Blood Eagle

by Craig Russell

  ‘And because it is made in illicit labs with no controls,’ continued Stern, ‘there are wild variations in purity. Often the chemicals used to synthesise and stabilise it are highly toxic.’

  ‘And you think it was the toxic chemicals that caused the burns in her mouth?’ Susanne asked.

  ‘Yes … and GHB can also have very strange side effects. Even light doses can cause nausea, vomiting, delusions, hallucinations, seizures and, of course, loss of consciousness. One side effect can be a feeling of fearlessness, such as Michaela says she felt. If she was given a cocktail of either flunitrazepam or clonazepam with gammahydroxybutyrate, the risks of general anaesthesia, respiratory depression and even coma would have been very high indeed. Michaela is lucky that she isn’t on a respirator. As Frau Doktor Eckhardt says, GHB is a particularly nasty little product. Whoever did this used it in combination with other drugs that would have a synergistic effect on each other. They may not have been trying to kill their victims, but they didn’t particularly care if they survived the experience.’

  ‘And GHB is illegally produced just to be used as a date-rape drug?’ Fabel asked.

  ‘No. Actually, it is very popular on the clubbing and rave circuit. It is used a lot as a downer to bring people down from Ecstasy and cocaine highs. I’m sure your own drugs squad will have had a lot of experience of it in the Hamburg club scene.’

  ‘How would it be ingested? Is it flavourless, like Rohypnol?’

  ‘Almost. When diluted, it has a slightly salty taste. In fact, one of the street names for it is Salty Water. Apart from that, it would be pretty easy to administer it in an alcoholic drink, which would synergise its effectiveness, or as a powder hidden in food.’

  ‘Michaela just told us she was at a club and some guy gave her water to drink and she thought it tasted salty.’

  ‘That would probably be it.’

  Fabel looked down at Stern’s report. ‘What about the rape? Did we get any forensics?’

  ‘All we can say is that she was vaginally raped over a period of two to four hours … perhaps by more than one man. No sodomy. No forced oral sex. And, unfortunately, no semen for DNA analysis. He – or they – must have used condoms. She was not beaten or otherwise abused. The only other injuries were the ligature marks on her ankles and feet …’ Stern nodded towards the file in Fabel’s hands. ‘The pictures are in there.’

  Fabel opened the report. The photographs showed the marks on her wrists and ankles. She had been spread-eagled, like the murder victims. But Michaela was alive. There was another photograph, of a woman’s forehead with the blonde hair pushed back to reveal a faint but discernible red mark.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Stern smiled. ‘That, Herr Kommissar, is a clue the rapist or rapists didn’t intend you to see. Michaela has highly sensitive skin, she has an eczematous condition. That’s one of the reasons for her tan – UV therapy.’ So much for my sun-salon theory, thought Fabel. ‘Anyway,’ continued Stern, ‘whoever did this to her made some kind of mark on her forehead. They have obviously tried to clean it off, but Michaela’s sensitive skin reacted to the paint or whatever it was they used. I thought it was very significant so I included it in the standard rape-kit evidence photographs, even though it isn’t much of an injury.’

  ‘And I’m very glad you did, Herr Doktor,’ said Fabel. ‘This could be of enormous significance evidentially.’

  ‘It looks like an X to me,’ said Stern. ‘Any ideas what it could mean?’

  Fabel looked at the mark and frowned. ‘As a matter of fact I do … I think that it is a Futhark symbol.’

  Stern shrugged his incomprehension.

  Susanne moved over to Fabel, who angled the image towards her. ‘A Viking rune?’

  Fabel nodded and slipped the photograph back into the file.

  Saturday 14 June, 3.50 p.m. Övelgönne, Hamburg.

  Susanne leaned over and kissed Fabel, stroking his cheek before getting out of the car.

  ‘We still on for tonight?’

  Fabel grinned. ‘You bet.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there at eight.’

  He watched her walk up the steps to the lobby of her apartment building, admiring the sleek curves of her body. She turned and waved at the door and he waved back. He sat for a moment after the door closed behind her, then took out his cell phone and called Werner at home. When Werner answered, Fabel thought he could hear children in the background. Werner’s eldest daughter, Nadja, had made Werner a grandfather twice over. Fabel apologised for disturbing him on a Saturday.

