Brother Grimm Page 12

  The tale of ‘The Changeling’ is a cautionary one; it is also one of our most ancient. It not only articulates that greatest of fears, to lose one’s child, but also the horror of having something false, malevolent and pernicious inveigled into the family and home. Moreover, it cautions parents that they shall be punished for any lack of vigilance in their care of their charges. The Changeling tale has appeared in countless forms, throughout Germany, the Low Lands, Denmark, Bohemia, Poland and beyond. Even Martin Luther had an unshakeable belief in Changelings and wrote several treatises on how to scald, drown or beat them until the devil came to call them back unto him.

  I shirk not from hard work, but this has been the most challenging tale to re-establish as a living truth. As with each of the tales I have reenacted, I first busied myself assiduously and enthusiastically with the preparations. For this tale, I needed to find two children: one to play the part of the Changeling while the other had to be a true child that I could steal from its mother.

  My brother’s and my researches had brought us to the North of Germany and we had found modest lodgings in a village near the Baltic coast. Lately, whilst in the village, I had observed a young woman with a florid complexion and flaxen hair who exemplified the robust, honest and earnest stupidity of the Northern German peasant. This woman bore with her a newborn child which she carried first in one arm, and then in the other. I knew, from the work of other eminent folklorists, and from my own research, that this habit of changing arms was known as carrying the baby ‘on the switch’. From the Rhineland and Hessen to Mecklenburg and Lower Saxony, it is a widely held superstition that carrying a baby ‘on the switch’ greatly increases the chances of its abduction by the Underground People. I guessed that this child was yet be baptised, and less than six weeks old, which is known to be the preference of the abductors. Moreover, neither this peasant woman nor her family had heeded the four precautions to protect a newborn from the Underground People. I have, of course, enumerated these in my volume Deutsche Mythologie, namely: place a key next to the infant; never leave women alone in the six weeks after giving birth for they are easily swayed by the devil; allow not the mother to sleep during the first six weeks unless someone has come to keep vigil over the child; whenever the mother leaves the room, an article of the father’s clothing, particularly his breeches, should be lain across the child.

  The mother having taken none of these precautions, this then would be the ‘true’ child of the tale and would illustrate most perfectly the abiding truth of the legend and remind the people of this area of the folly of ignoring ancient prohibitions. This child’s abduction presented itself as the comparatively easy part of the plan. I had most closely observed the woman’s routine and had taken detailed notes. I had established that there was a time, immediately before midday, when the babe was left to sleep in the open air while its mother busied herself with household chores. I knew that this was when I could make the substitution. Once stolen away, I would, of course, have no further need of the ‘true’ child and would do away with it swiftly. In its place I would leave a changeling child; this would be more difficult to achieve. Changeling children are known to be coarser than those whose place they have usurped. This is in keeping with them being the progeny of the Underground People, a race so inferior to true mankind and so ugly to behold that they conceal themselves underground, in the night or in the darkest shadows of the forest.

  I pondered this problem for some days until I heard talk of some gypsy folk who had camped close to the village. I knew that the hostility felt towards these people by the villagers would mean that the gypsies dared not venture into the village itself. If, therefore, my plan did not succeed and the villagers did not look to their ancient belief in the Underground People to account for the abduction and substitution, then they would look no further than the gypsies camped nearby. Indeed, I am uncertain if this would, in fact, be a failure to recreate the tale as I recorded it, for I have, in the course of my researches, often wondered if it was, indeed, gypsies and other itinerants who had inspired tales of the Underground People. The mistrust and hostility we instinctively feel towards the foreign and the strange is something I have always held to be a potential tool for manipulation. In this case, ignorant prejudice furnished me with a protection from suspicion.

  I therefore set about a plan to steal away a child, should there be one of a suitable age, from the gypsy encampment …

  Fabel put down the book, still open at the page, on to the coffee table. He felt as if the temperature of the room had dropped a couple of degrees: a malevolent chill that seemed to spring from the open book before him. Here, described in a fictional account, was a plan to abduct and murder based on the Grimms’ recording of ‘The Changeling’ folk tale. The painstaking approach that the fictional Jacob Grimm had taken was reflected in the planning and preparation of this all too real present-day killer. He thought again of the girl on the beach. A too-young life snuffed out to fulfil some twisted fantasy.

