The Valkyrie Song

by Craig Russell

  ‘There was a similar murder outside Oslo,’ said Fabel. ‘Exactly the same modus.’

  ‘My guess is that the victim didn’t let the killer into the house. There was a book beside him on the floor. No prints other than his own and it’s obvious he dropped it when he was shot. And I found powder traces on the wall by the lounge door and on the edge of the door itself. Again no prints on the door handle or anywhere else that I could see. I’m guessing that the killer opened the lounge door, stepped in and fired before the victim had time to respond. The killer didn’t need to go any further into the room, so she retraced her steps back along the hall to the front door. It was a hunch, but I was right: there is no evidence of the door having been forced, but there is some fresh scratching around the lock. She picked it.’

  ‘But nothing we can get DNA from? Or any trace of any kind?’ Fabel failed to conceal his frustration.

  ‘A faint partial bootprint in the hall, bearing traces of soil from the garden, but that could have been anyone’s and made at any time. And, anyway, it’s not big enough to give us a match.’

  ‘Great,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Sorry. I did my best,’ said Astrid and, even over the phone, Fabel could tell that she meant it. ‘I went over everything three times. Tried all the tricks. There just wasn’t anything to find.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. Holger told me that if anyone could get something, you could. He also said you’re the best he’s worked with for cold scenes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Astrid said. ‘But whoever killed Sparwald is better.’

  After he’d hung up Fabel made his way into the main Murder Commission meeting room. Werner, Anna, Henk and Dirk were waiting for him. He had also invited Karin Vestergaard to join them, but she had phoned in to say she’d be a few minutes late.

  ‘You know,’ said Werner, ‘if we’re looking for a Valkyrie, we couldn’t go far wrong looking at the Danish ice maiden. She’s a cold one all right.’

  ‘She’s a good cop, from what I can see,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Listen,’ said Anna, ‘while we’re on the subject of people we should be thinking about … I’m not being funny, but there are two women we should maybe take a long hard look at. Martina Schilmann and Petra Meissner.’

  ‘Why Martina?’ Fabel searched Anna’s face for meaning. ‘She’s ex-Polizei Hamburg, for God’s sake.’

  ‘She was also involved with Westland and was there at the scene. Let’s face it, we’ve only got her word that she was at the opposite end of Herbertstrasse all the time she said she was. And she was brought up in the GDR, as was Petra Meissner. Both fall within the age range we have for the Valkyrie.’

  ‘What?’ said Fabel dismissively. ‘So now we’re going to suspect all women from East Germany? We’d better bring in Chancellor Merkel, then. She was brought up in Brandenburg, after all.’ Fabel sarcastically put on an expression of enlightenment. ‘And she was in the Free German Youth!’

  ‘Seriously, Chef,’ pressed Anna. ‘We can’t ignore the fact that two women involved with Jake Westland spent their youth in the GDR.’

  ‘But Martina’s background will have been thoroughly checked out before she was allowed to join the Polizei Hamburg. And I would say that Petra Meissner’s public profile is far too visible for her to operate as a professional killer.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ said Anna. ‘But if Martina Schilmann is the Valkyrie, then her backstory in the GDR would be as solid as it could be …’

  ‘Okay, check it out.’ Fabel turned to Hechtner. ‘Dirk, were you able to get any more on who “Olaf” might be – the name in Jespersen’s notebook?’

  ‘Nope, sorry, Chef. From the little we’ve been able to piece together, there’s nothing to suggest Drescher ever used “Olaf” as a pseudonym. No Olafs that we can see connected to Goran Vujaić, Jake Westland or Armin Lensch either. We’re still looking into any Olaf that Ralf Sparwald might have known.’

  ‘It could be incidental,’ said Fabel. ‘Maybe nothing to it all.’

  Fabel waited until Vestergaard arrived and the rest of the team had assembled in the Incident Room.

