Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

‘You wouldn’t understand. No man would understand. I did it for the excitement. To be wanted. Desired.’

‘Did you get all that?’ asked Fabel when he met Anna and Werner in the hall. They had been watching the interview on the closed-circuit video monitor in the next room.

‘Yep,’ said Werner. ‘Weird. Do you believe her?’

‘There’s absolutely no way she could have dumped the knife before you arrested her?’ asked Fabel.

‘None,’ said Anna. ‘She was in Werner’s sight all the time and we searched her thoroughly immediately after she was arrested. Nothing. And nothing dropped or dumped, either.’

Fabel shook his head. ‘I give up sometimes. Keep her in and check out her alibi for last week with her husband. And try to be — I don’t know — diplomatic.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe I should ask him if he’s ever seen Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour. I’m not being funny, Chef, but there’s no diplomatic way of telling some guy that his wife’s been moonlighting as a hooker. “And, oh, by the way, don’t feel too bad about it: it’s not that she’s struggling on what you give her for housekeeping — she’s doing it for the love of dick.”’

‘Anna’s got a point, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘There’s no sugaring this pill.’

‘Simply keep to the fact that she’s a suspect in a serious crime, and that you need to establish her whereabouts on the night in question. Leave the explaining to her.’

‘Okay, Chef.’

Fabel made his way to his office. He checked his email. There was an internal note from van Heiden to remind him that Politidirektor Vestergaard, the boss of the dead Danish cop, Jespersen, was flying down to see them in a couple of days. Van Heiden helpfully provided the flight’s arrival time.

‘I’ve got nothing better to do,’ muttered Fabel. He really wanted to talk to Jespersen’s boss but he had thought, given that he was up to his neck in a major murder inquiry, that van Heiden could at least have arranged the pick-up.

He looked at his watch. Two a.m. He’d go home, catch four or five hours’ sleep and head back into the Presidium. He yawned. He was really getting too old for this. He thought of Viola Dahlke and the fact that she would be lying, wide awake and afraid, considering every thread as the fabric of her life unravelled. What the hell had she thought she was doing? She had been right: he didn’t understand; just as he hadn’t understood why so many of the people he had encountered in his career had done the things they had done. Human sexuality was a perplexing thing. A lot of the murders he had investigated had had bizarre sexual elements to them and Fabel had been forced to navigate some dark and stormy seas over the years. Sometimes it was as if women remained an unknown continent for him.

He took his English tweed jacket from the back of his chair and unhooked his raincoat from the rack. As he made for the door he almost expected the phone to ring.

It did.

It was strange, given the very nature of his job, that the one thing that Fabel had never fully come to terms with was the sudden extinction of life.

He had heard that astronauts, once they are truly in space, look back at the Earth and tend to become, in that instant, either entirely atheistic or totally convinced of the existence of a god. No middle ground. Whether in reality it was as absolute as that, Fabel could understand the experience. He had a similar feeling every time he looked at the dead. A corpse has no humanity: it doesn’t look like someone sleeping, it becomes nothing more than a human-like object. An empty shell. And in Fabel’s case, most of the dead he looked upon had been forcibly evicted from that shell.

Where some would have seen the vessel abandoned by the departing soul, Fabel saw only emptiness. The final shutting down of an interdependence of biological systems. The ending of a universe seen from a never-to-be-repeated viewpoint.

However Armin Lensch had seen the world, he wasn’t seeing it now.

His body lay on a scrubby patch of grass and rubble down near the shore of the River Elbe, close to Hafenstrasse. A few empty beer bottles and the wheel of some long-discarded child’s toy served as his pillow, and the grass on which he lay was framed by broken red bricks from whatever dock building had stood there at one time. The rain had turned to sleet, then to snow so the technicians had erected a white forensics tent to protect the crime scene and had illuminated it with lights on telescopic stands. Like Westland, Lensch had been sliced across the belly and his viscera, spilling sideways from the mouth-like gape of the wound, glistened in the harsh light of the arc lamps the forensic team had erected. A nauseating stench from his sliced-open abdomen lingered in the air of the forensics tent.

A man almost completely concealed in white hooded coveralls, blue latex gloves and a surgical mask came over to Fabel.

‘Hello, Jan.’ Holger Brauner, the forensics chief, slipped the mask from his face and smiled. ‘It’s a nippy one tonight…’

Fabel returned the smile. Brauner was almost invariably cheerful, despite the nature of his work. Or maybe because of it. ‘Hi, Holger. What’s the story?’

‘From my estimation, we’re talking about a male, twenty-nine years old, one-seventy-nine centimetres tall, white-collar job — finance sector — blood group O rhesus negative, suffers from a nut allergy and lives in Eppendorf.’

‘Very impressive, Sherlock,’ said Fabel. ‘You found his wallet, didn’t you?’

‘No, of course not. I established it all with DNA and the arcane skills of the forensic wizard. Do you never watch CSI?’ Brauner grinned and held up a plastic evidence bag containing a black leather wallet and a state identity card. ‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘All his credit cards and cash too, as far as I can see. Cellphone as well. Robbery doesn’t seem to have been the motive.’

‘Leave the detective work to us, lab rat,’ said Fabel, with a grin. Someone entered the tent behind him and he turned to see Anna and Werner. It had been Werner who had called Fabel. Werner rolled his eyes as he and Anna stepped back into the enclosed scene of crime. Fabel read his meaning: Anna’s make-up was thrown out in stark contrast to the pallor of her skin. It was the same effect he had seen on Viola Dahlke; in Anna’s case it was Armin Lensch’s mutilated belly, which she worked so hard not to look at, that was the cause of her lack of colour. Tough little Anna’s Achilles heel and another reason for her to consider a transfer.

‘You all right?’ Fabel asked.

‘I’m fine,’ said Anna defensively, but she still avoided looking at Lensch. ‘So we’ve got number two. Looks like we’re at the start of another series.’

‘I need you two to get on to finding out when he was last seen, who he was with… Werner, what is it?’ Fabel noticed Werner leaning close to the body, staring at the dead man’s face intently.

‘Anna, come here and look.’

‘Yeah… very funny.’

‘No, Anna, I mean it. Look at him — isn’t he the guy from earlier? When we were arresting Dahlke?’

Anna moved closer, holding the back of her hand to her nose. ‘Shit

… you’re right.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Let’s have it.’

‘Just a coincidence, Chef,’ said Anna. ‘I think it’s a coincidence. Remember we told you there was a bit of trouble when we arrested Dahlke — the drunks…’

‘I remember.’

‘He was the ringleader,’ said Werner.

Fabel looked down at Lensch. The dead man’s lips gaped slightly as if to speak and his eyes were still half open, as if a camera had caught him mid-blink. His hair was cut short and had been styled with some form of gel. The shirt looked as if it had been expensive, but the lower half was now sodden with blood. Lensch’s trousers were unfastened and his fly half unzipped. The slice across his belly again spoke of a single, purposeful stroke. Whoever had killed him had known what they were doing. Had done this before.