JF02 - Brother Grimm (27 page)

‘This is my interview, okay? You’re here to watch and learn, is that clear?’

Hermann sighed and nodded. ‘Does Herr Klatt know we’re here? The guy from KriPo Norderstedt?’ Anna didn’t answer and was out of the car and halfway up the path to the front door before Hermann had got his seat belt off.

Anna Wolff had called Frau Ehlers before making the trip up. She didn’t want them to think they’d found Paula’s body or that there had been any other significant development in the case. It was just that Anna wanted to go over a few details with them again. What Anna had not disclosed was that the central puzzle she was trying to solve was why it was Paula’s name that had been placed in the
‘changeling’ victim’s hand. Most of all, she felt an overwhelming impulse to be the one to find Paula. To bring her home to her family, even if it meant bringing home a corpse.

Anna was surprised to find that Herr Ehlers was also at home. A pale blue boiler suit, dulled by a film of very fine brick-dust or something similar, hung baggily on his tall, lean frame. He brought out a kitchen chair and sat on that, rather than stain the upholstery in the living room. Anna guessed that Frau Ehlers had phoned him at his work and he had come straight over. Again there was an intensity in the postures of both Ehlers which Anna found upsetting and annoying: she had made it very clear that they had no news. Anna introduced Henk Hermann. Before Frau Ehlers sat down, she went into the kitchen and re-emerged carrying a tray with a coffee pot, cups and some biscuits.

Anna got straight to the point. And the point was Heinrich Fendrich, Paula’s former German teacher.

‘We’ve been over this so many times before.’ Frau Ehlers’s face looked tired and drawn, as if from three years of insufficient sleep. ‘We cannot believe that Herr Fendrich had anything whatsoever to do with Paula’s disappearance.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ Henk Hermann spoke from the corner, where he sat resting a coffee cup on one knee. Anna fired a look in his direction, which he seemed not to have noticed. ‘I mean, is there something in particular that makes you so certain?’

Herr Ehlers shrugged. ‘Afterwards … I mean, after Paula went missing, he was very helpful and supportive. He was genuinely very, very worried about Paula. In a way that he couldn’t have faked. Even when the police kept questioning him all the
time, we knew they were looking in the wrong place.’

Anna nodded thoughtfully. ‘Listen, I know this is an uncomfortable question to answer, but did you ever suspect that Herr Fendrich’s interest in Paula was, well, inappropriate?’

Herr and Frau Ehlers exchanged a look that Anna couldn’t read. Then Herr Ehlers shook his ash-blond head. ‘No. No, we didn’t.’

‘Herr Fendrich seemed to be the only teacher Paula had time for, unfortunately,’ said Frau Ehlers. ‘He came to see us … it must have been about six months before Paula went missing. I thought it was strange, a teacher coming to the house and all, but he was very … I don’t know what you’d call it … very
definite
that Paula was very bright, especially in German, and that we should come up to the school for a meeting with the principal. But none of Paula’s other teachers seemed to think she was anything special and we didn’t want her to set her sights too high only to be disappointed later.’

Anna and Hermann sat in her VW outside the Ehlerses’ house. Anna gripped the steering wheel and sat unmoving, her gaze focused on the wind-screen.

‘Do I sense we just hit some kind of dead end?’ Hermann asked.

Anna gazed at him blankly for a moment before turning the key in the ignition decisively. ‘Not yet. I’ve a detour to make first …’

Given Fendrich’s sensitivity to further police investigation, Anna again decided to phone ahead, this time from her cell phone as she drove south from Norderstedt. She had rung the school he was now
teaching in, but didn’t disclose that she was calling on behalf of the Polizei Hamburg. Fendrich was less than happy when he came to the phone but agreed to meet them at the café in the Rahlstedt Bahnhofsvorplatz.

They parked in a Parkplatz a block away from the café, and walked through alternating shade and bright sunlight as the patchy clouds intermittently shuttered the sun. Fendrich was already there when they arrived, contemplatively stirring a cappuccino. When they entered Fendrich looked up and eyed Hermann with a disinterested suspicion. Anna introduced her new partner and they sat down at the round table.