  He was jolted back to the here and now by the ringing of his phone.

  ‘Hi, Chef … It’s Anna here. I’ve got an identity for the girl on the beach. And this time I think it’s the real one.’

  19.

  9.45 p.m., Monday, 22 March: Polizeipräsidium, Hamburg

  ‘Blue Eyes’ now had a name: Martha.

  After the last debacle, Anna Wolff had done nothing about contacting the parents yet. She had, however, secured from the Bundeskriminalamt a photograph of a girl who had been missing since the previous Tuesday: Martha Schmidt, from Kassel, in Hessen. Fabel stared at the photograph Anna had handed him: it was a blow up of a photo-booth image. There was no doubt. This time the photograph didn’t set alarm bells ringing in Fabel’s mind; instead it filled him with a profound sadness.

  Anna Wolff stood next to Fabel. Her large brown eyes lacked their usual sparkle and she looked pale and drawn. Fabel guessed she must have been working almost non-stop until she had uncovered the girl’s identity. When she spoke, her voice dragged with a leaden tiredness. ‘She was reported missing on the Tuesday, but was probably taken before then.’

  Fabel’s expression shaped a question.

  ‘The parents are both drug users,’ explained Anna. ‘Martha had a habit of disappearing for days on end and then turning up. The Hessen police didn’t give this last disappearance immediate priority. Both parents have already been reported twice for neglecting Martha, but I get the feeling that the father is hardly ever there now.’

  Fabel drew a deep breath and read through the file notes faxed up from Kassel. The parents were junkies and committed petty theft to support their habit; the mother had been known to resort to prostitution. The German underclass: ‘underground people’. And from Kassel: for many years home to the Brothers Grimm. Kassel, a normally unremarkable, quiet city, had recently been in the news because of the ‘Rotenburg Cannibal’ case that had shocked a Germany that had believed itself unshockable. Armin Meiwes had been convicted of assisting in the suicide of Bernd Brandes, who had volunteered to be eaten. Meiwes had videotaped the whole event: amputating Brandes’s penis, sitting down together with him to eat the dismembered organ, then drugging him, stabbing him to death and butchering him into cuts of meat which he froze. Before his arrest, Meiwes had consumed nearly twenty kilos of his victim – if Brandes could be described as a victim. He had been a more than willing volunteer, one of many who had applied to Meiwes to be eaten. They had met through a gay cannibal website.

  A gay cannibal website. Sometimes, despite the nature of his work, Fabel found it almost impossible to come to terms with the world that had suddenly formed around him. Every kind of sick desire and appetite seemed to have a place to feed. And now there was a new grim tale to be associated with Kassel.

  ‘You’d better get the parents, or at least the mother, up to make an identification,’ said Fabel.

  ‘I’ve been in touch with Martha’s social-services caseworker,’ said Anna. ‘She’s going to break t
he news to her parents, if they care, and then get one of them up for a formal ID.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why she didn’t emerge until now. I’m guessing that she didn’t see much of school.’ Fabel looked at the photograph again; at the face he had gazed into on the beach at Blankenese. In the photograph, Martha was smiling but the eyes still looked sad; too old and experienced for her sixteen years. A girl much the same age as his own daughter, yet who looked out on to the world through those bright azure eyes and saw too much. ‘Any idea of exactly when and where she disappeared?’

  ‘No. Like I said, sometime between nine p.m. on the Sunday and … well, when she was reported on the Tuesday, I suppose. Do you want me to go down there … to Kassel, I mean, and start asking around?’

  ‘No.’ Fabel rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘Leave that to the Hessen police, at least for the moment. There’s nothing of any worth to be found down there, unless the local boys get a witness to her being taken. But get them to check out anyone Martha had contact with who has a Hamburg connection. My guess is that our killer is from here – from Hamburg or close by – and that he has no direct connection with Martha Schmidt or anyone to do with her. But get as much detail from them on her final movements as possible.’ He smiled at his subordinate. ‘Go home, Anna, and get some sleep. We’ll pick this up in the morning.’

