Brother Grimm

by Craig Russell

  ‘Well … This isn’t just where our killer decided to dump the bodies. He could have done that twenty metres into the woods and we would maybe have taken weeks or months to find them. This is a message. He’s telling us something – the choice of location, the position of the bodies, the handkerchief, the breadcrumbs. This is all for our benefit. It’s all posed.’

  Fabel looked across to Holger Brauner, who smiled knowingly.

  ‘Posed …’ repeated Hermann, clearly becoming frustrated. ‘This is all carefully laid out. And that means that there is a psychotic agenda behind these killings, which in turn means that potentially we have a serial killer on our hands. And that is why I thought that I should inform you directly and right away, Herr Erster Hauptkommissar.’ He turned to Holger Brauner. ‘And the reason I contacted you, Herr Brauner, is because I felt that you might elicit something from this scene that our team might miss. I have followed your work with interest and have attended several of your seminars.’

  Brauner beamed a good-natured smile and nodded in mock humility. ‘And it is obvious you paid attention, Herr Kommissar.’

  Fabel broadened his own smile to a grin. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Hermann, I wasn’t suggesting you were wasting our time. Everything you have said about the crime scene is true – including the fact that it is the secondary, not primary scene. I just wanted to hear your reasoning.’

  The tense expression on Hermann’s nondescript face relaxed slightly, but the flint sharpness remained in his pale green eyes.

  ‘The question we’re faced with now,’ continued Fabel, ‘is where the primary locus lies … where we find our actual murder scene.’

  ‘I have a theory about that, Herr Hauptkommissar,’ Hermann cut in before anyone else could comment. Brauner laughed.

  ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘As I said, I believe the bodies were carried here. We have footprints on the track. Large footprints, suggesting a tall man. They have made a deep impression on the earth which is soft but not muddy. It suggests to me that he was carrying something heavy.’

  ‘Maybe what he was carrying was simply too much weight,’ said Brauner. ‘It could just be someone who’s taken up walking in the woods to burn off some calories.’

  ‘Then it’s very effective,’ Hermann responded, ‘because we have at least two sets of tracks, one coming and one going. The ones that head back towards the parking area don’t make the same deep impression. And that suggests to me that he carried something heavy to this spot, at least once, and walked back to the parking area unburdened.’

  ‘So you’re saying the murder scene was the car park?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘No. Not necessarily. He might have killed them there, but we’ve found no forensic evidence so far. That’s why I’ve secured the half of the car park nearest the Wanderweg. My belief is that the victims were murdered elsewhere and brought here by car. Or perhaps they were murdered in a car while still in the car park. But if he brought them here, I would guess that he parked his car close to the path.’

  Fabel nodded appreciatively. Brauner barked a laugh and slapped Hermann good-naturedly on the shoulder. It was a gesture that Hermann did not seem to appreciate too much. ‘I concur, Herr Kollege. Although I have to say we have a long way to go before we identify these footprints as belonging to our killer. But this really is very good work. Very few people would have thought to preserve the scene at the car park.’

  ‘The car park was empty when the bodies were found?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hermann. ‘The only vehicle here was the blue Opel that belongs to the walker who found the bodies, about seven-thirty this morning. Which leads me to believe that the vehicle that was our murder scene or was used to transport the bodies is long gone. Maybe even dumped and burnt-out somewhere to destroy forensic evidence.’ He pointed to the Wanderweg in the direction opposite that which they had taken. ‘This path leads to another parking area, about three kilometres along. I sent a car to check that, just in case, but there was nothing.’

  It suddenly struck Fabel that Maria had been quiet throughout the conversation. She had stepped closer to the bodies and her gaze seemed magnetically locked to the dead woman. Fabel held up a hand to the others and said ‘Excuse me …’ before moving over to join her.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked. Maria snapped her face towards him and gazed at him blankly for a moment, as if dazed. Her skin seemed pulled taut over the angular architecture of her face, like skin whitened over knuckles.