‘What is it you want from me, Kommissarin Wolff?’ Fendrich’s tone was of weary protest.

Anna slid her sunglasses on to the top of her head. ‘I want to find Paula, Herr Fendrich. Paula is either alive and has been subjected to God knows what torment for the past three years, or, and we both know this is more likely, she’s lying dead somewhere. Hidden from the world and from her family who just want to grieve for her. I don’t know what the basis of your relationship with her was, but I do believe that, at the bottom of it, you truly cared about Paula. I just need to find her. And what I want from you, Herr Fendrich, is anything you can give me that may point me in the right direction.’

Fendrich stirred his cappuccino once more, gazing down at the froth. When he looked up, he said: ‘Are you familiar with the playwright George Bernard Shaw?’

Anna shrugged. ‘That would be more my boss’s thing. Kriminalhauptkommissar Fabel is into all things English.’

‘Shaw was Irish, actually. He once said “Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach.” It basically condemned all teachers as failures. But it also denied that one can “do” teaching. I didn’t drift into this profession, Frau Wolff. I was called to it. I love it. Every day I face class after class of young minds. Minds yet to be fully formed and developed.’ He leaned back and gave a bitter laugh. His hand still rested on his spoon and his attention was back on the surface of his coffee. ‘Of course, there is so much – well, pollution, I suppose you’d call it. Cultural pollution … from television, the Internet and all of the throwaway technologies that are heaped on young people today. But every now and again one comes across a fresh, clear mind that is just waiting for its horizons to expand, to explode.’ Fendrich’s eyes were no longer lifeless. ‘Do you have any idea what it is like to be under police investigation for a crime like this? No. No you don’t. Nor can you have any idea what it is like to be in that position when you’re a teacher. Someone whom parents trust with those who are most precious to them. Your colleague, Herr Klatt, nearly destroyed my career. Nearly destroyed me. Pupils would avoid being alone with me. Parents and even my colleagues would regard me with undisguised hostility.’ He paused, as if he been running and then could not work out where it was he was going. He looked at both police officers. ‘I am no paedophile. I have no sexual interest in young girls or young boys. No
physical
interest. It is their minds that I care about. And Paula’s mind was a diamond. A crystalline clear, fearsomely sharp and penetrating intellect in the rough. It needed refining and polishing, but it was outstanding.’

‘If that is so,’ said Anna, ‘then I don’t understand
why you seem to be the only one to have seen that. No other teacher saw Paula as anything other than an average, if that, student. Even her parents seemed to think you were barking up the wrong tree.’

‘You’re right. No one else saw it. And that was because they weren’t looking. Paula was often seen as lazy and dreamy, rather than slow. Exactly what happens when a gifted child is trapped in an educational environment – or a domestic environment, for that matter – that isn’t intellectually challenging enough. The other thing is that Paula’s giftedness was manifesting itself in my subject – she had a natural ear and talent for the German language. And when she wrote … when she wrote it was like singing. Anyway, as well as those who didn’t see it there were those who didn’t want to see it.’

‘Her parents?’ said Henk Hermann.

‘Exactly. Paula wrote a story as an assignment for me. It was, well, almost a fairy tale. She danced through our language. There, in that small piece of writing in a childish hand, I saw someone who made me feel like a pedestrian. I took it with me when I met her parents and got them to read it. Nothing. It meant nothing to them. Her father asked me what good were stories when it came to her getting a job.’ Fendrich suddenly looked as if all the energy that had briefly fired within him had ebbed away. ‘But Paula’s dead now. Like you say, you know it, I know it.’

‘Why do you know it? What makes you so certain that, if she was as intellectually stifled as you say, she didn’t just run away?’ asked Hermann.

‘Because she didn’t write to me. Or to anyone else. If she had run away from home, I am absolutely certain that she would have left a letter, a note …
something written. As I said, it was as if the written word had been created for Paula. She would not have taken such a major step without putting something down on paper to mark it. She would have written to me.’

