Brother Grimm Read online

  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

  About the Book

  A girl’s body lies, posed, on the pale sand of a Hamburg beach, a message concealed in her hand. ‘I have been underground, and now it is time for me to return home…’

  Jan Fabel, of the Hamburg murder squad, struggles to interpret the twisted imagery of a dark and brutal mind. Four days later, a man and a woman are found deep in woodland, their throats slashed deep and wide, the names ‘Hansel’ and ‘Gretel’, in the same, tiny, obsessively neat writing, rolled tight and pressed into their hands.

  As it becomes clear that each new crime is a grisly reference to folk stories collected almost two hundred years ago by the Brothers Grimm, the hunt is on for a serial killer who is exploring our darkest, most fundamental fears. A predator who kills and then disappears into the shadows.

  A monster we all learned to fear in childhood.

  About the Author

  Craig Russell was born in 1956 in Fife, Scotland. He served as a police officer and worked in the advertising industry as a copywriter and creative director. In 2007, his second novel, Brother Grimm, was shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, and in the same year he was presented with a Polizeistern (Police Star) award by the Polizei Hamburg for raising public awareness of the work of the Hamburg police.

  For more information about Craig Russell and his books, please visit www.craigrussell.com

  Also by Craig Russell

  The Jan Fabel Novels:

  Blood Eagle

  A Fear of Dark Water

  Eternal

  The Carnival Master

  The Valkyrie Song

  The Lennox Novels:

  The Long Glasgow Kiss

  The Deep Dark Sleep

  Craig Russell

  BROTHER

  GRIMM

  For Wendy

  Acknowledgements

  I had a lot of fun spinning this dark yarn. I would like to thank everyone who both helped me and made the experience even more fun:

  First and foremost, my wife, Wendy, who was a great enthusiast of Brother Grimm from the start, and whose support and comments on the first draft helped make this a better book. My children, Jonathan and Sophie, my thriller-fan mother, Helen, and my sister Marion. I owe special thanks to Bea Black and Colin Black, to Alice Aird and Tony Burke, and to Holger and Lotte Unger for their friendship, support and invaluable advice.

  I am enormously grateful to my agent, Carole Blake, whose energy, commitment and drive has made the Jan Fabel series an international success, as well as Oli Munson and David Eddy of Blake Friedmann Literary Agency. Paul Sidey, my editor, has always been a great champion of my work and I thank him for all of the time, effort and thought he has devoted to this book. Thanks also to my accountants, Larry Sellyn and Elaine Dyer, who have offered such key advice and support throughout my writing career.

  Again, I owe great thanks to the excellent Dr Bernd Rullkötter, my German translator, who worked closely with me on the English as well as the German version of Brother Grimm. Thanks, Bernd, for caring so much, and for all your help.

  I have to make very special mention of the following people who offered their help and support freely and enthusiastically. I offer my deepest gratitude to: Erste Hauptkommissarin Ulrike Sweden of the Polizei Hamburg for reading my first draft and correcting technical inaccuracies as well as for all of the information, help and contacts she supplied; the journalist Anja Sieg who read my manuscript to ensure I got the East Frisian details right, and made a host of other invaluable comments; Dr Anja Lowit, who likewise read and commented on the first draft; Dirk Brandenburg and Birte Hell, both of the Hamburg murder squad; Peter Baustian of the Davidwache police station and Robert Golz of the Hamburger Polizeipräsidium; Katrin Frahm, my German language tutor, who has done a wonderful job in taking my German to new levels; Dagmar Förtsch, of GLS Language Services (and Honorary Consul of the Federal Republic of Germany in Glasgow) for her enthusiastic support and help; Udo Röbel, former editor-in-chief of BILD and now, himself, a crime author, for his enthusiasm and friendship; Menso Heyl, editor-in-chief of Hamburger Abendblatt, for his interest in my work and for sending me an airmail copy every day to help me keep totally up-to-date with events in Hamburg.

  And very special thanks to my German publisher, Marco Schneiders, for his enthusiasm for and commitment to my work.

  I gratefully acknowledge everyone at my publishers in the UK, in Germany and around the world, who has made a positive contribution to the Jan Fabel series.

  And, of course, to all of the people of Hamburg: ich bedanke mich herzlich.

  For more information about Craig Russell and his books, please visit www.craigrussell.com.

  1.

  9.30 a.m., Wednesday, 17 March: Elbstrand beach, Blankenese, Hamburg

  Fabel stroked her cheek gently with his gloved hand. A stupid gesture; probably an inappropriate gesture, but one that he felt was somehow necessary. He saw his finger tremble as it traced the curve of her cheek. He felt something tight and panicky in his chest when he realised just how much she reminded him of his daughter Gabi. He smiled a small, tight, forced smile and felt his lips tremble as the muscles of his face strained under the effort. She looked up at him with her large eyes. Unblinking, azure eyes.