  ‘Okay. We’ve got a break,’ he said addressing the whole team. ‘Thanks to Anna, we’ve cracked the code behind Drescher’s messages to the Valkyrie. All the messages have been simple time-and-place set-ups for meetings. It’s an example of institutional thinking. They formed their working system in a time before reunification, using the methods of the Cold War. I’m guessing that Drescher was uncomfortable with new technology, otherwise they could have used the Internet or anonymous email accounts. Having said that, there’s no evidence that they didn’t use these means in addition to the magazine announcements.’

  ‘Why do it at all?’ asked Werner. ‘After all, they could have simply phoned each other. No one knew who Drescher was and she could have had an untraceable cellphone.’

  ‘Like I said, institutional thinking. Drescher was in the same city as the Valkyrie, but their entire relationship had been created to operate at long distances, with the Valkyrie working on her own most of the time. When they set up in Hamburg, post-Reunification, they kept their old way of working. Inflexibility, I suppose.’

  As he spoke, Fabel noticed that Astrid Bremer, the deputy head of the forensics team, had come into the Incident Room and was standing at the back.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Fabel, ‘we’ve managed to get the cooperation of Muliebritas magazine. They’re going to hold us a space in the next issue. It’s due out next week, so we’ve had to work fast to get our wording right. There doesn’t seem to be any regular meeting place. The only common element is that it seems to always be in an open space, presumably so she can check it out as she approaches him, but with enough people around for them to be inconspicuous. As far as we can see, all meetings have been in Altona or Hamburg city centre.’

  ‘What about the Rathausplatz in front of the City Chambers?’ asked Anna. ‘We could put someone on each corner and on the U-Bahn entrance.’

  ‘I suspect that would be a little too public for the Valkyrie. Drescher always picked quieter venues. People milling about but not crowds. The other thing is we want to limit the risk to the public if things go pear-shaped.’

  ‘What if we used the Altona Balkon?’ asked Werner.

  ‘Drescher used it once before, as far as we can see. The last meeting, in fact.’

  ‘What about the Alsterpark next to where you used to live, Chef?’ said Anna. ‘On the shores of the Outer Alster? It would be reasonably easy to secure but quite difficult for the Valkyrie to spot us.’

  Fabel thought for a moment. ‘That sounds good. Anybody have any objections?’

  There were none.

  ‘Okay,’ said Fabel to Werner. ‘Let’s get this encrypted and spread across three announcements, the way Drescher did: “Alsterpark at Fährdamm. Eleven-thirty, Wednesday”. That gives us a week to get it all set up. In the meantime, I’m going to do a bit of digging into Goran Vujaić’s history. It was his untimely demise that brought Jens Jespersen to Hamburg.’ He turned to Vestergaard and spoke in English. ‘I’d like you to come along with me, if that’s okay. I’d also like us both to go and visit Gina Brønsted. The NeuHansa Group keeps cropping up in all of this.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said and smiled in a way so cool that it reminded him of Margarethe Paulus. ‘It would be my pleasure.’

  After Fabel had set the team about their various tasks, Astrid Bremer came over to him. She looked young and girlish and, for a moment, Fabel found it difficult to imagine her being an expert on death.

  ‘I think I have something,’ she said.

  ‘From Sparwald’s house?’ asked Fabel hopefully.

  ‘No, from the Drescher apartment. We have a fingerprint specialist who can extrapolate prints from very faint or old traces. I found a packet of Rondo Melange, the popular East German coffee. I just thought it was odd that a man trying so hard to conceal his Stasi past and living with a phoney West German history would have something like
that in his cupboard. Well, I’ve just heard back from my fingerprint guy. We’ve got a print that doesn’t belong.’

  ‘The coffee was a gift?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Astrid. ‘And a gift from someone who knew of Drescher’s GDR background. And that could only be one person …’

  Fabel had just walked into his office to fetch his coat when his phone rang.

  ‘Hello, Principal Chief Commissar Fabel? This is Dr Lüttig – Thomas Lüttig at SkK Biotech. I heard about Ralf … one of your people came round. A young woman.’

  ‘Commissar Wolff, yes. I’m sorry about Dr Sparwald, I know you valued him as a colleague.’

