Fabel’s mother laughed. ‘Don’t ask me. You and Lex are still my babies. But I wouldn’t worry about it. We all change.’
‘It’s just that when I come back here, I expect everything to be the same.’
‘That’s because here is a concept for you, a place in your past, more than a reality. You come back here to refocus the details of your memories. I used to do exactly the same whenever I went back to Scotland. But things change, places change. The world moves on.’ She smiled, reached up and ran her hand gently through the hair of his temple, combing it with her fingers in the way she used to when he had been a boy going to school. ‘How’s Gabi? When are you going to bring my granddaughter for a visit?’
‘Soon, I hope,’ said Fabel. ‘She’s due to come for a weekend.’
‘And how’s her mother?’ Ever since the break-up, Fabel’s mother had never once referred to his ex-wife, Renate, by name; and, as she spoke, he could hear the ice crystallising in his mother’s voice.
‘I don’t know, Mutti. I don’t talk with her much, but when I do it’s not very pleasant. Anyway, let’s not talk about Renate: it only gets you annoyed.’
‘What about this new girlfriend of yours? Well, not so new now. That’s quite a while you’ve been seeing her – is it serious?’
‘What … Susanne?’ Fabel looked startled for a moment. It wasn’t so much the question that had caught him off balance as much as the sudden realisation that he didn’t know the answer. He shrugged. ‘We get on. Really well.’
‘I get on really well with Herr Heermans, the butcher, but that doesn’t mean we have any kind of future together.’
Fabel laughed. ‘I don’t know, Mutti. It’s early days. Anyway, tell me what the doctor said to you about what you’ve to do when you get out of here …’
Fabel and his mother spent the next two hours chatting idly. As they did so, Fabel regarded his mother more closely than he had for a long time. When did she get so old? When did her hair whiten and why hadn’t he noticed? He thought about what she said about Norddeich being a concept to him; he realised that she too was a concept, a constant that was expected never to alter, to age. To die …
It was ten-thirty before Fabel got back to his mother’s home. He got a Jever beer from the fridge and took it out into the cool night. He walked to the foot of the garden and through the low gate and the fringe of trees. Then he climbed the steep grassy embankment of the dyke and, when he reached the top, he sat down, elbows resting on knees, occasionally easing the bottle of herby Frisian beer to his lips. The night was crisp and clear and the huge Frisian sky was scattered with stars. The dunes stretched before him and, midway to the horizon, he could see the glittering lights of the evening Norderney ferry. This was another constant: this spot where he sat, elevated above the flat earth behind and the flat sea beyond. He had sat here so many times before; as a boy, as a youth and as a man. Fabel breathed in deeply, trying to sweep away the thoughts that were crowding in on him, but they continued to buzz in his head randomly and relentlessly. The image of a long-disappeared Hilke Tietjen on the Norddeich dunes collided with the image of the dead girl on the beach at Blankenese; he thought of his home changing in his absence and of Paula Ehlers’s home being frozen in time during hers. The ferry, the last of the evening, drew closer to the Norddeich shore. He took another sip of the Jever. Fabel tried to recall Hilke Tietjen as she looked now, but found that he couldn’t: the teenage Hilke’s image prevailed. How could someone change so much? And was he wrong about the dead girl? Could she have changed in such a short space of time?
‘Thought I’d find you here …’ Fabel jumped at the sound of the voice. He half turned and saw his brother Lex standing behind him.
‘Christ, Lex, you scared the daylights out of me!’
Lex laughed and gave Fabel’s back a sharp nudge with his knee.
‘You spend too much time with crooks, Jannik,’ said Lex, using the Frisian diminutive form of Fabel’s first name. ‘You must always be expecting one to creep up on you. You need to chill out.’ He sat down next to his brother. He had brought another two bottles of Jever from the fridge and slapped one against Fabel’s chest.
‘I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.’ Fabel smiled warmly at his brother.
‘I know, but I got my sous chef to do a double shift for me. Between Hanna and the staff they’ll manage fine until I get back.’
Fabel nodded. Lex ran a restaurant and hotel on the North Frisian island of Sylt, close to the border with Denmark.
