Maria Klee leaned her back against the door of her apartment, as if adding her weight to the barrier between her inner space and the world beyond. The food had been great; the date had been a disaster. They had met for dinner at the Restaurant Eisenstein, a stylishly converted former ships’-propeller factory. It was one of Maria’s favourite places to eat and, being in Ottensen, it was handy for her. Her date had been Oskar, a lawyer she had met through mutual friends. Oskar had been intelligent, attentive, charming and attractive. In fact, as a prospective boyfriend he couldn’t have been better qualified.
But whenever she had felt that he was invading her personal space, she had recoiled. It had been like this every time since she had been stabbed. Every date. Every encounter with a man. Her boss, Fabel, did not have a clue about it; could not be allowed to know about it. She knew herself that there was a real danger that it could affect her effectiveness as a police officer. And whatever the bastard who stabbed her had taken away from her, he wasn’t going to take away her career. Now that Werner was on sick leave recovering from Olsen’s attack, Maria was Fabel’s sole number two officer. And she wasn’t going to let him down. She couldn’t let him down.
But deep in her gut a dark fire of dread burned remorselessly: what would happen when it came to it? What would happen when she was again faced with a dangerous offender, which was almost certain to happen sooner or later? Would she ever be able to hack it again?
In the meantime, with each new date, Maria had to fight down the panic that any threat of intimacy with a man brought. Oskar had been polite right up to the end, when at last the time came when they could bring the evening to an end without it being obviously and embarrassingly premature. He had driven her home and dropped her at the door to her apartment building. They had kissed briefly as she said goodnight: she had not suggested he come in for coffee and he had clearly not expected it.
Maria slipped off her coat and threw her keys down into the wooden bowl next to the door. Absent-mindedly her hand fiddled with the shoulder strap of her dress before it found its way to her chest, just below the sternum, and her fingers rubbed against the silk of her dress. She could feel nothing through the fine silk but she knew it was there. Her scar. The mark he had made on her when he had sunk the blade into her abdomen.
Maria gave a small jump when there was a knock at the door. Then she gave an irritated sigh. Oskar. She thought he’d taken the hint. She put the door on the chain before opening it. She felt almost disappointed when she saw that it wasn’t her date. Unhitching the chain, she held the door wide to admit Anna Wolff and Henk Hermann.
‘What’s up?’ she asked, but she was already reaching into the drawer of the cabinet by the door where she kept her service SIG-Sauer.
‘Our literary friend has been busy again. We’ve got a male victim. This time in Sternschanzen Park – under the water tower there.’
‘You notify Fabel?’
‘Yep. But he’s in Ostfriesland. He told me to get you out to the locus right away to start things moving. He’s heading back now and will meet us at the Präsidium later.’ Anna smiled as she watched Maria, her SIG-Sauer in one hand as she gazed down at her black evening dress, as if it would suddenly come to her where she could clip the holster. ‘Nice dress. We’ll wait while you get changed.’
Maria smiled her thanks and headed towards the bedroom.
‘Oh, and Maria,’ said Anna, ‘this one’s sweet – the bastard’s gouged his eyes out.’
The Schutzpolizei and the Spurensicherungsteam had already put up a white screen barrier fifty metres out from the murder scene. The body itself was protected by a second ring of forensic screens. The scene was lit up by arc lights and the low hum of the mobile generator that powered them buzzed in the background. Sternschanzen Park remained an ongoing battleground between the young, upwardly mobile families who were moving into the increasingly trendy area, and the drug dealers and users who haunted the Park after dark. Tonight, the arc-light-illuminated trees loomed menacingly above the scene and, beyond the trees, the red-brick Wasserturm water tower thrust upwards into the night. It was, Maria noted, an almost identical setup to the last death scene, in the Winterhuder Stadtpark, in the shadow of the Planetarium: also originally a water tower. The killer was trying to tell them something. Maria cursed the fact that she didn’t share Fabel’s ability to interpret the perverse vocabulary of the psychotic.