  ‘No problem. What’s up, Jan?’

  Fabel told Werner about his interview with Michaela Palmer. He included the description she had given of the eyes of the man at the club. Fabel deliberately did not stress this element: he wanted to see if Werner’s reaction matched his own. When Werner fell silent for a moment, Fabel guessed that he was indeed thinking the same.

  ‘Our guy from last night? Mr Anglo-Saxon cool?’

  ‘Could be. Maybe we should go back and see him.’

  ‘Careful, Jan,’ said Werner, ‘you don’t want to spook him. MacSwain’s under round-the-clock close surveillance. If he puts a foot wrong we’ll have him. But the fact that he buys books and has green eyes is flimsy stuff to re-examine him on. We were on pretty thin ice before. If he went to his lawyer and complained about harassment, I don’t think that our evidential trail would stand up to scrutiny.’

  ‘You’re right, Werner,’ said Fabel. ‘But phone around the team … and send Van Heiden an e-mail … I’d like a case conference first thing Monday.’

  ‘What about Dr Eckhardt? Shall I contact her as well?’

  ‘That’s okay, Werner, I’ve got that covered.’

  Werner laughed at the other end of the phone. ‘I bet you have, Chef. I bet you have.’

  Fabel shaved, showered and dressed in an English sea-island cotton shirt and a pale grey single-breasted suit. He had an hour before he was due to meet Susanne, so he went through the file he had brought back from Cuxhaven. Fabel saw himself as anything but a social conservative, and he did his best to embrace the new; but sometimes he wondered what the hell was happening to the world. Of course, rape was nothing new, but now there were young men out there who routinely set out to stupefy women with drugs that could permanently damage the brain, in order to have sex with them. The thought left Fabel bemused, and filled with dread for the future. But this guy was different. He was part of a group. And the acts they carried out clearly had some ritualistic meaning or purpose. He was using a drug cocktail to obtain victims for others as well as himself. Perhaps not for himself at all. He slipped out the piece of paper onto which he had traced the outline from the photograph of the inflamed mark on Michaela’s forehead. Was he putting too much importance on it? It could, after all, be some random sequence of lines rather than a rendering of a runic mark. But that didn’t make sense. They had marked her, branded her, with something of symbolic significance. Fabel was pretty certain it was the rune Gebu which was the Viking equivalent of the letter G, but he also knew that Futhark runes had more than a phonetic meaning, that each one had a symbolism that related to the Norse gods or myths. Fabel went over to his bookcase and pulled out a couple of heavy reference books, one of which was the same as the book MacSwain had bought; Otto had let him borrow it. He scanned through it, and finally he found what he was looking for. Fabel frowned as he read the entry, writing the key points down on the same piece of paper. Gebu was a rune that related to sacrifices to and gifts from the gods. Sacrifice. It also was the seventh rune. The number seven: Fabel remembered Dorn talking about the significance of numbers in the Viking belief system. Gebu was the rune most associated with the Blot or ritual of sacrifice.

  Could there be a connection between these attacks and the two murders? Not only was Michaela Palmer marked with a ritualistic sign, it was a rune associated with sacrifice. But if she and the other girl were intended to be sacrificed, then why did they let them go? A rea
l effort had been made to remove traces of the mark, and both girls had been heavily drugged so that they would remember next to nothing about their attackers. At the first briefing after the murder in St Pauli, Susanne had suggested that there may have been dry runs for the main event; but somehow that no longer seemed to fit with the kind of killer Fabel instinctively felt he was pursuing. Anyway, these attacks weren’t dry runs. There was no escalation here: both girls had been attacked after the murders. Fabel dropped the book onto the couch beside him and looked out of the window of his apartment across the Alster. He checked his watch: 7.30. He had better head off: he didn’t want Susanne to be there first and have to wait for him.

  If it hadn’t been for his almost obsessive tidiness he wouldn’t have noticed it. He rose from the couch to put the two reference books back on their shelf. Just before he put the one from Otto’s store back, he flicked through it absent-mindedly, letting the pages flutter through his fingers. There it was. A full-page colour plate of a wood-carved representation of Odin. The dark wood was crudely but strikingly fashioned into the bearded face and screaming, bared-teeth snarl of a berserker. It was the face of all-wise Odin. And the price Odin had had to pay to drink from the well of wisdom was to lose an eye.