‘How’s Mutti?’
‘Fine, Lex. Honestly, fine. She’ll probably be out tomorrow. It was a very minor attack, according to the medics.’
‘It’s too late for me to see her tonight. I’ll go in first thing tomorrow.’
Fabel looked at Lex. ‘Older in years but younger in heart’ was how Fabel habitually described his older brother. They looked nothing like each other: Fabel was a typical North German while Lex seemed to be a throwback to their mother’s Celtic roots. He was a good deal shorter than Fabel and had thick dark hair. And the difference lay in more than appearance. Fabel had often envied Lex’s easygoing good humour and irrepressible sense of fun. A smile came more quickly and more easily to Lex than to his younger brother and his good humour had left its traces in Lex’s face, particularly around the eyes that seemed always to be smiling.
‘How are Hanna and the kids?’ Fabel asked.
‘Great. Well, you know, the usual chaos. But we’re all fine and we’ve had a good year with the hotel. When are you going to bring that sexy psychologist of yours up?’
‘Soon, I hope. But I’ve got a swine of a case on my hands just now, and I know that Susanne has a heavy workload … but, with a bit of luck, it won’t be too long. God knows I could do with a break.’
Lex took another mouthful of beer. He turned back to his brother and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You look tired, Jan. This has been quite a shock with Mutti, hasn’t it? I know I’m not going to feel any easier until I see her tomorrow.’
Fabel looked into his brother’s eyes. ‘I got such a shock, Lex. It reminded me of when I got the call about Papi. It’s just that I’ve never really contemplated life without having Mutti around.’
‘I know. But at least we know it wasn’t too serious.’
‘This time,’ said Fabel.
‘Life’s full of bridges that we have to cross when we get to them, Jan. You’ve always been the worrier.’ Lex gave a sudden laugh. ‘You were always such a serious kid.’
‘And you never were serious, Lex. And you’re still a kid,’ said Fabel, without a hint of bitterness.
‘It’s not just Mutti, though, is it?’ asked Lex. ‘You’re really wound up, I can sense it. More wound up than usual, that is.’
Fabel shrugged. The lights of the ferry had disappeared behind the headland and the stars had the night to themselves. ‘Like I said, Lex, this case I’m on is a rough one.’
‘For once, Jan, why don’t you tell me about it? You never talk about the stuff you have to deal with. You never did with Renate, either. I think that was part of the problem between you.’
Fabel gave a bitter snort. ‘The problem between us was that she started screwing someone else. And as a result I lost my daughter.’ He turned to Lex. ‘But maybe you’re right. It’s just that I see things, I get to know things about what people are capable of doing to each other. Things that you should be able to go through a lifetime without seeing or knowing. When I don’t talk about it, it’s not because I’m cutting people off, it’s because I’m trying to protect them. Renate never understood that. And she never understood that sometimes I have to give everything to a case, all my attention, all my time. I owe it to the victims and to their families. Maybe that’s why Susanne and I are good together. As a forensic psychologist, she has to wade around in the same filth as I do. She knows what a shitty job it can be and what it can do to you. Renate used to say that it was like a game for me. Me against the bad guy. A co
ntest to see who wins. It’s not like that, Lex. I’m not pitting my wits against some cunning foe: I’m racing against the clock and against a sick mind and trying to get to him before he gets to his next victim. It’s not about catching a criminal, it’s about saving a life.’
Lex sighed. ‘I don’t know how you do it, Jan. I understand why, I guess, but I can’t understand how you cope with all of that pain and horror.’
‘Sometimes I don’t, Lex. Take this case. It started with a girl … fifteen, maybe sixteen, strangled and dumped on a beach. A girl like Gabi. A girl like your Karin. A young life snuffed out. That’s bad enough, but the sick fuck who did it left an identity on her that belonged to a different girl – a girl who has been missing for three years. It’s sick. It’s sick and unbelievably cruel … like he’s deliberately planned to devastate a family that’s already in pieces.’
‘And it definitely wasn’t the same girl?’