  ‘He was my friend as well, Chief Commissar. Anyway, you asked me to tell you if anything out of the ordinary came up. Well, after I heard about Ralf I spent the afternoon going through all his stuff. There is something … It would appear Ralf was doing some work for which there’s no company authorisation. Some kind of private project.’

  ‘Oh?’ Fabel reached into his drawer and took a notebook out. ‘What kind of private project?’

  ‘From what I can see, he has been having blood samples tested. Not many – it looks like just three samples, each from a different donor. I found the samples and some paperwork. It seems very strange indeed.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The tests were very specific. Ralf seems to have been looking for PBDEs. Also, he was doing the tests himself and wasn’t keeping proper records. But I did find a note relating to each of the samples. The first said: female, twenty-two, Hunan Province.’

  ‘China …’ Fabel spoke as much to himself as to Lüttig.

  ‘Yes. But the second one isn’t. It says: female, twenty-two, Bitola.’

  ‘Bitola?’

  ‘I checked it out on the Internet. It’s a city in Macedonia. Very industrial.’

  ‘What are these PBDEs?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Polybrominated diphenyl ethers. They’re used a lot in flame-retardants. And in a thousand other things. There’s a great deal of concern about their toxicity.’

  ‘You said there was a third sample. What was that labelled?’

  ‘Well, yes … it’s this third sample that’s causing me the most concern. It was labelled Hunan Province, same as the first blood sample. But it’s human tissue. And, from the tests Ralf was doing, I’m guessing it’s a sample of human thyroid. Which means it has been taken post-mortem. And there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘From what I can see of his results, the level of PBDEs in these samples is astronomical.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Fabel. ‘Could it be fatal?’

  ‘Potentially, yes. Like I said, they’re incredibly toxic and you need a special licence to dispose of them. The jury is still out on what damage they actually do, but they are suspected of causing problems with the thyroid gland, the endocrine system generally and even neurological damage.’

  ‘Thanks – that could be useful, Dr Lüttig.’ Fabel paused. ‘By the way, does the name “Olaf” mean anything to you? Someone whom Ralf Sparwald may have known?’

  ‘No, I can’t think of anyone. Is it important?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Fabel.

  He didn’t like business types.

  It didn’t matter how exalted or lowly they were in their arcane corporate hierarchies, they all, to Fabel, seemed to have had some kind of personality-ectomy. He had recently flown to Frankfurt for a meeting with the city’s Murder Commission. On the flight, Fabel had sat in his British tailored sports jacket surrounded by Boss-suited clones and feeling like an extra in the film Gattaca. He had promised himself he would blow his brains out with his SIG-Sauer before owning a BlackBerry.

  Fabel even found it difficult at times to hide his disdain for the type of police officers who seemed to be in ‘the business of policing’ and who dressed in the same corporate-clone style as their commercial counterparts.

  But it was the business leaders at the top of the tree who wound Fabel up most of all. Sometimes, it was as if they thought themselves medieval barons. In a way, Fabel supposed, they had a point: Hamburg was a city, and a state, that had built its history and independence on a foundation of trade. Instead of having total control over the lives of serfs and bondsmen, the Hanseatic city’s tycoons and magnates held employees, subsidiaries, suppliers and not a few of Hamburg’s politicians in their thrall. And most of Hamburg’s politicians were businessmen themselves.

  It had been Fabel’s experience that Hamburg’s business leaders often felt themselves above and beyond the reach of common mortals like policemen.

  So it didn’t surprise Fabel that it took his personal intervention to arrange an appointment with Gina Brønsted. He had asked one of the Presidium’s administrative assistants to set up a meeting but she had got nowhere, constantly being fobbed off by someone comparatively low down in the NeuHansa food chain.

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ Fabel had said when Brønsted’s secretary’s secretary’s assistant had said it was ‘quite impossible’ for an appointment to be made within the next week or so. ‘I quite understand that Frau Brønsted is very busy. I’ll send a marked police car to her home tonight and bring her into the Presidium. And don’t worry, I’ll be sure to tell her that you were so protective of her office time.’

  Fabel was informed that Gina Brønsted would see him later that afternoon. As soon as the appointment was confirmed he phoned Hans Gessler of the corporate crime division and asked him if he would mind coming along at such short notice.