The duty SpuSi forensic team leader wasn’t Brauner, but a younger man she had not met before. Maria forced the thought that this was the night for deputies from her head. As she entered the protected scene, her hands sheathed in latex gloves and her feet encased in forensic overshoes, she and the forensic team leader exchanged businesslike nods and he introduced himself as Grueber. He wore glasses behind which large, dark eyes glittered; he was almost boyish-looking with a pale complexion and very dark hair that flopped carelessly over his high, broad brow. Maria mentally christened him ‘Harry Potter’.
In the centre of the protected scene a man lay, as if laid out by an undertaker, in a pale grey suit, white shirt and gold-coloured tie. His hands were folded across his chest and a large lock of blonde hair had been placed between them, just as the rose had been left between Laura von Klosterstadt’s hands. Beneath the folded hands, Maria could see a small bloom of dark red on the white shirt.
The eyes were gone. The bruised lids sagged into the sockets, not fully covering them. Blood had crusted around where the eyes had been, but not as much as Maria would have expected. Maria found that she was drawn to the eyeless face. It was as if taking away the eyes had taken away the humanity. Even if he had been lying with his eyes closed, there would have remained something human about the corpse.
‘Shot?’ she asked Grueber, indicating the bloodstain under the hands. There were no other obvious wounds on the body to suggest a struggle or a frenzied knife attack.
‘I haven’t examined it yet,’ Grueber, the forensic chief said; he moved round the body and knelt down beside it. ‘Could be a bullet, or it could be a single stab. But whatever removed the eyes wasn’t sharp. My guess is that they were forced out by the killer’s thumbs. You’ve got a real “hands-on” killer here.’ He stood up and turned to face Maria fully. ‘The victim is about thirty-five to forty, male, obviously, one metre seventy-seven tall, and I’d say he’s somewhere about seventy-five kilos. There’s capillary rupture around the nose and lips as well as the obvious strangulation trauma to the neck, so that looks like our cause of death.’
‘The thing with the eyes. Pre- or post-mortem?’
‘Difficult to say at the moment, but the relative lack of blood would suggest it was done after death or immediately before. Although there wouldn’t be masses of blood anyway.’
Anna Wolff came into the canopy with Henk Hermann. She winced as she looked at the eyeless face. Hermann knelt down by the body.
‘I’ll bet analysis will prove that this is the missing section of Laura von Klosterstadt’s hair.’ He turned to Grueber. ‘Is it okay to move the hands? I’m guessing we’ll find a note from our killer under one of them.’
‘Let me do it,’ said Grueber. ‘Like I said, I reckon your killer is very “hands on”. Maybe the victim got his hands on the killer in return. We could have skin cells under the fingernails.’ He carefully eased up one hand and laid it slightly to one side, then removed the hair and put it into an evidence bag. He lifted the second hand. A small slip of yellow notepaper lay beneath it.
‘That’s it,’ said Hermann. Grueber used tweezers to lift the slip and place it in a clear plastic evidence bag. He handed it to Hermann who turned it to the arc light and peered at it. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Lass mir dein Haar herunter. Again the writing was small, tight and in the same red ink.
‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.’ Hermann read it out loud.
‘Great,’ said Maria. ‘So he’s chalked up number four.’
‘Number five,’ said Anna, ‘if you include Paula Ehlers.’
Grueber examined the shirt front, carefully easing open a button and looking at the wound below. He shook his head. ‘Weird . . . he wasn’t shot. Looks like a single stab wound. Why didn’t he defend himself?’
‘And what’s the thing with the eyes?’ Henk Hermann. ‘It looks like our guy is collecting trophies now.’