‘We’re almost certain. But I’m having to put the poor bloody family through DNA tests to make sure.’
‘Christ,’ said Lex, and looked out across the dunes and the dark velvet waves. ‘So do you think that the killer of this girl on the beach maybe killed the other girl, the missing girl?’
Fabel shrugged. ‘I think there’s a good chance.’
‘So you’re back to your race against the clock. You have to get to him before he gets to another girl.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
Lex let out a long, slow breath. ‘It’s getting cold out here and I need another beer.’ He stood up and slapped his hand down on Fabel’s shoulder. ‘Let’s go inside.’
Fabel cast one last long look out over the dunes and out to the sea before rising and following his brother back down the dyke, towards their shared childhood home.
8.
3.30 p.m., Friday, 19 March: Norddeich, East Frisia
Fabel hadn’t slept well. He had dreamt of a teenage Hilke Tietjen running along the Norddeich beach, beckoning for him to follow. She had disappeared behind a dune but, when Fabel had caught up, it wasn’t Hilke who lay on the sand but another teenage girl from another beach who looked up at Fabel with an unblinking, azure gaze.
That morning he and Lex had driven into Norden to visit their mother. They had been told that she was well enough to be discharged, but that a home visit would be arranged each day for the next few days. As they had walked back to the car, Fabel had become painfully aware of how fragile his mother looked. Lex had suggested to her that Fabel should return to Hamburg, while he volunteered to stay for the next couple of days and had explained that Fabel was in the middle of a very important case. Fabel was grateful to his brother for taking the pressure off him, but felt guilty about leaving.
‘Don’t fuss,’ she had said. ‘You know how I hate a fuss. I’ll be fine. You can come and see me next weekend.’
As soon as he was back on the A28 Autobahn, Fabel phoned Werner at the Präsidium. After Werner asked about Fabel’s mother, they settled down to discussing the case.
‘We got confirmation back from the Institut für Rechtsmedizin,’ Werner told him. ‘The DNA from the girl on the beach doesn’t match the swabs taken from Frau Ehlers. Whoever she is, she definitely isn’t Paula Ehlers.’
‘Has Anna made any more progress on finding her real identity?’
‘No. She’s been widening her search and she picked up a couple of hopefuls, but they turned out not to match when she pursued them. She’s been at it solidly since you left … God knows what time she left the Präsidium last night. Oh, by the way, when Möller called with the DNA results he wanted to talk to you to discuss his autopsy findings. The stuck-up bastard wasn’t going to talk to me – you know what he’s like. He said the report will be on your desk for when you get back. But I told him that you’d want me to pass the main points on to you.’
‘What did he give you?’
Werner’s tone suggested he was scanning through notes as he spoke. ‘The dead girl is about fifteen or sixteen, according to Möller. There are signs of childhood neglect: bad teeth, evidence of a couple of old fractures, that sort of thing.’
‘Then she could have been subject to long-term abuse,’ said Fabel. ‘Which could mean that the killer was a parent or guardian.’
‘And that would fit with Anna finding it so hard to trace her as a missing person,’ said Werner. ‘If it were a parent, then they may be delaying reporting her missing, or not reporting her missing at all, to try to keep us off their trail.’
‘So far it’s working.’ Fabel paused for a moment to process the information Werner had given him. ‘The only problem is that kids exist beyond the confines of their family. There must be a school somewhere questioning her absence. She must have had friends or relatives who have missed her.’
‘Anna’s way ahead of you, Chef. She’s been trawling through school attendance records. Again, nothing so far. And you can add a possible boyfriend to the list. Möller says the dead girl was sexually active, but there is no evidence of sexual contact in the last two days before her death.’
Fabel sighed. He realised that he had passed through Ammerland and a sign indicated the Oldenburg turn-off. His old university town. He was only just out of East Frisia, but already he was reimmersing in the mire of what humans are capable of doing to each other; to their children. ‘Anything else?’
‘No, Chef. Other than Möller says that the girl hadn’t had much to eat in the forty-eight hours prior to death. You coming back into the Präsidium?’
‘Yep. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.’