  ‘Will you be bringing along the Little Mermaid?’ asked Gessler.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Fabel was genuinely confused.

  ‘That little Danish beauty I’ve heard you’ve grown attached to.’

  ‘If you mean Politidirektør Karin Vestergaard, then yes, as a matter of fact she will be there. Gina Brønsted is a Flensburg Dane and I thought it might be useful. And anyway, Politidirektør Vestergaard has a direct interest in this case.’

  ‘Count me in,’ said Gessler.

  Given the trouble that he had had in securing an appointment with Gina Brønsted, Fabel was surprised when, as he was leaving the Presidium, he was handed a note at reception telling him that Gennady Frolov’s office had been looking for him, asking if it would be possible for Fabel to talk with the Russian. Frolov was on Fabel’s to do list and he made a mental note to follow up the call when he got back.

  The NeuHansa Group had its offices in a brand-new building in the HafenCity. Fabel had picked up Gessler and Vestergaard and drove through the city from the Presidium down to the shores of the Elbe. They crossed over the short cantilevered bridge into the Speicherstadt.

  ‘This is amazing,’ said Vestergaard as they entered the maze of narrow cobbled streets, cathedral-sized red-brick warehouses and interconnecting canals.

  ‘The Speicherstadt was a toll-free zone right up until a few years ago,’ said Gessler eagerly, leaning over from the back seat. ‘I think it was two thousand and four … up until then the Speicherstadt was an independent free port and the world’s biggest bonded area.’

  Gessler was a shortish but good-looking man in his forties with a reputation for being a bit of a ladykiller. Fabel had noticed when he picked him up at the Presidium that Gessler was wearing a Hugo Boss suit. And tapping something into his BlackBerry.

  Fabel had also noticed that Gessler’s eyes had lit up as soon as he had introduced him to Karin Vestergaard. The light had failed to catch in hers.

  ‘There’s been a lot of new building,’ explained Fabel. ‘The Hanseatic Trade Centre in the Speicherstadt itself as well as the HafenCity, which is all new. Gina Brønsted has headquartered her NeuHansa Group in one of the biggest and newest buildings. Rumour has it she has a thirteen-million-euro penthouse apartment above the shop, as it were.’

  They passed through the Speicherstadt and into the HafenCity. Glass and steel were everywhere, but it was obvious an effort had been made to e
xtend something of the spirit of the old Speicherstadt into the architecture of the twenty-first century.

  ‘Very impressive,’ said Vestergaard.

  ‘It’s not finished,’ said Gessler. ‘There’s going to be an opera house to compete with Sydney – the Elbphilharmonie Concert Hall.’

  ‘How do you want to handle this, Jan?’ asked Vestergaard as if she hadn’t heard Gessler.

  ‘I’ll ask her about Lensch, her employee, and Claasens, the export agent. She also met Westland the night he died. This is all quite … involved. She’s a Flensburg Dane – I think I told you that already – meaning she’s German by nationality but Danish by ethnicity and first language. If I’m struggling, maybe you can jump in. Also, I’ll leave the questioning about Jespersen to you.’ Fabel turned and spoke to Gessler. ‘Hans, I smell a rat here. I’m not saying Brønsted herself is directly involved with any of these killings, but NeuHansa is always there in the background.’

  ‘I don’t interrogate people, Jan – I interrogate paperwork and computer data. If there’s a link between NeuHansa and these murders, then there will be something on file, somewhere, something that might look innocuous but which will point us in the right direction. I need to get access to their files. When you introduce me, it would be best not to disclose my department, unless she asks specifically.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fabel swung his door open and got out, followed by Gessler and Vestergaard. He heard Gessler give a low appreciative whistle and when he turned he half expected the corporate cop to be staring at Karin Vestergaard’s legs. Instead Fabel followed his eyes to a massive, sleek luxury motor yacht anchored further down the quay. The yacht had the look of something equally suited for space travel as sailing: a long, elegant white needle with a superstructure of black glass and elongated arches. A helicopter sat on the aft deck.