The Valkyrie Song

by Craig Russell

  Fabel felt the hope slip from him. He sighed.

  ‘We got on well,’ said Margarethe. ‘We were supervised most of the time. Watched and monitored. Our sleeping quarters were kept separate. But we were trained together for most things.’

  ‘Did the other girls tell you anything that gave a clue to their true identities?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘They thought they could control us completely. Make us like machines. But they couldn’t.’ Margarethe smiled. Not a fake smile. Not something she had been trained to use at appropriate moments. Her smile. And it terrified Fabel. ‘Liane Kayser. Anke Wollner. It was our rebellion. Our way of keeping a little of ourselves outside their control. We told each other our real names.’

  Fabel kept his gaze on Margarethe, but to his left he heard Anna Wolff scribbling the names into her notebook before rushing out of the interview room.

  ‘There was something else. We knew that we would be sent to different places. That we maybe wouldn’t see each other again. So we worked out a plan. A place we would meet.’

  ‘Where?’ Fabel tried to keep his tone dispassionate.

  ‘You have to remember, we were all living in the East. We didn’t know then that the Wall would come down. We didn’t know that one or more of us might be sent into the West, into deep cover. So we picked somewhere we all knew. Halberstadt.’

  ‘In Saxony-Anhalt?’

  Margarethe nodded. ‘One of the girls, Liane, came from Halberstadt. She said that if we needed each other we would meet at the cathedral in Halberstadt.’

  ‘How would you know to come?’

  ‘Two newspapers, one in the GDR, one in West Germany. We would run an announcement. It would be a quote from Njál’s Saga: “The heavens are stained with the blood of men, as the Valkyries sing their song.” If we saw the announcement we would know to meet up in Halberstadt at eight a.m. on the first Monday of the month following the announcement.’

  Fabel leaned forward. ‘So, if we ran this announcement in the appropriate newspapers, we could bring the other two Valkyries to Halberstadt?’

  Margarethe shook her head. ‘It was compromised. They caught us talking about it. We were stupid: we were being trained by the Stasi and didn’t think that they would have bugged us.’

  ‘So you don’t think the others would respond to the announcement?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘No. And we didn’t arrange another code. After that we were separated. We didn’t see each other again.’

  ‘And you’ve had no contact since then? With any of the other Valkyries?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘You said Drescher had a favourite. This is the woman you think he’s been operating with. Which one, Margarethe? Who was his favourite – Liane Kayser or Anke Wollner?’

  ‘Anke Wollner. Liane … well, Liane was different. She didn’t respond as well to discipline. She wanted things her own way. It was Anke who was Drescher’s little protégée.’

  Anna Wolff came back into the room and retook her place. She responded to Fabel’s inquiring look with a sharp shake of her head.

  ‘I’ll ask you again …’ Fabel turned back to Margarethe. ‘If it wasn’t one of the other Valkyries, who set you up with everything you needed to kill Drescher?’

  The blank mask fell again.

  ‘Was it someone else from the Stasi? Maybe someone who worked with Drescher and saw him as a threat.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Does the name Thomas Maas mean anything to you? Ulrich Adebach?’ Fabel ran through the other names he had obtained from the BStU Federal Commissioner’s office. It was clear that they had come to a dead end. It was almost as if Margarethe had realised that she had opened up too much and was now shutting down. No, thought Fabel, she was too much in control for that. Any information she had given had been released in a controlled manner.

  Fabel terminated the interview and Margarethe was taken back to her cell under heavy guard. Fabel ordered that she be placed in a video-surveillance cell.

  ‘So nothing on these names?’ Fabel asked Anna as soon as they were in the corridor.

  ‘Nothing. But that’s hardly surprising, Chef. If these girls were chosen by the Stasi, especially if they were orphans or from broken homes, then I would guess that the first thing the Stasi would do would be to wipe all trace of their real identities from the public record. An easy thing to do if you’re in charge of that selfsame public record.’