  That’s why they all had the same face when they raped you, Michaela, thought Fabel. They all wore a mask. The same mask. The mask of one-eyed Odin.

  Saturday 14 June, 8.00 p.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg.

  Fabel didn’t need to look around to know that she had entered the bar. The barman facing him gazed blankly over Fabel’s shoulder and the motion of his hands stopped in the middle of polishing a glass. Fabel also heard the conversation of the two men to his right trail into silence as they moved aside to make way for her. He felt her presence as she leaned on the bar next to him, and the subtle sensuality of her perfume reached him. Fabel smiled and without turning his head said: ‘Good evening, Frau Doktor Eckhardt.’

  ‘Good evening, Herr Kriminalhauptkommissar.’

  Fabel turned. Susanne was dressed in a simple sleeveless black dress and her raven hair was loosely tied up. Fabel somehow remembered to take a breath.

  ‘I’m glad you could make it,’ he said.

  ‘So am I.’

  Fabel ordered drinks and they made their way over to a table by the window. Milchstrasse was full of people strolling or sitting out in the pavement cafés and enjoying the embers of the day.

  ‘I’m determined that we won’t talk shop this evening,’ said Fabel, ‘but would you be free for a case conference on Monday morning at ten?’

  ‘No problem,’ Susanne said. ‘This case has really got to you, hasn’t it?’

  Fabel smiled weakly. ‘They all do. But yes, this one in particular. There are so many things that don’t fit and so many things that fit too well.’ Fabel outlined his theory about the Odin masks.

  ‘I just don’t know, Jan,’ Susanne said, rotating her wine glass by turning the stem between her fingers, ‘I still think that this is a single killer. And I still think that you’re off-base with your theory about ulterior motives. I think that this is a solo sicko getting off by butchering young women at random.’

  ‘That sounded a less than professional summary, Frau Doktor.’

  Susanne laughed. ‘Sometimes I feel less than professional. I am still a human being, an ordinary person, and occasionally I can’t help reacting to all this horror at an emotional level. There must be times you feel the same?’

  Fabel laughed. ‘Most of the time, in fact. But if you feel like that why do you do it?’

  ‘Why do you?’

  ‘Why am I a policeman? Because someone has to do it. Someone has to stand in the way, I suppose … between the ordinary man, woman or child and those that would harm them.’ Fabel stopped abruptly, realising he had more or less repeated Yilmaz’s analysis of him. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘you’re a doctor … there’s a hundred different ways in which you could help people. Why do you do this?’

  ‘I suppose I drifted into it. After qualifying in general medicine I studied psychiatry. Then psychology. Then criminal and forensic psychology. Before I knew it I had become uniquely qualified for this line of work.’

  Fabel smiled broadly. ‘Well I’m glad that you did. Otherwise you wouldn’t have drifted in my direction. Now that’s enough shop talk …’ Fabel beckoned to a waiter.

  Saturday 14 June, 8.50 p.m. Uhlenhorst, Hamburg.

  Angelika Blüm cleared the clutter from the broad coffee table and spread out a large, detailed map of Middle and Eastern Europe. On top of this she laid out the photographs, the press cuttings, the company details and the pieces of paper she had cut out, each with a handwritten name on it: Klimenko, Kastner, Schreiber, Von Berg, Eitel (Jnr), Eitel (Snr). In the middle of the map she laid the last name. Whereas all the others were written in black, this name was in handwritten red felt-pen capitals: VITRENKO.

  It was all there. But the connections that held her theory together were too fragile to withstand the pressure of jurisprudential scrutiny. All she could do was write it up and expose those involved to the attentions of investigators with greater resources than she had. Why hadn’t that bloody policeman got in touch? She knew Fabel was investigating Ursula’s murder and what she had to say would cast more light on it. Angelika had read about the second murder: the girl whose photograph they had published in an attempt to establish her identity. She did not recognise the woman nor could she see any connection with Ursula or the other elements in her investigation. Either this second murder was a copycat or there was some link that still lay beyond Angelika’s investigative horizon.