  The panic grew in Fabel. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and tell her that it was all going to be all right. But he couldn’t; and it wasn’t going to be all right. She still held him with her unblinking, unwavering azure gaze.

  Fabel felt Maria Klee’s presence beside him. He withdrew his hand and stood up from his squatting position.

  ‘How old?’ he asked without turning to Maria, keeping his eyes locked with the girl’s.

  ‘Difficult to say. Fifteen, sixteen, I’d guess. We don’t have a name yet.’

  The morning breeze scooped up some of the fine sand of the Blankenese beach and swirled it like a drink stirred in a glass. Some of the grains blew
into the girl’s eyes, settling on the whites, but still she did not blink. Fabel found he could not look any more and tore his gaze away. He shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets and turned his head, looking, for no good reason except to fill his eyes with something other than the image of a murdered girl, up towards the red and white striped spindle of Blankenese lighthouse. He turned back to Maria. He stared into her pale blue-grey candid eyes that never told you much about the person behind them; that sometimes suggested a coldness, a lack of emotion, unless you knew her well. Fabel sighed as if some great pain or sadness had forced the breath from him.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t know if I can do this any more, Maria.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said, looking down at the girl.

  ‘No … I really mean it, Maria. I’ve been doing this job for nearly half my life and sometimes I feel like I’ve had more than a bellyful of it … Christ, Maria – she’s so like Gabi …’

  ‘Why don’t you leave this one to me?’ said Maria. ‘For now, at least. I’ll deal with forensics.’

  Fabel shook his head. He had to stay. He had to look. He had to hurt. Fabel was drawn back to the girl. Her eyes, her hair, her face. He would remember every detail. This face that was too young to wear death would remain in the galleries of his memory, along with all those other faces – some young, some old, all dead – from years of murder inquiries. Not for the first time Fabel found himself resenting the one-way relationship he was forced to have with these people. He knew that, over the coming weeks and months, he would get to know this girl: he would talk with her parents, her siblings, her friends; he would learn her routines, the music she was into, the hobbies she enjoyed. Then he would delve deeper: he would tease solemn secrets from closest friends; he would read the diary she had kept hidden from the world; he would share the thoughts she had chosen not to share; he would read the boys’ names she had doodled in secret. He would build a complete picture of the hopes and dreams, the spirit and personality of the girl who had once lived behind those azure eyes.

  Fabel would know this girl so totally. Yet she would never know him. His awareness of her began with the total extinction of her awareness of anything. Her death. It was Fabel’s job to know the dead.

  Still she gazed at him from the sand. Her clothes were old: not rags, but drab and worn. A baggy sweatshirt with a ghost of a design on its front, and faded jeans. And when the clothes had been new they had been cheap.

  She lay on the sand with her legs partly pulled up under her, her hands folded and resting on her lap. It was as if she had been kneeling on the sand and had toppled over, her posture frozen. But she hadn’t died here. Fabel was sure of it. What he wasn’t sure about was whether her posture was an accidental arrangement of limbs or a deliberate pose struck by whoever had left her there.

  Fabel was snapped back from his bitter thoughts by the approach of Brauner, the head of the Spurensicherung forensics team. Brauner walked across the wooden planking, elevated on bricks, that he had assembled as the sole ingress and egress to the crime locus. Fabel nodded a grim welcome.

  ‘What have we got, Holger?’ Fabel asked.

  ‘Not a lot,’ said Brauner, bleakly. ‘The sand is dry and fine and the wind shifts it about a bit. It literally blows away any forensic traces. I don’t think this is our primary locus … you?’

  Fabel shook his head. Brauner looked down at the girl’s body, his expression clouded. Fabel knew that Brauner too had a daughter and he recognised the gloom in Brauner’s face as a shade of the dull ache he felt himself. Brauner drew a long breath.

  ‘We’ll do a full forensic before we pass her on to Möller for the autopsy.’

  Fabel watched in silence as the white-overalled forensic specialists of the Spurensicherungsteam processed the scene. Like ancient Egyptian embalmers wrapping a mummy, the SpuSi technicians worked on the body, covering every square centimetre in strips of Tesa tape, each of which was numbered and photographed, then transferred to a polythene sheet.

  Once the scene had been processed, the girl’s body was carefully lifted and zippered into the vinyl body bag, hoisted on to a trolley and half pushed, half carried across the yielding sand by two mortuary attendants. Fabel kept his gaze focused on the body bag, an indistinct smudge against the pale colours of the sand, the rocks and the uniforms of the mortuary men, until it disappeared from view. He then turned and looked back along the clean, blond sand towards the slender Blankenese lighthouse, out across the Elbe towards the distant green shores of the Altes Land, then back up at the manicured green terraces of Blankenese, with its elegant, expensive villas.