  ‘I want you to get back on to the BStU Federal Commissioner’s office in Berlin.’ Fabel leaned against the wall. ‘Give them these names and see what comes up. The Stasi thought they were invulnerable – maybe they thought any mention of the girls’ real identities within the context of a Stasi HQ file was relatively safe.’

  ‘It’s a very, very long shot, Chef,’ said Anna.

  ‘At the moment it’s the best we’ve got.’

  They were joined by Karin Vestergaard and Werner Meyer, who had been watching the interview from the next room.

  ‘Well?’ Fabel asked Vestergaard.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘It’s difficult to read expression and body language over a CCTV link.’

  ‘There was none to read, believe me. There’s a very big chunk of humanity missing from Margarethe Paulus. But you heard what she said about Jespersen’s death. She claims she had nothing to do with it and she has a point when she says she has nothing to gain by lying about it.’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ said Vestergaard. ‘I tend to believe her.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Fabel. ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘we’ve got a professional assassination in Norway, Jørgen Halvorsen, and the death of Jens Jespersen in Hamburg. It’s pretty safe to assume that they are directly linked.’

  ‘Then we’ve got the murders in the Kiez – the Brit Westland and Armin Lensch,’ said Werner. ‘The so-called return of the Angel of St Pauli. They must be connected.’

  ‘And the murder of Georg Drescher,’ said Anna. ‘Whether Margarethe was involved in the Jespersen and Halvorsen killings or not, there is a connection. So effectively we have three sets of murders that have a common link, and that link is this Stasi conspiracy to place Valkyrie assassins in the West.’

  ‘There’s maybe one more,’ said Fabel. ‘Peter Claasens – the suicide that maybe isn’t a suicide in the Kontorhaus Quarter. Maybe the link lies there.’ He turned to Karin Vestergaard. ‘And I think maybe you and I should take another look at this environmental analyst Sparwald, who has had some kind of contact with Halvorsen.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Vestergaard. ‘If they were both supposed to be travelling to China, and Halvorsen didn’t make it, then who’s to say that Sparwald did?’

  Fabel straightened up from leaning on the wall. ‘Do you still have the address?’

  Karin Vestergaard held out the note that Sparwald’s boss had given her.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Fabel.

  7.

  Fabel rang Sparwald’s cellphone number from his car.

  ‘Number unavailable,’ he said to Vestergaard as he snapped his phone shut.

  ‘That’s not surprising, if he’s in a remote part of China.’

  ‘Like you say, if that’s where he is,’ said Fabel. He looked at the note Lüttig, Sparwald’s boss, had given them. ‘But I hope to God he is. If Sparwald really was due to make this trip with a Norwegian travelling companion, and that travelling companion was Halvorsen …’

  Sparwald didn’t live far from his work. But if you were someone who appreciated the environment, Poppenbüttel was not a bad choice of place to live. Even in winter, with its branches bare and its tones muted, Nature still made her presence felt here. Sparwald lived in a small house near the banks of the Alster, set tight into a mass of trees. The house was constructed out of wood, but most of the south-facing side of the house was made up of windows, over which shutters had been pulled.

  ‘It reminds me of a lot of the houses we have in Denmark,
’ said Vestergaard. She pointed to a large area of the garden that had been dug up. There were spiralled coils of pipe lying on the muddy exposed undersoil. ‘Look – he’s been installing a geothermal energy converter. It’s not finished. Now that’s a very odd project to leave half-done when you’re about to go off to China for a month or so.’ She nodded up towards the roof. ‘And these solar panels are new. It doesn’t look to me like they’re connected. Sparwald was obviously in the middle of a pretty major home-improvement project.’

  Fabel rang the front doorbell and knocked on the door for good measure. As he expected there was no answer. He turned to Vestergaard.

  ‘I’m going to have a look around the back. See if you can find a window where the blinds haven’t been drawn.’