  Anna nodded dully and left. Fabel sat on at his desk, took out his sketch pad and scored out the name ‘Blue Eyes’ and replaced it with ‘Martha Schmidt’. On his way out, he pinned the photograph on to the incident board in the conference room.

  20.

  11.10 a.m., Tuesday, 23 March: Institut für Rechtsmedizin, Eppendorf, Hamburg

  The father was clearly no longer part of the picture.

  Ulrike Schmidt was a small woman who looked as if she were well into her forties but Fabel knew, from the information supplied by the Kassel police, that she was only in her mid-thirties. She had probably been pretty once, but she now wore the hard-faced weariness of the habitual drug user. The blue of her eyes lacked any lustre and the shadows beneath them had a jaundiced tinge. Her hair was lifeless blonde and she had scraped it back from her face, gathering it into a hasty ponytail; the jacket and trousers she wore had probably passed for smart until comparatively recently, but had not passed for fashionable for a decade or more. It was clear to Fabel that she had fished her outfit out from a meagre wardrobe in an attempt to dress appropriately for the occasion.

  And the occasion was to identify her dead daughter.

  ‘I came up by train …’ she said, for the sake of saying something, as they waited for the body to be brought to the viewing room. Fabel smiled bleakly. Anna said nothing.

  Before coming to the mortuary in the Institut für Rechtsmedizin, Fabel and Anna had sat with Ulrike Schmidt in the Polizeipräsidium and asked her about her daughter. Fabel remembered how he had prepared himself to delve into every corner of the life of this dead girl, this stranger to him, whom he would know intimately. But he never did get to know the girl on the beach. For a few hours she had been someone else, then she had become nobody again. As they had sat in the Mordkommission’s interview room, Anna and Fabel had tried to add dimensions to the name ‘Martha Schmidt’: to make a dead girl live once more, in their minds. The autopsy had revealed that Martha had been sexually active and they had asked her mother about boyfriends, about who she was friendly with, what she did in her free time – and in the time when she should have been at school. But Ulrike Schmidt’s answers had been vague, uncertain; as if she had been describing an acquaintance, someone on the periphery of her awareness, rather than her own flesh and blood: her daughter.

  Now they sat in the ante-room of the state mortuary, waiting to be called to identify Martha’s body. And all Ulrike Schmidt’s conversation revolved around was her journey. ‘Then I took the U-Bahn from the Hauptbahnhof,’ she said, dully.

  When they were called forward and the sheet was folded back from the face of the body on the trolley, Ulrike Schmidt looked down on it without expression. For a moment, Fabel felt a small panic rise in his chest as he wondered if this was going to be another failed identification of the ‘Changeling’ body. Then Ulrike Schmidt nodded.

  ‘Yes … yes, that’s my Martha.’ No tears. No sobbing. She stared emptily at the face on the trolley and her hand moved towards it, towards the cheek, but checked itself and fell limply to her side.

  ‘Are you sure this is your daughter?’ There was an edge to Anna’s voice and Fabel fired a warning look in her direction.

  ‘Yes. That’s Martha.’ Ulrike Schmidt didn’t look up from the face of her daughter. ‘She was a good girl. A really good girl. She looked after things. After herself.’

  ‘The day she went missing,’ said Anna, ‘did anything unusual happen? Or did you see anyone unusual hanging about?’

  Ulrike Schmidt shook her head. She turned to Anna for a moment, her eyes dull and dead. ‘The police already asked me that. I mean the police at home, in Kassel.’ She turned back to the dead girl on the trolley. The girl who died because she looked like someone else. ‘I told them. About that day … that I was having a bad day. I was kind of out of it. Martha went out, I think.’

  Anna stared at Ulrike Schmidt’s profile. Hard. Schmidt was oblivious to Anna’s silent reproach.

  ‘We’ll be able to release the body to you soon, Frau Schmidt,’ said Fabel. ‘I take it that you would like to make arrangements for her to be taken to Kassel for her funeral?’