  It occurred to Fabel that he had never viewed such a desolate scene.

  2.

  9.50 a.m., Wednesday, 17 March: Krankenhaus Mariahilf hospital, Heimfeld, Hamburg

  The Oberschwester chief nurse watched him from the hall. She felt a leaden sensation coalesce in her heart as she did so. He sat, unaware of observation, leaning forward in the bedside chair, his hand resting on the grey-white wrinkled topography of the old woman’s forehead. Occasionally his hand would run gently and slowly through the white hair; and all the while he spoke into her ear in a low, gentle murmur that only the old woman could hear. The chief nurse became aware of one of her subordinates standing behind her. The second nurse also smiled with a bitter sympathy as she took in the scene of middle-aged son and elderly mother wrapped in their own exclusive universe. The chief nurse indicated the scene with a small thrust of her chin.

  ‘He never misses a day …’ She smiled joylessly. ‘None of mine will bother their backsides about me when I’m that age, let me tell you.’

  The other nurse gave a small knowing laugh. The two women stood in silence for a moment, each taking in the same picture, each wrapped up in their individual, dully terrifying thoughts about their own distant futures.

  ‘Can she hear anything he says to her?’ asked the other nurse after a moment.

  ‘No reason to believe she doesn’t. The stroke has all but paralysed her and struck her dumb, but, as far as we know, her faculties are still in order.’

  ‘God … I’d rather die. Imagine being imprisoned in your own body.’

  ‘At least she’s got him,’ said the chief nurse. ‘He brings in those books of his each and every day and reads to her and then spends an hour just sitting there, stroking her hair and talking quietly to her. At least she’s got that.’

  The other nurse nodded and gave a long, sad sigh.

  Inside the room the old woman and her son were both oblivious to the fact that they were being observed by others. She lay unmoving, incapable of moving, on her back, presenting her son, who sat hunched forward in the bedside chair, with her faintly noble profile of high arched brow and aquiline nose. Every now and then, a trickle of saliva would dribble from the corner of the thin lips and the solicitous son would dab it away with a folded handkerchief. He smoothed the hair back from her brow once more and leaned in close again, his lips almost touching her ear and his breath, as he spoke low and soft and gentle, stirring the silver strands of hair on her temple.

  ‘I spoke to the doctor again today, mother. He told me that your condition has stabilised. That’s good, isn’t it, Mutti?’ He didn’t pause for the answer that he knew she was incapable of giving. ‘Anyway, the doctor says that after your big stroke, you had what they call a series of “stuttering” strokes … like tiny little strokes that did the damage. He also said that these are over now and you won’t get any worse if I make sure your medication is maintained.’ He paused and let his breath out slowly. ‘What that means is it would be possible for me to look after you at home. The doctor wasn’t too keen on the idea to start with. But you don’t like strangers looking after you, do you, Mutti? I told the doctor that. I told him that you’d be much better off with me, with your son, at home. I told him I’d be able to arrange for your care when I’m at work, and the rest of the time … well, the rest of the time you’d have me to look after you, wouldn’t yo
u? I told him that the nurse can visit us in the cosy little apartment I’ve bought. The doctor says I might be able to take you home towards the end of the month. Isn’t that great?’

  He let the thought sink in. He scanned the pallid grey eyes that moved sluggishly in the immobile head. If there was any emotion behind the eyes, it could not break through to be read. He drew even closer, eagerly tugging the chair in tighter to the bed, making it squeak on the polished hospital floor. ‘Of course, we both know that it won’t be like I told the doctor, don’t we, mother?’ The voice remained gentle and soothing. ‘But there again, I couldn’t tell the doctor about the other house … our house. Or that what I’ll really do is leave you to lie in your own shit for days on end, could I? Or that I will spend hours exploring what capacity you have left to feel pain. No, no, that wouldn’t do at all, would it, Mutti?’ He gave a small, childlike laugh. ‘I don’t think the doctor would be too keen on me taking you home with me if he knew that, would he? But don’t worry, I won’t tell him if you don’t … but of course you can’t, can you? You see, mother, God has gagged and bound you. It’s a sign. A sign for me.’

  The old woman’s head remained motionless, but a tear oozed from the corner of her eye and sought out the creases in the skin of her temple. He dropped his voice even lower and infused it with a conspiratorial tone. ‘You and I will be together. Alone. And we can talk about the old days. About the old days in our big old house. About when I was a child. When I was weak and you were strong.’ The voice was now a hiss: venom breathed into the ear of the old woman. ‘I’ve done it again, Mutti. Another one. Just like three years ago. But this time, because God has bound you up in the prison of your own hideous body, you can’t interfere. This time you can’t stop me, and I’ll keep on doing it and doing it. It will be our little secret. You will be there at the end, mother, I promise you that. But this is just the beginning …’