  ‘What? Oh … yes.’ Then, more determinedly: ‘Yes. I’m fine. It’s not stirring up post-trauma stresses, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No, Maria, that’s not what I meant. What is it you see?’

  ‘I was just trying to work out what it is that he’s trying to say with this. Then I looked at their hands.’

  ‘Yes … holding hands. The killer obviously posed them to appear as if they were holding hands.’

  ‘No … not that,’ said Maria. ‘The other hands. His right and her left. They’re made into tight fists. It doesn’t look right. It looks like it’s part of the posing.’

  Fabel turned abruptly. ‘Holger – come and take a look at this.’ Brauner and Hermann came over and Fabel pointed out what Maria had noticed.

  ‘I think you’re right, Maria …’ said Brauner. ‘It looks like they’ve been closed post-mortem but ante-rigor …’ Suddenly, Brauner looked like he’d been stung. He turned sharply to Fabel. ‘Christ, Jan – the girl on the beach …’

  Brauner reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an unopened surgical-glove packet. He snapped on a latex glove and pulled a probe from his breast pocket. There was an urgency about each action. He moved forward and turned the girl’s hand over. The rigor made it difficult and he called Hermann across, holding out the pack of latex gloves as he did so.

  ‘Put these on before you touch the body. I want you to keep her hand turned round.’

  Hermann complied. Brauner tried unsuccessfully to use the probe as a lever to open the woman’s fingers. Eventually he had to pry them open with his own. He turned to Fabel and nodded grimly, before reaching into the palm with a pair of surgical tweezers and extracting a small, tightly rolled piece of yellow paper. He slipped the paper into a clear plastic evidence bag and carefully unrolled it flat. He stood up and carefully retraced his steps back from the bodies. Hermann followed.

  ‘What does it say?’

  Brauner handed the evidence bag to Fabel. Fabel felt a chill somewhere deep in his bones. Again it was a rectangular slip of the same yellow paper, about ten centimetres wide by five long. He recognised the small, regular, red-ink handwriting as the same on the note recovered from the hand of the dead girl on Blankenese beach. This time there was just one word written: ‘Gretel’. Fabel showed the paper to Maria.

  ‘Shit – it’s the same guy.’ She looked down again at the bodies. Brauner was already prying open the clenched fist of the male victim.

  ‘And this, apparently, is “Hänsel”,’ said Brauner as he stood up, slipping another piece of yellow paper into an evidence bag.

  Fabel felt a tightness in his chest. He looked up at the pale blue sky, down the path that led back to the parking area, into the green sepulchre of the woods and then back to the man and woman lying with their throats slashed to the spine, sitting with their hands touching and a large, breadcrumb-scattered handkerchief spread on the grass between them. Hänsel and Gretel. The bastard thought he had a sense of humour.

  ‘You were right to call us in, Kommissar Hermann. You may have just shortened the distance between us and a serial killer whom we know has killed once, maybe twice before.’ Hermann beamed with satisfaction: Fabel didn’t return the smile. ‘What I need you to do now is to get all of your team back to the parking area for a briefing. We need this whole area fingertip-searched. And then we’ve got to find the primary locus. We have to know who these people are and where they were murdered.’

  12.

  10.00 a.m.,
Sunday, 21 March: Blankenese, Hamburg

  She sat in her chair and grew older.

  She sat straight and unmoving, listening to the clock ticking, aware that every measured second was a wave that eroded her youth and her beauty. And her beauty was great. Laura von Klosterstadt’s refined grace transcended passing fashions for the waiflike or for the voluptuous. It was a true beauty: a timeless, glacial, cruel perfection. Hers was not a look to be ‘discovered’ by a photographer: it had been formed from true nobility, bred over generations. It had also proved to be highly marketable, an asset for which fashion houses and cosmetics companies had paid vast sums of money.

  The scale of Laura’s beauty was matched by that of her loneliness. It is difficult for the plain and the ordinary to imagine how beauty can repel as much as ugliness. Ugliness inspires disgust; great beauty such as Laura’s inspires fear. Laura’s looks threw a fence around her that few men were brave enough to breach.