  ‘What’s the point? Dead is dead. She doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to her now.’ Ulrike Schmidt turned to Fabel. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but not from grief. ‘Is there somewhere nice here?’

  Fabel nodded.

  ‘Don’t you want to be able to visit her?’ A sharp, bitter incredulity edged Anna’s voice. ‘To visit her grave?’

  Ulrike Schmidt shook her head. ‘I wasn’t meant to be a mother. I was a lousy mother when she was alive, I don’t see how I’ll be a better one now she’s dead. She deserved better.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I rather think she did.’

  ‘Anna!’ Fabel snapped, but Ulrike Schmidt was either ignoring Anna’s reproach or thought it fair comment. She stared at Martha’s body for a silent moment, then turned to Fabel.

  ‘Is there anything I have to sign?’ she asked.

  After Ulrike Schmidt left to catch the train home, Fabel and Anna walked out of the Institut für Rechtsmedizin and into the day. A milky sheet of cloud diffused the sun into a soft-edged brightness and Fabel put on his sunglasses. He rested his hands on his hips and looked up, squinting at the sky; he turned to Anna.

  ‘Don’t do that again, Kommissarin Wolff. Whatever you think of the likes of Frau Schmidt, you cannot voice your opinions like that. Everyone grieves in a different way.’

  Anna snorted. ‘She wasn’t grieving at all. Just a smack-head waiting for her next fix. She doesn’t even care what happens to her daughter’s body.’

  ‘It’s not our place to judge, Anna. Unfortunately it’s all part of being a Mordkommission officer. We don’t just deal with death, but the aftermath of death too. Its consequences. And sometimes that means being diplomatic. Biting our tongues. If you can’t handle that then you have no place here. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, Chef.’ She rubbed her scalp frustratedly through the short black hair. ‘It’s just … it’s just that she’s supposed to be a mother, for God’s sake. There’s supposed to be some kind of … I don’t know … instinct at work there. To protect your kids. To care about them.’

  ‘It doesn’t always work that way.’

  ‘She let this happen to Martha.’ Anna’s tone was defiant. ‘She obviously knocked her about when she was a kid … there’s the twist fracture to the wrist from when Martha was about five and God knows what else in the meantime. But, worse than that, she let that poor girl fend for herself in a dangerous bloody world. The result is that she was taken by a maniac, spent God know
s how long terrified witless and then she’s killed. And that cow hasn’t the heart to even give her a decent burial, let alone visit her grave.’ She shook her head, as if in disbelief. ‘When I think of the Ehlers, a family torn to pieces for three long years because they have no body to bury, no grave to grieve over … and then that cold-hearted bitch who doesn’t give a toss about what we do with her daughter’s body.’

  ‘Whatever we think of her, Anna, she’s the mother of a murdered child. She didn’t kill Martha and we can’t even prove that her neglect of her was a contributory factor. And that means we still have to treat her like any other grieving parent. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Hauptkommissar.’ Anna paused. ‘It said in the Kassel report that the mother was an occasional prostitute. You don’t think that she swapped over to pimping for her own daughter? I mean, we know that Martha had sexual partners.’

  ‘I doubt it. From what I can see from the report it was just, as you said, an occasional thing to feed a habit when necessary. I doubt that Frau Schmidt would be organised enough for anything else. Anyway, you heard the way she spoke about Martha. It clearly wasn’t a close relationship and I get the feeling mother and daughter went their own ways. Did their own thing, as it were.’

  ‘Maybe Martha was the organised one,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe she was in business for herself.’

  ‘I doubt it. There’s no suggestion of that in any of the police or social services reports. She had no habit to support. No. I just think that she was trying to be as normal a teenager as her family background would allow.’ Fabel fell silent for a moment, thinking about his own daughter, Gabi, and how much Martha Schmidt had reminded him of her. Three girls of roughly the same age, who looked like each other: Martha Schmidt, Paula Ehlers, and Gabi. Some part deep within him shuddered at the thought. A universe of unlimited possibilities. ‘Let’s get back to the Präsidium … I’ve got a bakery to visit.’