  She rested her elbows on her knees and cradled the bowl of her coffee cup in her hands as she scanned the scattered pieces. They were like components of a machine waiting to be assembled, but she didn’t know how the machine worked, what its ultimate function was. Certainly, if all of these components could be put together it would make one hell of a story: a Hamburg Stadtsenator, the office of the Erste Bürgermeister, neo-Nazis, a leading media company and, right at the centre of it all, a faceless Ukrainian special-forces commander whose appetite for atrocity had made him a name others barely dared to speak: Vasyl Vitrenko.

  She took a sip of her coffee and tried to disengage her mind from the puzzle for a moment. Sometimes you had to look away before you could refocus and see what had been in front of you all the time. The door buzzer made her jump. She sighed and placed her coffee down on top of the spread-out map and walked over to her entryphone.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Frau Blüm? This is Kriminalhauptkommissar Fabel of the Polizei Hamburg. You’ve been trying to get in touch with me. May I come up?’

  Angelika looked down at her bathrobe and slippers and swore under her breath. She sighed and pushed the button to speak. ‘Of course, Herr Fabel. Come on up.’ She pressed the button to release the door and moments later heard his footsteps echoing in the hall. She opened the door but kept it on the chain. The man in the hall held up his oval KriPo shield and Angelika smiled and slipped the chain from the door.

  ‘Please excuse me, Herr Fabel. I wasn’t expecting anyone.’ She stood to one side to let him in.

  Saturday 14 June, 11.30 p.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg.

  The moonlight through the deep windows cut geometric shapes across the floor and walls of Fabel’s bedroom and accented the sweeps and curves of Susanne’s body as she lowered herself onto him. It cast her moving shadow on the wall as the initial gentle, quiet, rhythm of their lovemaking grew in intensity.

  Afterwards they lay together: Susanne on her back, Fabel on his side, resting his head on an elbow and studying the moonlight-etched profile of his lover. He raised himself up onto one elbow and looked down at her. Tenderly, he pushed back a strand of hair from her brow.

  ‘Will you stay the night?’

  Susanne gave a cosy moan. ‘I’m too comfortable here to get up and get dressed.’ She turned to him and smiled wickedly. ‘But I’m not tired enough to
sleep.’

  Fabel was about to answer when the phone rang. He gave Susanne a resigned smile and said: ‘Hold that thought. I’ll be right back.’

  Fabel rose and walked naked to the phone. It was Karl Zimmer, the duty Kommissar at the Mordkommission.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ Zimmer said, ‘but something’s come up that you ought to know about.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve received another e-mail from Son of Sven.’

  I AM, AS YOU WILL HAVE GATHERED, A MAN OF FEW WORDS. MY VICTIM, HOWEVER, WAS A WOMAN OF MANY.

  I DO NOT CARE FOR WOMEN WHO DO NOT FULFIL THEIR PRIMARY FUNCTION, BUT CHOOSE THE SELFISHNESS OF A CAREER OVER THE NATURAL IMPERATIVE TO BREED. THIS ONE WAS WORSE THAN MOST. SHE SAW IT AS HER CALLING TO DEFAME THOSE WHOSE NOBILITY SHE COULD NEVER ASPIRE TO: SOLDIERS WHO FOUGHT AGAINST ANARCHY AND CHAOS.

  I HAVE ADDED A TWIST THIS TIME. SHE THOUGHT I WAS YOU, HERR FABEL. IT WAS TO YOU SHE BEGGED FOR HER LIFE. IT WAS YOUR NAME THAT BURNED IN HER BRAIN AS SHE DIED.

  SHE HAS SPREAD HER WINGS.

  SON OF SVEN

  Sunday 15 June, 1.30 a.m. Polizeipräsidium, Hamburg.

  ‘I’m sorry to have pulled you all in at such an ungodly hour,’ said Fabel, but his businesslike expression suggested the apology was a formality. The figures around the table all had the puffy-eyed look of unwelcome awakening, but no one complained; everyone realised the importance of the arrival of a new e-mail. ‘But this new e-mail has some unpleasant twists to it, to say the least.’

  Werner, Maria, Anna and Paul nodded bleakly. Susanne also sat at the table and there had been an exchange of knowing looks between the others when she arrived with Fabel.