  She sat and felt herself age. It was her thirty-first birthday in a week’s time. Heinz, her agent, would be here soon. He was coming to help her prepare for the birthday party. Heinz would make sure that everything went well: he was an extravagant, ebullient gay who combined limitless energy with steely determination and efficiency. He was a good agent; but, much more, he was also the closest thing Laura had to a real friend. She knew Heinz’s concern for her went beyond ‘looking after the talent’: he had been the only person to see through Laura’s defences and understand the extent of her sadness. And soon the villa would be filled with Heinz’s flamboyance. But for now it was still.

  The room in which Laura sat was one of the two places to which she would retreat. Both were in her vast Blankenese villa: there was this large, over-bright and deliberately functionless room with its uncompromisingly hard chair, hard wooden floor and white walls; and there was the pool room that projected from the side of the house, out over the terraces and, when one swam towards the vast picture windows at the pool’s end, the feeling was of swimming out into the sky. These were the places where Laura von Klosterstadt met with herself.

  This room, however, was empty other than for the unyielding chair in which she sat and a single cabinet along one wall. The CD system on the drawer unit was the only comfort or amenity she had allowed into this space.

  It was a bright room. It had been this room that had persuaded her to move here. It was large, with a high plaster ceiling framed with ornate cornicing and filled with light from the vast bay window. Ideal for a nursery, she had thought, and at that moment had decided to buy the villa.

  But it wasn’t a nursery. She had left it stark and white, turning its brightness into something uncompromisingly sterile. It was here that Laura sat and thought about a ten-year-old child who didn’t exist. Who never really did exist. Laura would sit in the comfortless chair in the sterile white room and think of how it might have looked with bright colours, with toys. With a child.

  It was better this way. Laura’s experience of her own mother had led her to believe that having a child would simply pass down to another generation the misery she had herself experienced. It was not that Laura’s mother had been cruel. She had not beaten her nor deliberately humiliated her. It was simply that Margarethe von Klosterstadt, Laura’s mother, had clearly never felt anything in particular for her. Sometimes Margarethe would look at Laura in an unsettling and vaguely disapproving way, as if trying to assess her; to work out who and what exactly Laura was and where she should fit in to her life. Laura had always been very aware that, in some way that was apparent only to her mother, she must have been a bad girl. A naughty child. Margarethe had clearly identified all of Laura’s flaws as a child and had highlighted them with the glacial spotlight of her disapproval. Her mother had also, however, recognised Laura’s extraordinary beauty – in fact, she isolated it as Laura’s sole virtue. She had even, at the start, managed Laura’s career, before Heinz had been appointed. She had worked tirelessly, even obsessively, to promote Laura’s career and to ensure that she became a prominent part of the social circle to which the von Klosterstadts belonged. But Laura had no childhood memory of her mother playing with her. Caring for her. Smiling at her with a genuine warmth.

  Then there had been the problem.

  Almost exactly ten years before, when Laura’s beauty was in its very first bloom and the modelling contracts had started to come in, someone had somehow slipped through the barbed defences that Margarethe von Klosterstadt had cast around her daughter. That Laura had cast around herself.

  Laura’s mother had taken charge; had arranged everything. Laura hadn’t told her mother she was pregnant: she had only just found out for sure herself, but through some near-mystical means that Laura could not attribute to maternal instinct, her mother had come to know about the pregnancy. Laura had never seen her boyfriend again, and had never mentioned him again or even thought of him again. She knew that her mother had made sure he would never reappear: the von Klosterstadt family had the power to bend others to its will, and it had the wealth to buy those who did not bend. A week before her twenty-first birthday, a short holiday was arranged: a private clinic in London. Then Laura’s social and modelling career continued as if nothing had happened.

  It was funny, she always thought it would have been a boy. She didn’t know why, but that was how she always imagined her child.

  She heard a car in the drive. Heinz. She sighed, rose from her chair and made her way out to the entrance hall.

  13.

