JF02 - Brother Grimm Read Online Free PDF

the file photograph, the girl in the sand. Again something snagged in his brain: some barely perceptible inconsistency.
    ‘Have you found our little girl?’ Frau Ehlers searched Fabel’s face with an urgency and intensity he found almost unbearable.
    ‘I don’t know, Frau Ehlers. It’s possible. But we need you or Herr Ehlers to make a positive identification of the body.’
    ‘So there’s a chance it isn’t Paula?’ There was a hint of defiance in Herr Ehlers’s tone. Fabel caught Anna’s glance out of the corner of his eye.
    ‘I suppose so, Herr Ehlers, but there’s every indication that it may well be Paula. The victim is taller than Paula was when she went missing, but her height is well within the growth you would expect over the last three years. And there was some evidence that seemed to link her with this address.’ Fabel did not want to tell them that the killer had tagged his victim.
    ‘How did she die?’ asked Frau Ehlers.
    ‘I don’t think we should go into that until we make sure it really is Paula,’ said Fabel. The desperation in Frau Ehlers’s expression seemed to intensify. Her lower lip trembled. Fabel relented. ‘The victim we found was strangled.’
    Frau Ehlers’s body was racked with silent sobs. Anna stepped forward and put her arm around her shoulder, but Frau Ehlers drew back. There was an awkward silence. Fabel found himself sweeping hisgaze around the room. There was a large photograph framed on the wall. It had obviously been taken with an ordinary camera and had been enlarged more than it should have been. The texture was grainy and the girl at the centre of the picture gazed out with flash-reddened pupils. It was Paula Ehlers; she was smiling up at the camera from behind a large birthday cake that was emblazoned with the number thirteen. Fabel felt a chill as he realised that she looked out at him from the day before she was snatched from her family.
    ‘When can we see her?’ asked Herr Ehlers.
    ‘We’ve arranged for the local police to take you down tonight, if that’s okay.’ It was Anna who answered. ‘We will meet you there. A car will pick you up about 9.30 p.m. I know it’s late …’
    Herr Ehlers cut her off. ‘That’s all right. We’ll be waiting.’
    On the way back to the car, Fabel could sense a tension in Anna’s movements. And she was silent.
    ‘You okay?’ he asked.
    ‘Not really,’ She looked back at the sad little house with its tended garden and its red roof. ‘That was tough. I don’t know how they have stood it so long. All that waiting. All that hope. They have depended on us to find their little girl and, when we do, we can’t even bring her back alive.’
    Fabel bleeped off the alarm and locks and waited until they were both in the car before answering. ‘I’m afraid that’s the way it works out. Happy endings belong in movies, not in real life.’
    ‘But it was as if they hated us.’
    ‘They do,’ said Fabel resignedly. ‘And who can blame them? Like you say, we were supposed tobring her back alive, not tell them we found her body abandoned somewhere. They were depending on us to deliver the happy ending.’ Fabel started the engine. ‘Anyway, let’s stay focused on the case. It’s time we called in on Kriminalkommissar Klatt.’
    Norderstedt has an officially split personality. It is part of Greater Hamburg, its phone numbers share the Hamburg 040 prefix, and when Fabel and Anna drove up through Fuhlsbüttel and Langenhorn into Norderstedt there had been a sense of an unbroken metropolitan continuum. Yet the Polizei Hamburg has no jurisdiction here: it is the Landespolizei of Schleswig-Holstein that operate in Norderstedt. However, because of their close proximity and the continual overlapping of cases, the Norderstedt police had more contact with the Polizei Hamburg than with their own force in the gentle landscapes and small towns of Schleswig-Holstein. Anna had phoned ahead to arrange for Kommissar Klatt to meet with