The Valkyrie Song

by Craig Russell

  ‘And Margarethe is one of those people?’

  ‘Not quite. There’s nothing borderline with Margarethe. Köpke says she’s a true sociopath and, quite unusually, she’s suffering from a dissocial personality disorder, rather than an antisocial personality disorder.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Mainly that she can function, or seem to function, more normally. Dissocial sociopaths don’t get into trouble to the same degree – delinquency, criminal behaviour, that kind of thing – as the antisocial type. And they’re better at disguising their behaviour. She won’t have sought out opportunities to act antisocially, but she will act without pity to get or do whatever she wants. The main thing is she has absolutely zero empathy for other human beings. She is simply incapable of simulation … imagining that other people have feelings or even the same kind of consciousness as she does.’

  ‘Ideal for a professional assassin,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Not really. As you’ve experienced yourself, the typical individual with full dissocial personality disorder has an extremely low violence threshold. So does an antisocial, for that matter. If everything she has claimed about the Stasi training is true – and bear in mind all sociopaths are inventive, compulsive liars – then her trainers would no doubt have identified her instability and dropped her from the programme. Another trait of the disorder, unfortunately for Drescher, is the tendency to pin the blame or responsibility for their failures on others. Combine that with a tendency towards obsession, and you’ve got the ultimate stalker from hell. Köpke believes that in Margarethe’s case there’s co-morbidity with another personality or even a schizoaffective disorder … or maybe it’s to do with the neurological damage done in childhood. Something that makes her even more focused and obsessive. Her belief that her sister exists, and the way she allows the sister to speak and act through her, isn’t psychopathic, it’s psychotic. Delusional. In Margarethe we have something extra going on in the mix: sociopathy with a twist.’

  Fabel looked through the window, out across the treetops. The sky was heavy and grey. ‘Do you think the other so-called Valkyries will be similar? Sociopaths, I mean?’

  Susanne shrugged. ‘To take human life for money doesn’t show a lot of empathy for others. But sociopaths are egomaniacal, narcissistic and extremely impulsive. I’m guessing that these women who were trained as professional assassins had a high degree of self-discipline and were willing to subordinate their will to that of others. But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. The opposite, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t want you sitting in on the interview, Susanne,’ said Fabel. ‘You can watch from the other room through the CCTV.’

  ‘That’s no good, Jan. I need to be able to observe her closely. And I want to be able to ask her questions. Surely you will have her restrained this time?’

  ‘Okay … but if she kicks off again, you leave right away. I’ll have extra bodies in there with us.’

  Susanne’s perfect porcelain smile had a hint of wickedness about it. ‘I don’t know, Jan … you’re going to have to learn to deal with your fear of women or I’m going to end up a permanent chaperone.’

  Fabel, Susanne and Anna Wolff were seated in the interview room before Margarethe Paulus was brought in. Karin Vestergaard, Werner and others from the Murder Commission team were in the connecting room, watching on closed-circuit TV.

  When Margarethe was brought in by two uniformed officers, her wrists braceleted in Speedcuffs, her strong, attractive face was as impassive as it had been before.

  ‘Sit down, Margarethe.’ Fabel indicated the floor-fixed chair. One of the officers unfastened her Speedcuffs, only to use them again to fix her right hand to the metal securing loop on the table. A tall woman of about forty took the seat next to Margarethe. She was Lina Mueller, the state-appointed attorney.

  ‘This is Frau Doctor Eckhardt,’ said Fabel, gesturing towards Susanne, ‘from the Institute for Judicial Medicine. She is a criminal psychologist and she has spoken to Dr Köpke, who of course you know. Frau Doctor Eckhardt will have some questions for you. You will have already spoken to Frau Mueller, who is here to represent your interests.’

  ‘I don’t need a lawyer,’ said Margarethe. Again it was a simple statement of fact, made without resentment or anger.

  ‘We feel you should have one present,’ said Anna. ‘It’s your right.’

  Margarethe didn’t respond, in voice or expression.

  ‘What is your name?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘I am Margarethe Paulus.’

  ‘But you told Herr Fabel earlier that you were Ute Paulus,’ said Anna.

  ‘You are confusing me with my sister,’ said Margarethe. ‘Ute is my sister’s name.’

  ‘Where is your sister right now?’ asked Susanne.

  Margarethe gazed at the small, reinforced-glass window. ‘My sister is resting. She is waiting for me.’

  ‘Where is she waiting?’ asked Susanne. Margarethe remained silent. Inanimate.

  ‘Margarethe,’ said Fabel, changing tack. ‘There are a number of killings that have taken place in Hamburg since you escaped from the hospital. I would like to ask you what you know about them. Do you understand?’

  ‘I have an IQ of one hundred and forty,’ said Margarethe. ‘Dr Köpke has probably already told you that. There is not a question you are capable of asking that I would be incapable of understanding.’

  ‘Okay, Margarethe. I’m impressed, if it’s important to you that I am impressed. Let’s start with the most recent murder. Robert Gerdes.’

  ‘You know by now that Robert Gerdes was not his real name. It was Georg Drescher. And it wasn’t murder, it was an execution. I told your colleagues when I phoned that I had executed Drescher.’