  Noon, Sunday, 21 March: Naturpark Harburger Berge, south of Hamburg

  They had made the discoveries almost simultaneously.

  Kommissar Hermann had radioed in that two cars – a flash Mercedes sports and an older VW Golf – had been discovered part-concealed in woodland at the southern end of the Naturpark. This guy was cool. Methodical. Having driven the first car to the spot, it would have taken the killer twenty minutes to walk back for the second car. Fabel wanted details, but didn’t want to discuss the discovery over the radio, so he called Hermann back on his cell phone.

  ‘I’ll get Herr Brauner and his team over there as soon as they’re finished here. Make sure the locus stays protected.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hermann, and Fabel could tell that he was slightly offended.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Fabel. ‘You’ve made it very clear from your work here that you know how to preserve a scene. Is there anything that leaps out at you there?’

  ‘The Mercedes is the murder scene, as I thought. Let’s put it this way, the upholstery is never going to be the same again. There’s a briefcase in the back. We may well get an identity from that, but obviously we haven’t touched it yet. We’ve checked out the number – registered owner is a company. Backstube Albertus, located in Bostelbek, in the Heimfeld area of the city. I’ve got someone checking with them as to who drives it. At the moment we’re just saying that it has been found abandoned. The Golf belongs to a Hanna Grünn. It’s registered to an address in Buxtehude.’

  ‘Good. I’ll come over with Herr Brauner when we’re through here.’

  ‘Funny,’ said Hermann. ‘It’s almost as if he was half-hearted about hiding the cars. He could even have burned them out.’

  ‘No …’ said Fabel. ‘He was just buying himself a little extra time. Putting that extra distance between us and him. He wanted us to see where he had killed them. It’s just that he wanted us to see it when it suited him.’

  It was Holger Brauner who made the other discovery. He led Fabel back to the main car park and to the fringes of the forest. The undergrowth thinned out at one point and both men pushed back branches to reach a narrow pathway, not even wide enough to constitute a firebreak. This, at one time, had been a second way into to the clearing, but so narrow that it had obviously been intended solely for walkers or cyclists, or simply as an access. Fabel cursed as the tan shoes he had paid so much for in London sank into the peaty earth.

  ‘Here …’ Brauner indicated where he had placed several scene-of
-crime tent cards on the ground. ‘These are fresh boot prints. Good ones, too. And from the size I would guess definitely male.’ He led Fabel further along the track, pointing to another boot print. ‘Just keep clear of that, Jan. I haven’t got a photograph or a cast of it yet.’

  Fabel followed Brauner’s lead and struggled to make his way along the grassy edge of the track. Brauner stopped beside a row of tent-card markers. ‘And these are tyre tracks – again fresh.’

  Fabel squatted down and examined the tracks. ‘Motorbike?’

  ‘Yep …’ Brauner indicated where the sweep of the track curved out of sight, consumed by the tangled darkness of the forest. ‘My guess is that if you get one of your guys to follow this path, they’ll end up coming out somewhere near the main road. Someone rode their motorcycle all the way up here until they were about 150 metres from the car park. If my interpretation of these tracks and boot marks is right, he killed the engine and pushed the bike the rest of the way.’ He pointed back to the original boot prints. ‘And those marks indicate that he stood just out of sight of the car park, probably observing it.’

  ‘Our killer?’

  ‘Could be.’ Brauner’s face broke into its usual good-natured grin. ‘Or perhaps simply a nature lover watching the nocturnal wildlife in the car park.’

  Fabel returned Brauner’s smile, but an alarm bell was sounding somewhere in his mind. He moved back to re-examine the footprints, straddling them to avoid damaging them. The branches he had to push back to gain access to the path now shielded his body. In his mind he rewound a clock, making it night. You waited here, didn’t you? It was like you were invisible, part of the forest. You felt safe and hidden here while you watched and waited. You saw them arrive, more than likely separately. You kept a watch on one of them while he or she waited for the other to turn up. You knew them, somehow, or at least their movements. You knew to wait for your second victim to arrive. Then you struck.