After he hung up, Fabel switched the radio on. It was tuned into NDR Eins. An academic was railing against a writer who had written some kind of highly controversial literary novel. Fabel had missed a good bit of the debate, but from what he could gather the novelist had used the fictitious premise that accused some well-known historical personage of having been a child-murderer. As the debate continued, it became clear to Fabel that the personage was one of the Brothers Grimm, the nineteenth-century philologists who had collected German folk and fairy tales, legends and myths. The academic was becoming more and more incensed, while the author remained unshakeably calm. Fabel was able to gather that the author’s name was Gerhard Weiss and the title of his novel was Die Märchenstrasse – The Fairy Tale Road. The novel had been written in the form of a fictionalised Reisetagebuch – travelling diary – of Jacob Grimm. The host of the programme explained that, in this fictional account, Jacob Grimm accompanies his brother Wilhelm, collecting the tales that they will eventually publish as Children’s and Household Tales (Grimms’ Fairy Tales) and Deutsche Sagen (German Myths). Where the novel departed from fact was in how it described Jacob Grimm as a serial killer of children and adult women, committing murders in the towns and villages he visits with his brother, each killing replicating a tale that they have collected. In the novel, the mad Grimm’s rationale is that he is keeping the verity of these tales alive. The fictionalised Jacob Grimm eventually comes to believe that myths, legends and fables are essential in giving voice to the darkness of the human soul.
‘It is an allegory,’ explained the author, Gerhard Weiss, ‘a literary device. There is not, nor has there ever been, any evidence or even suggestion that Jacob Grimm was a paedophile or any sort of murderer. My book Die Märchenstrasse is a story, an imagined tale. I chose Jacob Grimm because he and his brother were involved in the collection and study of the German folk tale, as well as analysing the mechanics of the German language. If anyone understood the power of myth and folklore then it was the Brothers Grimm. Today we are afraid to let our children play out of sight. We see menace and danger in every aspect of modern life. We go to the cinema to terrify ourselves with modern myths that we convince ourselves hold a mirror up to our life and society today. The fact is, the danger has always been there. The child-killer, the rapist, the insane murderer have all been constants in the human experience. All that is different is that, where we used to frighten ours
elves with the spoken tale of the big, bad wolf, of the wicked witch, of the evil that lies waiting in the dark of the woods, we now scare ourselves with cinematic myths of the super-intelligent serial killer, the malevolent stalker, the alien, the monster created by science … All we’ve done is reinvent the big, bad wolf. We just have modern allegories for perennial terrors …’
‘And that gives you the justification to malign the reputation of a great German?’ asked the academic. His tone was stretched between anger and incredulity.
Again, the voice of the author remained calm. Disturbingly so, thought Fabel. Almost emotionless. ‘I am aware that I have infuriated much of the German literary establishment as well as the descendants of Jacob Grimm, but I am merely fulfilling my duty as a writer of modern fables. As such, it is my responsibility to continue the tradition of scaring the reader with the danger without and the darkness within.’
It was the show’s host who asked the next question. ‘But what has particularly infuriated the descendants of Jacob Grimm is the way that, although you have made it clear that your portrayal of Jacob Grimm as a murderer is totally fictional, you have used this novel to promote your theory of “fiction as truth”. What does that mean? Is it fictional or not?’
‘As you say,’ answered Weiss in the same, level, emotionless tone, ‘my novel has no foundation in fact. But, as with so many works of fiction, I have no doubt that future generations will probably believe that there was some truth in it. A less educated, lazier future will remember the fiction and accept it as fact. It is a process that has been at work for centuries. Take William Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Scottish king Macbeth. In reality, Macbeth was a well-loved, respected and successful king. But because of Shakespeare’s desire to please the then British monarch, Macbeth was demonised in a work of fiction. Today, Macbeth is a monumental figure, an icon for ruthless ambition, avarice, violence and bloodlust. But these are the characteristics of the Shakespearean character, not the historical reality, of Macbeth. We do not simply progress from history to legend to myth – we invent, we elaborate, we fabricate. The myth and the fable become the enduring truth.’
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