  ‘So it was you who tortured and killed him? It wasn’t your sister?’ asked Susanne.

  ‘We both did. Ute tracked him down and found him. She kept her promise. She promised me she would make it all right for me, and she did. But when we killed him we acted together. We were one.’

  ‘Why the torture?’ asked Susanne. ‘All that terrible pain. What did he do to you to have deserved that?’

  Margarethe sat mute. Fabel repeated Susanne’s question, but it was as if Margarethe could not hear him. Fabel had years of experience of silences in interviews: he had learned to read them, interpret them. Sometimes a suspect’s refusal to speak said more than their answers. This was different. It wasn’t a silence, it was a complete shutting down of all responses. He knew then with absolute certainty that Margarethe would answer only those questions that suited her. He just hoped that he would get enough from her to start putting what had happened into some kind of understandable context.

  ‘A week ago,’ Fabel broke the silence. ‘A young man called Armin Lensch was murdered in the Kiez district of Hamburg. His belly was sliced open with a blade. What can you tell me about that?’

  ‘I can tell you nothing about it. It had nothing to do with me. I didn’t kill him.’ Margarethe’s frighteningly blank expression suggested a complete lack of guile. Of emotion. Of anything.

  Fabel placed the srbosjek, still cased in a clear plastic evidence bag, on the table. He kept a firm hold on the bag, just outside her reach.

  ‘Did you use this on Armin Lensch? Is this what you sliced open his belly with?’

  ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ Margarethe said, looking at the weapon without interest. ‘And I wouldn’t use that for slicing open a gut. That’s for cutting throats.’

  ‘If you haven’t seen that before,’ said Fabel, leaning forward, ‘then how do you know how it’s used?’

  ‘I’ve never seen your car, but if I did I would know how to drive it. And I know that that is called a graviso knife. Or a srbosjek. It was used by Croat Ustae. It’s very simple but highly effective. But it’s not an assassin’s weapon, particularly. This is for killing large numbers of people. Although I have to say that used expertly, it would silence and kill a single meeti
ng efficiently.’

  ‘Meeting?’ asked Susanne.

  ‘That’s what we call them,’ said Margarethe. ‘A meeting is when the agent and the target encounter each other and the mission is executed. We call them meetings because there should be no engagement with the target prior to execution, making the meeting the first and final encounter. We also call the target a meeting.’

  Fabel placed a second evidence bag on the table. It contained the automatic that Dirk and Henk had found.

  ‘Is this yours?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ she said.

  ‘It was retrieved from your apartment. Again, there is a Croatian connection.’

  ‘I know. It’s a Croatian PHP MV-9 automatic. It’s about eighteen years old. It was a model developed in a rush for use in the Independence War.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Once again I’m impressed by your encyclopaedic knowledge of weapons and assassination techniques. But your knowledge of this weapon could come simply from the fact that it is yours. That you had it ready to use if your drugging of Drescher didn’t work out as planned.’

  Again an empty stare. Margarethe was attractive. Her features perfectly proportioned. But there was still something about the way she looked at him that reminded Fabel of the photographs he had seen of Irma Grese. The same void in the eyes and expression. He had no way of knowing if Margarethe was lying to him. After nearly twenty years as an investigator of murders, of conducting interviews like this, he found himself lost in a strange country, completely without any recognisable landmarks.

  ‘Who are “we”?’ asked Susanne, filling the silence. ‘You said “We call the target a meeting.”’

  ‘My sisters and I. The Valkyries.’

  ‘How many Valkyries were there?’ asked Anna Wolff. Margarethe stared at her for a moment, still expressionless, before answering.

  ‘Only three of us were selected for final training.’

  ‘But you didn’t finish your final training,’ said Fabel, ‘did you?’

  ‘I was selected along with the other two. Out of dozens of girls who in turn were the best of the best. Only three of us were chosen to be Valkyries. It was Drescher who dropped me from the programme.’

  ‘Is that why you killed him? Is that why you kept him alive to suffer first?’

  Margarethe gave a small smile. It was the first time Fabel had seen her smile and it did not reach her cold, empty eyes. She shook her head. ‘I didn’t kill him because he dropped me. I killed him because he chose me … because he selected me for this kind of life in the first place. My head …’ She winced as if some terrible migraine was cutting through her. ‘The things in my head. He put them there. And I can’t get them out.’

  ‘What things?’ asked Susanne.

  ‘I’ve already shown you. They were all there for you to see. In the flat. I didn’t think I was being ambiguous.’ There was a flicker of impatience in Margarethe’s expression. On anyone else it would have gone unnoticed, but it flashed across the empty canvas of her face. ‘He taught me how to kill. That more than anything. Him and the others, all the different ways to kill. How to shatter someone’s nose and drive the bone fragments into their brain. Or cut off the blood to the brain with an embrace and kill without the meeting knowing what was happening. How to seduce a man, or a woman, and fuck them in a way that they become completely obsessed with you. How to cut yourself off from your own body so that you can do anything, with anyone. How to follow someone without them knowing, to hunt and trap them and kill them in an instant. They told us we could learn from everything. No matter how bad it was, we could benefit from it. Every war, every crime, had a lesson to be learned.’ She nodded to where Fabel had shown her the forensic-bagged knife. ‘That’s where I learned about the srbosjek. And more. So much more. And the thing was … the totally mad thing was that they tried to teach you that you could switch off from it all and have a normal life in between the meetings.’