  Fabel made his way around the side of the building. Again there were signs of work in progress: building materials propped against the side of the house; tools left out. Fabel tried the back door. It was locked.

  ‘Jan!’ He heard Vestergaard call from the other side of the house. He ran around, slipping on the mud churned up by Sparwald’s excavation for the heat pump.

  ‘Take a look at this,’ said Vestergaard. ‘There’s a space between the blind and the edge of the window.’

  He peered through but could see nothing. He took a small torch from his pocket and shone the beam through.

  ‘You see it?’ said Vestergaard.

  ‘I see it,’ said Fabel. For a moment he tried to convince himself it was just a shoe. But he knew that what he saw, just visible from behind the sofa, was a foot.

  He called the Presidium from his cellphone and told them to send a blue-and-silver from Police Commissariat 35 at Poppenbüttel.

  ‘And could you alert the Forensics Department. It would appear we have a murder scene here.’

  ‘This is different,’ said Vestergaard without a hint of irony. It had taken less than two minutes for the first uniformed unit to arrive and for the door of Sparwald’s home to be shattered with a ram. The first thing that had struck them on entering the house was the smell. The real stench of death. They found Sparwald’s body in the lounge, his foot projecting beyond the edge of the sofa, as they had seen through the window. This was horror of a different kind from that they had experienced at the Drescher scene, and Fabel understood exactly what Vestergaard had meant by her comment. The smell was because Sparwald had lain undiscovered for days, maybe weeks, but the method of his death had been much cleaner than Drescher’s. Without symbolism or ritual. Without passion.

  Fabel and Vestergaard had put on forensic overshoes and latex gloves before entering the house and instructed the uniformed officers to do the same. Clutching a handkerchief to his mouth and nose, Fabel bent down and examined Sparwald, who lay staring up at the ceiling, the skin on his face pale and blotchy. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead and another under his jawline. This had been the professional, efficient extermination of a life.

  ‘You realise this is exactly the same m.o. as the Halvorsen killing?’ Vestergaard too held the back of her hand to her nose to diminish the smell of death, but Fabel noticed that otherwise she seemed untouched by the scene. Her brow was slightly furrowed, but it was the concentration of a professional analysing the facts she was presented with.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m guessing he’s been killed with a low-velocity hollow-point.’

  ‘The Valkyrie,’ said Vestergaard, but quietly, as if to herself.

  Poppenbüttel police station was part of Polizei Hamburg Division East and could not have been more different from Davidwache or Klingberg. Police Commissariat 35 was situated on Wentzelplatz, next to the S-Bahn station. The Commissariat was an imposing, brand-new construction composed of solid modernist blocks, angles, curves and sweeps. There was, Fabel thought, something almost intimidating about the severity of the building and he found himself thinking just how much more approachable Davidwache must seem to the public.

  Fabel had assembled the resources he needed there, bringing in Holger Brauner and his forensics team, plus Anna, Werner, Henk and Dirk. The Poppenbüttel uniformed branch had kept on the on-duty shift after its replacement came on, doubling the number of officers available. Fabel had also made a call to van Heiden, whose disapproving tone all but suggested that he held Fabel personally responsible for another murder being discovered. But, again, there had been no reluctance to comply with Fabel’s request for more officers.

  The first people Fabel spoke to were the forensics team. Brauner had rolled up in a convoy of vans carrying twelve specialists and all the technical support they needed to carry out a thorough processing of the scene.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Brauner said to Fabel, ‘I’d like Astrid to go in alone to start with. She has a knack of getting trace from older scenes.’

  ‘It’s up to you, Holger,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s your thing, not mine. But she must be good – normally you would be all over a scene like this like a rash.’

  ‘Trust me, Jan, she is. One of the best I’ve worked with.’