‘No,’ said Maria, looking up at the water tower. ‘He’s not taken them as trophies. This –’ she indicated the corpse with a slight movement of her head ‘– is meant to be the Prince. In the Rapunzel fairy tale, the Princess is locked away in a tower by her enchantress stepmother. When she finds out that Rapunzel and the Prince are having secret trysts, the enchantress tricks the Prince and, as he falls from the tower, his eyes are pierced by thorns and he is blinded.’
Anna and Henk made impressed faces.
Maria smiled a bitter smile. ‘Fabel’s not the only one who’s been reading up on his fairy tales . . .’
By the time Fabel made it to the Präsidium, they already had an identity for the eyeless man in Sternschanzen Park – Bernd Ungerer, a catering-equipment salesman from Ottensen – and photographs of the body and the scene had been processed and were up on the inquiry board. Fabel had called Maria on his cell phone and asked her to assemble the whole team, including Petra Maas, Hans Rödger and Klatt, the Norderstedt KriPo officer.
It was two in the morning when everyone was gathered in the Mordkommission’s main office. Everyone looked as if they were under the influence of the same cocktail of tiredness, adrenalin and coffee. All except the newest team member, Henk Hermann, who couldn’t have looked fresher, or more eager.
Once Maria had gone through all they knew about the victim and the forensic details to date, Fabel scanned the incident board. He moved back and forth between the von Klosterstadt murder scene and the Sternschanzen images, then to the other scene-of-crime images from the Naturpark Harburger Berge and the Martha Schmidt body on Blankenese beach. There was what seemed like an interminable silence, and then he turned to the team.
‘Our killer is trying to tell us something,’ he said at last. ‘I couldn’t work out what it was, and then the water towers gave it away. He’s linking the murders. Not just with the Grimm fairy-tale theme. He’s telling us what he’s going to do next . . . or at least he’s dropping hints.’ Fabel moved over to the Martha Schmidt images. He slammed his hand against the image of the dead girl. ‘We’ve always suspected that he killed Paula Ehlers. Well, now I’m convinced of it. That’s why he used the changeling story for Martha Schmidt. He chose Martha because she looked so much like Paula Ehlers and themed the death with “The Changeling” Grimm fairy tale . . . to show us that there’s a body we haven’t found. He used Martha’s face as an advertisement that he’d killed Paula.’ Fabel paused and laid his hand on a second picture: a general shot of the Elbstrand beach where Martha had been found. ‘But he wasn’t just being retrospective in his confessions, he was being predictive.’ Fabel pointed to the background of the shot, where the terraces of Blankenese rose steeply from the shore. Part of a building jutted out above the trees and bushes. ‘This is the swimming-pool annexe to Laura von Klosterstadt’s villa. He had already chosen Laura as a victim and posed Martha’s body in sight of Laura’s house. Laura was already his Sleeping Beauty, sequestered from the likes of poor Martha, the “underground people” changeling – elevated above her by wealth and by social standing.’ He moved over to the von Klosterstadt murder section of the board. ‘And here we have a victim that is posed beneath an icon from two Grimm fairy tales, the tower. He’s mixing his metaphors here, but in a controlled way. The Planetarium in Winterhuder Stadtpark doubles as Rapunzel’s tower and Dornröschen’s castle . . .’ He moved to the close-up image of where Laura von Klosterstadt’s hair had been cut. ‘And then he places her hair in the hands of his next victim, and gouges out his eyes to fit with the Rapunzel tale.’
‘What about the double murder in the Naturpark Harburger Berge? How is that connected?’ asked Anna.
Fabel rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. ‘It could be that the connection is confined to the location. Two murders, one place: two characters, one story. The link is the story, “Hänsel und Gretel”. But I don’t think that’s it. To begin with, I actually thought that the killings in the Naturpark sat removed from the other murders; that they were inspired by Olsen’s sexual jealousy. But that’s not it either. I believe that the Naturpark murders are a single act and that they are connected to another or others – but not with the murders to date. The link is with some murder still to be committed, and I believe that there will be a cross-reference – another fairy-tale link – back to one or more of the killings we’ve already seen. And I have a feeling that the link we shall see emerge has something to do with the missing eyes.’
