing had happened in the dream, but there had been an overwhelming feeling of malevolence.

  He lay in the dark, thinking; spreading his mind over the city outside. His thoughts roamed over the lonely woodland park to the south. ‘Hänsel und Gretel’. Children lost in the dark of the forest. Out along the dark Elbe towards the pale sands of the Blankenese Elbstrand. A girl lying by the shore. That was the start. Fabel was meant to get that. These were the overture notes and he had missed their meaning.

  His tired mind misfired, jumbling unconnected things together. He thought of Paul Lindemann, the young policeman he’d lost on their last major case, and his thoughts turned to Henk Hermann, the uniformed Kommissar who had secured the scene in the Naturpark, and then to Klatt, the KriPo Kommissar from Norderstedt. Two outsiders to the Mordkommission team, one of whom he believed would become a permanent insider. But he did not yet know which one it would be. There was the sound of laughter outside. Somewhere down on the Milchstrasse people were coming out of a restaurant. Other lives.

  Fabel closed his eyes. ‘Hänsel und Gretel’. A fairy tale. He remembered the radio interview he had heard when driving back from Norddeich, but his tired brain locked out the name of the author. He would ask his friend Otto, who owned a bookstore down in the Alsterarkaden.

  A fairy tale.

  Fabel fell asleep.

  16.

  10.00 a.m., Monday, 22 March: Alsterarkaden, Hamburg

  The Jensen Buchhandlung was situated in the elegant covered Arcades on the Alster. The brightly lit bookstore exuded Northern European cool, and would have looked just as much at home in Copenhagen, Oslo or Stockholm as it did in Hamburg. The interior styling was simple and contemporary, with beechwood bookshelves and finishings. Everything about it suggested organisation and efficiency, which always made Fabel smile, because he knew the owner, Otto Jensen, to be totally disorganised. Otto had been a close friend of Fabel’s since university. He was tall, gangly and eccentric: a moving focus for chaos. But concealed in the tangle of bungling physicality was a supercomputer mind.

  The Jensen Buchhandlung was not busy when Fabel arrived, and Otto had his back to the door, stretching his near-two-metre frame to stack books on the shelves from a new stock box. One dropped from his grasp and Fabel lunged forward and caught it.

  ‘I suppose lightning reactions are a prerequisite for a crime fighter. It’s most reassuring.’ Otto smiled at his friend and they shook hands. They enquired about each other’s health, about their respective partners and children, then chatted idly for a few minutes before Fabel explained the purpose of his visit.

  ‘I am after this new book. A novel. A Krimi, I suppose. I can’t remember the title or the author, but it’s based on the idea of one of the Grimm brothers being a murderer …’

  Otto smiled knowingly. ‘Die Märchenstrasse. Gerhard Weiss.’

  Fabel snapped his fingers. ‘That’s the one!’

  ‘Don’t be impressed by my amazing knowledge of fiction – it’s being punted big time by the publishers at the moment. And I think you would offend Herr Weiss’s literary sensibilities by describing it as a Krimi. It’s based on an “art imitating life imitating art” premise. There are more than a few members of the literary establishment getting themselves worked up about it.’ Otto frowned. ‘Why on earth would you want to buy a historical murder thriller? Isn’t Hamburg serving you up enough of the real thing?’

  ‘If only it weren’t, Otto. Is it any good? This book, I mean.’

  ‘It’s provocative, that’s for sure. And Weiss knows his stuff about folklore, philology and the work of the Brothers Grimm. But his style is pretentious and overblown. Truth is, it really is just a common-or-garden thriller with literary pretensions. That’s my opinion, anyway … Come and have a coffee.’ Otto led Fabel to the Arts section of the shop. There had been some changes since Fabel’s last visit: an aisle had been removed to open up the space. The gallery above now looked on to an area with leather sofas and coffee tables piled with newspapers and books. There was a counter in the corner with an espresso machine.

  ‘It’s all the thing, nowadays,’ grinned Otto. ‘I came into this business because I love literature. Because I want to sell books. Now I serve caffè lattes and macchiatos.’ He indicated a sofa and Fabel sat down while Otto went over to the coffee bar. After a couple of minutes he came back with a book jammed under his arm and carrying two coffees. He put one down in front of Fabel. Otto, unsurprisingly, had spilled some of the coffee and it swirled in the saucer.

  ‘I’d stick to books, Otto, if I were you.’ Fabel smiled at his friend. Otto handed him the book, sloshing some of his own coffee into his saucer.

  ‘This is it. Die Märchenstrasse. The Fairy Tale Road.’

  It was a thick hardback. The book jacket was dark and brooding, with the title set in a Gothic Fraktur typeface. A nineteenth-century copperplate illustration was set, small, in the centre of the cover. It showed a small girl in a hooded red cape walking through a forest. Red eyes glowed in the darkness behind her. Fabel flipped the book over and looked at the back. There was a photograph of Weiss: the unsmiling face was hard and broad, almost brutish, above the bulk of his neck and shoulders.

  ‘Have you read anything of his before, Otto?’

  ‘Not really … I’ve flicked through a couple. He has had similar stuff published before. He has quite a following. A weird following at that. But he seems to have broken into the mainstream with this.’

  ‘What do you mean, a “weird” following?’


  ‘His previous books were fantasy novels. He called them the “Wahlwelten Chronik” – the “Choose-Worlds Chronicles”. They were based on the same sort of premise as this new one, but set in a totally fictitious world.’

  ‘Science fiction?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Otto. ‘The world Weiss created was almost the same as this, but the countries had different names, different histories, et cetera. More like a parallel world, I suppose. Anyway, he invited fans to “buy” a place in his books. If they sent him a few thousand Euros, he would write them into the story. The more they paid, the bigger part they played in the storyline.’

  ‘Why would anyone pay for that?’

  ‘It’s all to do with Weiss’s oddball literary theories.’

  Fabel gazed at the face on the back cover. The eyes were incredibly dark. So dark it was difficult to distinguish the pupils from the irises. ‘Explain them to me … His theories, I mean.’

  Otto made a face that suggested the difficulty of the task. ‘God, I don’t know, Jan. A mixture of superstition and quantum physics, I guess. Or I suppose, more accurately, superstition dressed up in quantum physics.’

  ‘Otto …’ Fabel smiled impatiently.

  ‘Okay … Think of it this way. Some physicists believe that there is an infinite number of dimensions in the universe, right? And that consequently there is an infinite number of possibilities – and infinite variations on reality?’

  ‘Yes … I suppose so …’

  ‘Well,’ Otto continued, ‘the scientific proposition has always been an artistic belief for many writers. They can be a superstitious bunch. I know for a fact that several well-known authors avoid basing characters on people they know, quite simply because they fear that their imaginings for the characters may become reflected in reality. You kill a child in a book, and a child dies in reality, that kind of thing. Or, scarier still, you write a novel about horrific crimes and somewhere, in another dimension, your fiction becomes fact.’