  Fabel held a cramped briefing in the Commissariat’s main conference room. His strategy was simple: to get every door knocked on, every memory jogged, every detail noted. At the same time, he hoped against hope that the forensic survey of the murder scene would reveal something that would point them in the direction of the Valkyrie. He and Vestergaard plotted out when the assassin had been in Oslo, and an estimate, from Astrid Bremer’s initial observations, of when Sparwald had died. From that Fabel worked out a rough schedule for the killer, and put a team on to looking at flights, trains, ferries. It was a long shot, particularly as they were dealing with someone who clearly did not leave traces. Or make mistakes. Ever.

  Fabel got home about ten and told Susanne what his day had yielded.

  ‘You look bushed,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I grabbed something at Poppenbüttel.’ He sighed. ‘We spent hours trying to trace her steps. I don’t know, Susanne … this killer, the thing with Margarethe Paulus, sometimes I think it’s all beyond me. For the first time in years I feel totally lost with a case.’

  Susanne smiled and pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen over Fabel’s brow. ‘Do you want me to tell you what I think?’

  ‘Of course I do. I always want your opinion. You know that.’

  ‘I’m not talking about my professional opinion. I mean my personal opinion.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Men are always trying to work out the secret of being a success with women. You’re always asking each other that. The answer is that the man who is most successful with women is the man who has no secret. The man who doesn’t treat them as if they’re from another planet.’

  ‘Are you trying to improve my courting skills?’

  ‘No, Jan. You did all right in that department. But this case … because you’re dealing with women, with a female serial killer and/or a professional female assassin, you think you have no frame of reference. The truth is there are differences in the offending behaviours of each gender. But you are basically thinking about this all the wrong way because you’re thinking about it in a different way. Just do what you do, Jan. Forget the gender and focus on the crimes.’

  Fabel thought about what Susanne had said. ‘You might be right,’ he said.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to bed. You need a good night’s sleep. Things will look different in the morning.’

  It took a while for Fabel to drift off and when he did fragments of dreams punctuated his sleep. Vague fragments. Irma Grese. Margarethe Paulus. And another woman whose face he could not make out.

  8.

  ‘You’re looking for me.’ He broke off. Another coughing fit and muffled sounds indicating he had covered the mouthpiece with his hand. When he came back on the line his voice sounded harder, more determined, as if annoyed at his own weakness. ‘I know you’ve been looking for me.’

  ‘Of course I’ve been looking for you,’ said Sylvie Achtenhagen
. ‘What did you expect? Have you got more information for me?’

  ‘You’ve seen all you need to see. You don’t need to look for me. You don’t need to find me,’ said Siegfried. ‘I want us to meet.’

  ‘Face to face?’ asked Sylvie. As she spoke, she looked out of the hotel window. It was a transit hotel, one of the ones just off the autobahn, and she watched the rain-fudged dark shapes of cars and lorries drift silently along the ribbon of motorway in the near distance.

  ‘Face to face,’ he said. ‘Have you got my money?’

  ‘You know the answer to that already. You know it’s not that simple.’

  ‘Everything in life is as simple as you choose to make it. Decisions about life and death are the most straightforward. A decision about whether you want someone else to get this scoop is a simple one.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Sylvie, ‘we can sort something out.’

  ‘Of course we can. I want something from you and I know you will give it to me. Like I said, it’s simple.’

  After Siegfried hung up, Sylvie remained at the window for a moment, still watching silent cars in the distance. She was closing in on him. She knew that. He knew she was looking for him because she had obviously been looking in the right places. Sylvie went across to the bed and laid out the sheets with the names she had narrowed it down to. They were all over the East of Germany and one was back in Hamburg. One of these was Siegfried, she was sure of it.

  Sylvie rose early the next morning and drove the fifty kilometres to Dresden. There she met with a retired accounts clerk called Berger. Berger, like Frau Schneeg, had sought to hide his past as a Stasi officer by moving from his home town to Dresden. Nonetheless, word, Berger explained, had a habit of getting around.

  ‘You were on Ulrich Adebach’s staff, is that right, Herr Berger?’ Sylvie looked around his apartment. Clean but small and cheaply furnished. Depressing.