After the briefing, Fabel sat in his office alone. The only illumination was his desk lamp, which cast a bright disc on to the desktop. Into this pool of light, Fabel placed the sketchbook on which he had already replicated the inquiry board, adding his own, more subjective comments.
Everything else was shut out. His entire consciousness telescoped down into this small, bright focus. Fabel updated the sketchbook with the details of the latest killing. More would emerge about this newest victim over the coming days, but for now they knew that Bernd Ungerer was a forty-two-year-old salesman for a catering equipment company based in Frankfurt. Ungerer, apparently, was the company’s sole representative for Hamburg and the North of Germany. He was married, with three children, and lived in Ottensen. Fabel stared at the bald facts he had laid out: in what kind of world did a middle-aged salesman end up stabbed in the heart and with his eyes ripped from his head?
Fabel gazed long and hard at the bright white page with its black felt-tip pen notations and its red felt-tip pen lines, connecting names, locations, comments. He started to write the bizarre formulae of the investigation: Paula Ehlers + Martha Schmidt = The Changeling; Martha Schmidt ‘placed beneath’ + Laura von Klosterstadt ‘placed above’ = The Changeling/Sleeping Beauty. Hanna Grünn + Markus Schiller = Hänsel und Gretel; Bernd Ungerer + Laura von Klosterstadt = Rapunzel.
There was at least one equation missing. He stared at the page, willing it to come out at him. He wrote down: Grünn/Schiller + Bernd Ungerer? = ? He scored it out and wrote Grünn/Schiller + ? = ?; Ungerer + ? = ? No matter how hard Fabel stared at it, the page refused to yield more. He felt an anxiety clench tight in his belly: the pieces that were not yet there would come in the form of more deaths. Someone else would have to pay in fear, in pain and with their lives for Fabel’s inability to see the full picture.
Olsen. Fendrich. Weiss. Was there another equation there? Was Fabel wrong to think that this was a solo killer? Was it Olsen plus Fendrich, Weiss or another? He opened his desk drawer and took out a copy of Weiss’s book. He had read Die Märchenstrasse from cover to cover; but now his focus was specific. Weiss had titled a chapter ‘Rapunzel’. Again, the narration was in the voice of the fictively elaborated Jacob Grimm.
Within Rapunzel, as within each of these tales, there lies an articulation of elemental Good and Evil; an understanding of the forces of Creation and Life; of Destruction and Death. I have found within these ancient fables and tales such commonality of theme as to suggest that their origins lie not simply in our unlettered pagan past but in the earliest articulations of the most elemental of forces. The nascence of some of these tales must, indeed, lie deep in some early community of man, when and where our numbers on the Earth were few. How, otherwise, are we to explain why the tale of Cinderella exists in almost identical forms not only throughout Europe but also in China?
Of these elemental forces, I have found that Nature, at her most bountiful and at her most destructive, is most commonly given human form. The Mother. The maternal and the natural forces are so often seen as in parallel, and in the old folk tales and fables the Mother embodies both. Nature gives life, nourishes and sustains; but She is also capable of fury and cruelty. This dichotomy of Nature’s character is solved in these tales by the dual (and sometimes triple, if one counts the motif of the Grandmother) representation of Motherhood. There is the image of Mother herself, who commonly represents the hearth and home and all that is good and wholesome: she is Safety and Protection; she nourishes and succours; she gives Life. The motif of the Stepmother, on the other hand, is often employed to represent the negation of normal maternal impulses. It is the Stepmother who persuades her husband to abandon Hänsel and Gretel in the woods; it is the Stepmother, driven by insane envy and vanity, who seeks the death of Snow White. And in the form of the wicked Enchantress, we see the Stepmother as the abductor and tormentor of Rapunzel.
