Free JF02 - Brother Grimm by Craig Russell Page A

thing.’
    ‘Then she could have been subject to long-term abuse,’ said Fabel. ‘Which could mean that the killer was a parent or guardian.’
    ‘And that would fit with Anna finding it so hard to trace her as a missing person,’ said Werner. ‘If it were a parent, then they may be delaying reporting her missing, or not reporting her missing at all, to try to keep us off their trail.’
    ‘So far it’s working.’ Fabel paused for a moment to process the information Werner had given him. ‘The only problem is that kids exist beyond the confines of their family. There must be a school somewhere questioning her absence. She must have had friends or relatives who have missed her.’
    ‘Anna’s way ahead of you,
Chef
. She’s been trawling through school attendance records. Again, nothing so far. And you can add a possible boyfriend to the list. Möller says the dead girl was sexually active, but there is no evidence of sexual contact in the last two days before her death.’
    Fabel sighed. He realised that he had passed through Ammerland and a sign indicated the Oldenburg turn-off. His old university town. He was only just out of East Frisia, but already he was reimmersing in the mire of what humans are capable of doing to each other; to their children. ‘Anything else?’
    ‘No,
Chef
. Other than Möller says that the girl hadn’t had much to eat in the forty-eight hours prior to death. You coming back into the Präsidium?’
    ‘Yep. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.’
    After he hung up, Fabel switched the radio on. It was tuned into NDR Eins. An academic was railing against a writer who had written some kind of highly controversial literary novel. Fabel had missed a good bit of the debate, but from what he could gather the novelist had used the fictitious premise that accused some well-known historical personage of having been a child-murderer. As the debate continued, it became clear to Fabel that the personage was one of the Brothers Grimm, the nineteenth-century philologists who had collected German folk and fairy tales, legends and myths. The academic was becoming more and more incensed, while theauthor remained unshakeably calm. Fabel was able to gather that the author’s name was Gerhard Weiss and the title of his novel was
Die Märchenstrasse
–
The Fairy Tale Road
. The novel had been written in the form of a fictionalised Reisetagebuch – travelling diary – of Jacob Grimm. The host of the programme explained that, in this fictional account, Jacob Grimm accompanies his brother Wilhelm, collecting the tales that they will eventually publish as
Children’s and Household Tales
(
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
) and
Deutsche Sagen
(
German Myths
). Where the novel departed from fact was in how it described Jacob Grimm as a serial killer of children and adult women, committing murders in the towns and villages he visits with his brother, each killing replicating a tale that they have collected. In the novel, the mad Grimm’s rationale is that he is keeping the verity of these tales alive. The fictionalised Jacob Grimm eventually comes to believe that myths, legends and fables are essential in giving voice to the darkness of the human soul.
    ‘It is an allegory,’ explained the author, Gerhard Weiss, ‘a literary device. There is not, nor has there ever been, any evidence or even suggestion that Jacob Grimm was a paedophile or any sort of murderer. My book
Die Märchenstrasse
is a story, an imagined tale. I chose Jacob Grimm because he and his brother were involved in the collection and study of the German folk tale, as well as analysing the mechanics of the German language. If anyone understood the power of myth and folklore then it was the Brothers Grimm. Today we are afraid to let our children play out of sight. We see menace and danger in every aspect of modern life. We go to the cinema to terrify ourselves with modern myths that weconvince ourselves hold a mirror up to our life and society today.