Brother Grimm
Page 36
‘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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Copyright © Craig Russell 2006
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Table of Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Craig Russell
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Copyright