In the city of Lübeck there was a beautiful and wealthy widow, whom I shall call Frau X. Frau X had herself borne no child, but found herself the guardian of Imogen, her late husband’s daughter by a previous marriage. Imogen was every inch a match for her stepmother’s beauty but, of course, possessed a wealth that in her stepmother diminished daily: youth. Now it must be made clear that not I nor anyone else had the slightest reason to believe that Frau X was envious of Imogen, or was in any other way ill-disposed towards her. Indeed, Frau X seemed to be most solicitous and affectionate towards her ward and treated her as if she were her own child. But this is an inconsequence: it sufficed that I had found a beautiful stepmother and daughter, one of the most common motifs in the fairy tale. As Imogen was not dark of hair, I could not use her to re-enact Snow White, but she did have lustrous golden hair about which I believe she was quite vain. I had found my Rapunzel! I ensured that I had no contact with either Frau X nor Imogen which might incriminate me in the future and set about planning the execution of my re-enactment.
Over the preceding months, I had acquired large quantities of laudanum, which I obtained in small increments by visiting various physicians on my travels with a specious complaint of sleeplessness. I again noted my subject’s movements and selected the best opportunity to strike. Imogen took a walk each day in the wooded park to the north of the town. Being a young lady of some breeding, she was always accompanied by a female companion. I neither know nor care about the identity of Imogen’s chaperone, but she was the type of dull, homely companion that women of beauty habitually choose to contrast with their own pulchritude. I found myself loathing the companion for the preposterousness of her headgear: a ridiculously cheerful bonnet which, one can only assume, she chose in the mistaken belief that it mitigated the homeliness of her features.
There was a stretch of path where the two walkers were temporarily concealed from others in the park (on this particular day, the unpromising sky had deterred many from promenading) and which fortuitously allowed an exit from the park completely concealed by trees. I approached the women from behind and let swing, with some relish, at the companion’s ludicrously ornamented head with a heavy iron bar I had secreted in my cloak. I was in such a rush to subdue Imogen that I could only take the most passing satisfaction in the manner in which I had forced the ridiculous bonnet of the companion through her smashed skull. Imogen began to scream, however, and I was forced to deliver a sharp jab to her jaw. This concerned me greatly, because any damage to her beauty would compromise the success of my re-enactment. I picked her up and carried her into the trees, just far enough to be out of sight. Then I dragged the dead companion into the woods. A pool of blood had gathered about her ugly head and smeared on the paving as her bonnet separated from her shattered cranium and grey matter spilled forth. I am thoroughly ashamed to admit that I uttered a rather foul curse as I dragged her from view. Gathering some well-leaved branches, I returned to try to sweep up the mess, but succeeded only in spreading the stain further. I knew I could not avoid discovery of the companion’s body – most likely imminent discovery – but that concerned me not: what I had to achieve was the swift removal of Imogen from the park without detection. I had left a hansom carriage at the far side of the woods and I hoisted Imogen over my shoulder and carried her with what haste my burden and the terrain would permit. Imogen had begun to stir by the time I placed her in the interior of my carriage and I quietened her by forcing some laudanum down her throat.
I had dressed as a coachman and, after securing Imogen in the cabin, I climbed atop the hansom and made my departure from the scene in an unhurried manner. I had succeeded with my abduction without being observed. Indeed, it was by great fortune that the companion’s body was not found within minutes, as I had feared, but much later that day, when a search had been undertaken by townsfolk concerned for the safety of the missing ladies.
Prescient of the need for a place of some concealement, I had secured separate lodgings in Lübeck from those of my brother: a small house on the outskirts of the city. After dark-fall I bundled Imogen, to whom I shall henceforth refer as ‘Rapunzel’, into the house and carried her down to the basement. There I bound her securely, applied some more laudanum, and gagged her lest she rouse sufficiently in my absence to alert some passer-by with her screams.
