Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

There was a mother with two children three tables away. Birta watched them. The mother would have been roughly the same age, shared Birta’s colouring and was dressed in typical Oslo chic. Expensive but restrained. And warm. But, unlike Birta, there was something not entirely contained about the young mother: a vague sense of chaos. Birta recognised it as the consequence of motherhood; that a substantial fraction of the woman’s life was no longer hers to control and Birta wondered what that must feel like.

She turned back to watch the trams and the passers-by. She had never had children. She had never divided herself. And she never would. She had chosen career and herself above all else. And now she sat under the pale Norwegian sky, watching the trams pass and glancing over at the woman and her two children and felt a vague ache in her chest.

This was futile. Sentimental wandering. She was annoyed with her own self-indulgence since she’d arrived. Like the trip to Holmenkollen.

Birta had not planned to visit Holmenkollen, but she had felt the need as soon as she had approached Oslo. She had driven overnight and had approached the city along the Mosseveien highway that ran along the shore, as the day had broken painfully beautiful in deep red and purple-blue silk over the Oslofjord. She had parked in a municipal car park on the outskirts of the city and had taken the T-Bane train to Holmenkollen and mingled with the handful of off-season tourists at the ski centre. Like the tourists, she had looked out over the city from the top of the ski jump. But it had been the circuit around the centre, the one used for the biathlon, that she had come to see. One more time. It had been a pointless exercise and so unlike her. And now she sat in the centre of Oslo surrendering to pangs of jealousy as she watched a woman fuss over her children.

This was not what she was here for. She was in Oslo on business, not to sightsee or for indulgent self-reflection. She paid in cash for her coffee and left without another glance at the woman and her children.

The sun was already low and the long Nordic winter night would come soon. It would be dark. Time for her meeting.

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s a deal. We share information. But I have to say that for the moment it’s going to be very much a one-way trade. You’re the one with the background info. All I’ve got at the moment is something that looks like a death from natural causes.’

‘Like I told you,’ said Vestergaard, ‘Jens Jespersen was my commanding officer when we were both in the Politiets Aktionsstyrke. I learned a hell of a lot from him during that time. I don’t think I’d be where I am today if it hadn’t been for him.’

Fabel watched Vestergaard closely for signs of thaw in the ice maiden. If they were there, they were too small for him to detect. She spoke of Jespersen with respect, even a hint of affection, but there was no warmth in her voice.

‘There was a major drugs bust, six years ago. We set up an elaborate sting — or more correctly Jens set up an elaborate sting and we landed Goran Vuja i c. You know, the Bosnian Serb warlord turned drug smuggler.’

‘I remember,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s funny how people like Vuja i c start off with some kind of ethnic or political agenda and then embrace the criminal free market with enthusiasm. He was a bad bastard from all accounts. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘I’ll get to that, but yes, he died four years ago. Vuja i c was as slimy as he was a vicious piece of work. He had been a member of a Bosnian Serb police unit and was directly involved in some of the atrocities that went on during the Bosnian War. He was never tried at the Hague. Not enough evidence. But the bastard was there at the massacres and the rape camps. Anyway, Jens Jespersen set up a sting and we took Vuja i c down. A few months before we had managed to trip up a Danish businessman called Peter Knudsen who had been dabbling in drug exporting. Jens did a deal with him and Knudsen collaborated with us in setting up Vuja i c. We used Knudsen’s yacht and Jens played the part of Knudsen. We staged three meetings on the yacht and one in Copenhagen. Vuja i c went along with it all. The last meeting on the yacht was where the money changed hands, electronically. It was a very expensive op for us to put on but it seemed very successful.’

‘So how come Vuja i c went free?’ asked Fabel.

‘Unfortunately, Jens hadn’t dotted all the i’s or crossed all the t’s and Vuja i c ’s legal team started to argue entrapment. It wouldn’t have got him off, but his legal team managed to get him bailed between hearings. His passport was impounded, though, and he was restricted from travelling outside Denmark. It was all a bit of a mess and, to be frank, it wasn’t just that my career overtook Jens’s, it was the fact that his came to a standstill. He was blamed for leaving open a potential loophole through which Goran Vuja i c could walk free. Anyway, it was when Vuja i c was on bail pending trial that someone decided to relieve the state of the burden of court proceedings. We found him in Tivoli Gardens just sitting in the rain on a bench. Someone had used a small, thin file or knife to stab him in the heart. It was a truly professional job: there was hardly any blood and it took us ages to find the entry wound beneath his sternum.’

‘I guess you make a lot of enemies in his line of business.’

‘And some strange partners,’ said Vestergaard. She paused while a waiter came in and took their cups away. ‘You see, that was the start of Jens’s obsession with the Valkyrie.’

‘The Valkyrie?’

Vestergaard held up her hand as if to slow Fabel down. ‘We had set up this luxury yacht for the sting. Fitted it out with bugs and hidden cameras to record the whole operation. One of the things we got on tape was Vuja i c talking about the third partner in the deal. A sleeping partner who had financed the whole drug deal and was looking for the lion’s share of the profit. It was this anonymous third partner we had really wanted to uncover.’

‘So you think it was this partner that had Vuja i c killed?’

‘Almost definitely. Vuja i c was nothing if he wasn’t a negotiator. All through his questioning he had kept shtum about the identity of the moneyman. He knew that if his defence of entrapment didn’t work, he could do a deal by giving up the name of his backer. But anyway, if we go back to the conversation we recorded on the boat… Vuja i c had mentioned that the moneyman had a contract killer who was the best in the business. Vuja i c claimed that this contract killer had cleaned up the competition for him at the behest of this sleeping partner. He also claimed this killer went by the name of the Valkyrie, that she was a woman. And he claimed that if the circumstances called for it, this killer was an expert at making the deaths look like accidents or natural causes. Oh, and by the way, the crooked businessman we used to set Vuja i c up also died prematurely.’

‘So that’s why you want our pathologist to check closely for puncture marks or anything unusual…’

‘Exactly. But Vuja i c had more to say about the Valkyrie. And this is where it gets really interesting for you: he claimed that she was based here. In Hamburg.’

Fabel leaned back in the leather sofa and gazed out across the empty lounge and through the vast plate-glass windows to the Alsterfleet beyond. ‘You believe this?’

‘Jens did. But, like I said, he didn’t share information the way he should have. And from what I’ve seen of your report, his laptop and notebooks have disappeared as well.’

‘I thought he was travelling surprisingly light. And we were pretty sure his cellphone was wiped. But we didn’t know for sure that stuff had been taken. I’ll get someone to start questioning the staff.’