  Fabel paused for a moment, leaning back in his chair, as if creating a punctuation mark in the interview.

  ‘I have to say, I am most impressed with your organisational abilities. Planning, arranging the apartment below Drescher’s. Very impressive. But there’s no way – absolutely no way – you could have organised that yourself in the time available since your escape from Mecklenburg. Who is helping you, Margarethe?’

  Another hollow stare and silence.

  ‘Okay,’ sighed Fabel. ‘Jens Jespersen. Politiinspektør Jens Jespersen of the Danish National Police. Someone picked him up in a restaurant in the Hanseviertel and persuaded him to meet with her later. Then, when they were in bed together, she killed him with an injection of suxamethonium chloride. Exactly the means you used to immobilise Georg Drescher. You’ve just described to us the way Major Drescher and his Stasi colleagues trained you in concealment, disguise and seduction techniques. Those sound to me exactly the kind of skills used to get Drescher into a vulnerable position and kill him. I suppose you are going to tell me that you don’t know anything about that?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Fabel fixed Margarethe with a penetrating stare that failed to penetrate.

  ‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’

  ‘I have a colleague of Jespersen’s in the other room, watching this interview. His superior officer. She is here because Politiinspektør Jespersen was here to try to find Georg Drescher. He was also following up rumours that a female contract killer, going by the name the Valkyrie, was operating out of Hamburg. That is a hell of a lot of coincidences, Margarethe.’

  No comment, no shrug, no expression.

  ‘He was here to find the man you were hunting. In turn he was hunting a killer called the Valkyrie, and he was killed with the same drug you used on Drescher. You killed Jens Jespersen, didn’t you? He got in the way of your mission. A secondary target. Or what would you call it: an unplanned meeting?’

  Margarethe ignored Fabel and turned to Susanne. ‘You are a criminal psychologist?’

  ‘I’ve already told you that.’

  ‘And you have spoken with Dr Köpke?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you think I am a psychopath.’

  ‘I believe you have dissocial personality disorder, yes. But I think you have something else going on as well. You’re not just psychopathic, you’re psychotic. Delusional.’

  ‘Really?’ said Margarethe. ‘Then you know that I will be kept in an institution, probably for the rest of my life.’

  ‘I don’t think you can ever be reintegrated into society, no. Or cured of your problems. Maybe the psychosis, with drug therapy. But no, you will be confined for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Although I disagree with your diagnosis, Frau Doctor Eckhardt, I agree with your vision of my future. I will never be at liberty. And if I am a psychopath, then I have absolutely no sense of accountability or responsibility. And punishment is meaningless to me. So could you explain to Herr Fabel that there is absolutely no point in me lying to him about which murders I did or did not commit?’

  ‘There are other reasons for lying,’ said Fabel. ‘To protect others. Maybe you weren’t working alone. Perhaps you decided to have a class reunion with your fellow ex-Valkyries. That would explain all the money and resources you have at your disposal. Maybe it was one of your sisters who killed Jespersen.’

  ‘Maybe it was,’ said Margarethe. ‘But I know nothing about it. And even if I did, I owe them no loyalty. They left me behind. Only my sister stayed by me. Promised to make it right.’

  There, thought Fabel. There I saw something. For the first time in the interview he saw an opening. Hardly a crack, but something that could be worked at. Pried open.

  ‘Yes, Margarethe,’ he said sympathetically. ‘They did leave you behind. Betrayed you. They went on to become true Valkyries while you were thrown aside and rejected. After all that horror, all that pain, all those horrible, horrible things they put into your head.
Is that the real reason you tortured and killed Drescher? To achieve some kind of fulfilment? Do you have any idea of the kind of money they will have made out of their meetings? Oh yes, when the Wall came down, Drescher and his girls embraced capitalism with real enthusiasm. They have been killing for private enterprise as a private enterprise.’

  ‘She …’ said Margarethe.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She. Not they. Georg Drescher had a favourite. He works with only one woman. The other Valkyrie has no part of it. She has another life.’

  There was a short, electric pause. Fabel felt his pulse pick up a beat. He was aware that Anna and Susanne were staying very still and quiet.

  ‘Names, Margarethe,’ he said. ‘What are their names? The woman Drescher worked with, the professional killer. What is she called?’

  ‘We were friends,’ said Margarethe. Now there was emotion. Not much, just a hint of wistfulness. ‘As much as we could be friends. All three of us were loners – part of what they needed from us. But, in our own way, we were friends.’

  ‘They left you behind, Margarethe. You owe them nothing.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that. You don’t need to manage me. I will tell you what I want to tell you. Not what you think you can make me tell you.’ She paused. ‘It was a rule that we didn’t know each other’s names. They were very strict about that. We knew each other as One, Two and Three. I was Two.’