I then joined my brother for a rather splendid meal of vension ‘direkt von der Jagd’. I allowed myself a moment of amusement at the idea of consuming flesh ‘straight from the hunt’ when I had come ‘straight from the hunt’ myself. I found, however, that when I thought of the bounty of flesh my chase had yielded, I experienced a manly disturbance and placed the thought from my mind.
On returning to the lodgings, I found my beautiful Rapunzel had stirred from her slumbers. Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty? The quandary had occurred to me before: these tales are essentially variations, rather than separate stories. In both, my brother had insisted we ‘civilise’ the account somewhat, having Sleeping Beauty awoken by a kiss. In the original we had found, she is actually discovered deep in her hundred-year slumber by a married King, not a Prince, who knows her carnally, several times, while she sleeps. It is only after she gives birth to twins and one, attempting to suckle, sucks the splinter from her thumb that she is awoken from her enchanted slumber. Again, with the Rapunzel tale, the young Princess in her tower is not so chaste as later versions, including that which we recorded, would suggest. A veil is again drawn over how Rapunzel comes by two children after her trysts with the Prince. Therein lies a morality of an earlier time, when Christian values held less or no sway. Both Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, in their original forms, bear children from liaisons non-marital . . .
Fabel put the book down. He remembered what Heinz Schnauber had said about Laura von Klosterstadt’s secret pregnancy and abortion. If the killer was following either authentic, original versions of the fairy tales or Weiss’s book, then it added to her ‘suitability’ as a victim. But it had been a closely guarded secret: if the killer knew about it then he must have had some intimate knowledge of the von Klosterstadt family. Or he must have been the father. Fabel read on.
In the interests of verisimilitude to the fable, I therefore was compelled to violate my Rapunzel, but only once she was asleep. She looked at me with pleading eyes which made her singularly unattractive. When I removed her gag she began to plead for her life. I found it interesting that, being a woman of breeding, she did not seek to plead for her virtue, which I sensed she would have surrendered freely were it to assure her survival. I made her drink more laudanum and the tranquillity and beauty of her face and form were restored. Once I had removed her clothing I became intoxicated with the beauty of her body and I admit to having indulged in her flesh several times as she slept. I then placed a silk cushion gently over her face. There was no bitter last struggle for life and she gave up her spirit.
Again Fabel broke from the book, this time to pull out the von Klosterstadt autopsy report: far from exhibiting any signs of sexual trauma, there were indications that Laura might have been celibate for some time. He returned to Die Märchenstrasse.
The following night I returned to the park and laid my Rapunzel beneath the ornamental tower at its centre. The moon shone brightly and illuminated her beauty. I brushed out her lustrous hair, which shimmered like white gold in the moonlight. I left her there, my Rapunzel, for others to find and recall the old tales.
I had considered my re-creation complete, and was well satisfied with it. It came as a great and welcome surprise when it emerged some days later that Frau X had become the subject of rumour and speculation about her role in her stepdaughter’s death. Such was the suspicion – though none was felt officially – that not only was her social standing amongst the elite of Lübeck completely destroyed, the woman was often assaulted with jeers from the common folk when she appeared on the street. Proof positive not only that the prejudice of the peasant lives on in the so-called civilised world, but also of the essential truth of these old tales.
Fabel closed the book, leaving his hand to rest on its cover as if he expected it to yield more through osmosis. He thought beyond the glossy cover, the publisher’s commercial product beneath his hand, to the moment of creation. He imagined the menacing bulk of Weiss hunched over his laptop, the too-black eyes glittering, in that light-absorbing study of his. He pictured the wolf/werewolf sculpture, probably crafted by Weiss’s insane brother, caught in its silent snarl as Weiss committed his serial murders on paper.
Fabel stood up and pulled on his Jaeger jacket, switching off his desk light. Hamburg sparkled at him through his office window. Out there one and a half million souls slept, while others explored the night. Soon. The next killing, Fabel knew, would be soon.