JF02 - Brother Grimm Read Free

in the team. Junior in rank but senior in years, Werner Meyer was not just Fabel’s colleague: he was his friend, and often his mentor. Werner shared the same rank as Maria Klee and together they represented Fabel’s immediate support in the team. Werner, however, was Fabel’s number two. He had much more practical experience as a police officer than Maria, although she had been a high-flyer at university, where she had studied law, and then later at the Polizeifachhochschule and Landespolizeischule policeacademies. Despite his tough look and considerable bulk, Werner’s approach to police work was typified by a methodical thoroughness and an attention to detail. Werner was ‘by-the-book’ and had often reined in his
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when Fabel had wandered too far down one of his ‘intuitive’ routes. He had always seen himself as Fabel’s partner and it had taken time, and dramatic events, to accustom him to working with Maria.
    But it had worked. Fabel had teamed them because of their differences: because they represented different generations of police officer, and because they combined and contrasted experience with expertise, theory with practice. But what really made them work as a team was that which they shared: a total and uncompromising commitment to their roles as Mordkommission officers.
    It had been the usual preliminary meeting. Murders took two forms: there was the hot pursuit, where a body was found quickly after death, or there was a strong and clear evidential direction to be pursued; then there was the cold trail, where the killer had already distanced himself or herself in chronology, in geography and in forensic presence from the murder event, leaving the police only scraps to piece together: a process that took time and effort. The murder of the girl on the beach was a cold-trail case: its form was nebulous, amorphous. It would take them a long time and a lot of investigative toil before they made any defined shape of it. The afternoon’s meeting had therefore been typical of initial case meetings: they had reviewed the scant facts that were available and timetabled further meetings to examine the awaited forensic and autopsy reports. The body itself would be the starting point: no longer a person but a store of physical information abouttime, manner and place of death. And, on a molecular level, the DNA and other data retrieved from it would begin the process of identification. The major part of the meeting had been devoted to allocating resources to the various investigative tasks, the first of which was to get almost everyone on to the job of identifying the dead girl. The dead girl. Fabel was steadfastly committed to uncovering her identity, but it was that moment he dreaded most: when the body became a person and the case number became a name.
    After the meeting Fabel asked Maria to hang around. Werner nodded knowingly at his boss and, in so doing, succeeded in further highlighting the awkwardness of the situation. So now, Maria Klee, dressed in an expensive black blouse and grey trousers, her legs crossed and her long fingers interlocked in a cradle around her knee, sat impassively and somewhat formally, waiting for her superior officer to speak. As always, her posture was one of restraint, confinement, control, and her blue-grey eyes remained impassive under the questioning arch of her eyebrows. Everything about Maria Klee exuded confidence, self-control and authority. But now there was something between Fabel and Maria that was awkward. She had been back at work for a month now, but this was their first major case since her return and Fabel wanted them to say what had been left unsaid.
    Circumstances had forced Fabel and Maria into a unique intimacy. An intimacy closer than if they had slept together. Nine months before, they had spent several minutes alone, under a starry sky in a deserted field in the Altes Land on the southern shore of the Elbe, their breaths mingling, the self-assured MariaKlee