The three left the café simultaneously. Hermann and Anna both shook Fendrich’s hand and started back towards the Parkplatz. Fendrich had walked to the café and the school lay in the opposite direction, yet he seemed to hesitate at the café doorway. Anna and Hermann had only gone a few metres when they heard Fendrich call out ‘Kriminalkommissarin Wolff!’

There was something about Fendrich’s body language, as if he lingered on the threshold of something other than the café, that told Anna she needed to handle this alone. She handed Hermann her car keys.

‘Do you mind?’

Hermann shrugged and headed off towards the car. Fendrich met Anna halfway.

‘Kommissarin Wolff. Can I tell you something? Something off the record?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can promise—’

Fendrich cut her off, as if he didn’t want an excuse for not confiding whatever it was he had to confide. ‘There was something. Something I didn’t tell the police at the time because … well, I suppose because it would have looked bad.’

Anna tried to keep the impatience out of her expression, but failed.

‘There was nothing in my relationship with Paula that was inappropriate, I swear to you. But shortly before Paula disappeared I gave her a gift. A book. I didn’t say anything at the time because I knew that detective, Klatt, would twist its meaning.’

‘What was it?’ asked Anna. ‘Which book did you give Paula as a gift?’

‘I wanted her to understand the foundations of the German literary tradition. I gave her a copy of
Children’s and Household Tales
. By the Brothers Grimm.’

The sky was now more blue and Hamburg seemed bathed in a less sterile brightness, although the sun intermittently veiled itself in scattered patches of milky cloud.

In a media city like Hamburg, Fabel always had to be careful about discussing cases in public, but there were two places that he liked to use as unofficial venues for team meetings. There was the Schnell-Imbiss snack stand down on the Hafen, run by an ex-cop and fellow Frisian friend of Fabel’s. And there was the café that sat across from the Winterhuder Fährhaus. Tucked in behind the bridge, the café had an outdoor area for sitting that stretched along the side of the Alsterstreek waterway and looked across to the spire of St Johannis. On the other side of the white-painted iron fence, two swans nosed the water disinterestedly where a previous café customer had tossed broken-up crusts into it. The outdoor decor comprised white polypropylene tables and chairs shaded by parasols advertising cigarettes, but the café was both handy for the Präsidium and far enough away from it to offer a change of scene.

There were six of them in total, and Fabel pulled
two chairs over from a vacant table so that everyone could sit together. Anna and Maria were used to Fabel’s alfresco briefings, while the two Sex Crime SoKo members, Petra Maas and Hans Rödger, seemed nonplussed by the surroundings. But the expression on Henk Hermann’s face suggested that he felt he had just been admitted into a highly exclusive and rather secretive club.

The waiter came and took their orders for coffee. He greeted Fabel by name and chatted briefly about the weather. He had, of course, no idea that this group were members of the Mordkommission, and probably dismissed the murder squad detectives as a bunch of executives taking a break from a seminar. Fabel waited until the waiter withdrew before addressing his team.

‘We’re not getting this right. I know you’re all putting all your energies into this inquiry, but we seem to be generating more heat than light. We have three possible suspects: Fendrich, the teacher; the author, Weiss, who is a long shot; and then there’s our prime suspect, Olsen. But when you take them individually, none seems to fit entirely.’

Fabel paused as the waiter brought the coffees over to the table.

‘What we may be overlooking,’ continued Fabel, ‘is that we may be dealing with two killers working in tandem. That would make sense of Henk’s theory about the second set of footprints at the Naturpark murder scene. Maybe we were wrong to dismiss those as unrelated.’

‘Or it could be that we’ve got a principal killer and a copycat?’ said Hermann, tentatively.

Fabel shook his head. ‘As well as the “theme” of the murders being absolutely consistent, we have a
direct forensic link between all murders. The small pieces of yellow paper found at each scene are not only identical, they seem to have been cut from a single piece of paper. And the handwriting is a match, too. Two killers working in tandem would perhaps explain Olsen being the murderer in the Naturpark and someone else doing the other two, but only one hand writing the notes.’