Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

‘A little. But your Angel seems to be contravening it…’

Anna laughed. They broke off their conversation as they came to the doorway of another club. Two bull-necked Neanderthals stood with their hands folded in front of them in the traditional stance of security staff.

‘Why do they always stand like that?’ Anna asked Wangler. ‘You know, as if they’re protecting their balls?’

‘Maybe they’ve heard about you…’ Wangler laughed.

‘You know about that?’

‘Everybody knows about that.’ Wangler turned to the first doorman. ‘Hi, Heiner.’

‘Hi, Theo.’ The huge doorman spoke with a remarkably soft voice. A little high-pitched. ‘How’s it going?’

‘The usual. Listen, Heiner, this is Criminal Commissar Wolff of the Murder Commission. She’d like to ask you a couple of questions.’

‘She can ask me anything, any time…’ The doorman smiled at Anna. His mate joined in but Anna reckoned it was a reflex action. The other doorman did not look sufficiently evolved to be capable of independent thought. Anna returned the smile with a weary one of her own. She handed the doorman a photograph of Armin Lensch.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen this guy?’ asked Anna.

The doorman glanced at the photograph. He shrugged colossal shoulders and handed it back to Anna. Then he checked himself. ‘Wait a minute. Let me see it again…’ Anna handed the photograph back to him. ‘Yeah… yeah, I seen him. I seen him on Friday… no, Saturday night. Over there.’ He pointed across the wide roadway. ‘I seen him get into a taxi.’

‘You remember everyone you see getting into a taxi?’ asked Anna.

‘No. But I remember this guy because I didn’t think it was a taxi. Or a taxi on duty, anyway. It looked dodgy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it was the right model — a Merc E-class, and it was the right colour, ivory-beige — but it didn’t have a roof sign. The reason I paid attention was ’cause I noticed the car came up from behind him. I don’t think he realised it wasn’t a taxi. You’ve got to watch for shit like that — you know, pervs pretending to be taxi drivers and picking up girls and stuff. Or drunken guys being picked up and rolled for their cash. It don’t happen much because nobody’s got a car the same colour as a taxi.’

‘And you would identify this man as the one who got into the taxi? Or fake taxi?’ Anna tapped the photograph.

‘Yeah, he was in here earlier in the night with a bunch of other guys. Mouthy little prick. I recognised him when I saw him over the road.’

‘You said you watch out for guys being rolled — why didn’t you report seeing him get into the car or do something to stop it?’ asked Wangler.

‘It could have been a genuine taxi. Whether it was or not, I didn’t think at the time that he was in danger.’

‘Why?’ asked Anna.

‘Well.’ Heiner the Neanderthal shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘I reckoned he was safe. With it being a woman driver and all…’

Birta drew close to the house, keeping to the edge of the shields of yellow light cast out onto the snow by the uncurtained windows. It was, she reflected, something you would never think about: drawing your blinds or curtains when you lived in a place like this. The forest was your shutter against the world. No one else to see you.

She could see no one in the lit rooms: she scanned the blank, dark windows too. Nothing. She made her way around the side of the house. There was a door halfway along. Locked. She went around to the back, keeping tight against the wall. There was another door at the back. She turned the handle and was rewarded with the door easing open. It led into the kitchen of the house: a large pine-clad room with expensive-looking fittings and a clutch of unmatched leather and upholstered chairs in one corner. The large fridge was bedecked with children’s drawings, scribbled notes, fridge magnets. Birta eased the door closed behind her and stood perfectly still, diverting all of her attention to any sounds from inside the house. Nothing. Shit, maybe he wasn’t here. That would normally not be a problem: she could replan, reschedule. But Birta had left her mark on this location: there was a middle-aged man with a ripped heart lying out in the woods.

She edged out into the hall. Still no sounds of life. Birta made her way along towards the study. She was about halfway along, checking every room as she passed, when the door to the left immediately ahead opened and the sound of a refilling toilet cistern filled the hall. The client stepped out into the hall and gave a start when he saw Birta standing there. She snapped the pistol up and aimed at his head.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said, and smiled falteringly.

‘Me?’ Birta said.

‘Well, not you specifically, but someone like you.’ He looked past her along the hall. ‘I suppose I expected it to be a man.’

‘I’m not a man,’ said Birta. No point in looking behind me, she thought. Your handyman is not coming. No nasty surprise for me. No reprieve for you.

‘I can see that… listen, you don’t have to…’ The client didn’t finish the sentence. Birta’s bullet hit him in the centre of his forehead and he toppled backward, his body rigid, like a felled tree. She walked over to where he lay. Birta knew he was already dead: there were sounds from his body — post-mortem sounds — his pale trousers were stained with urine and she thought she could smell excreta. Violent death, she knew, was seldom clean. Or odourless. Dark red, almost black blood oozed from a nostril and his left ear. Nevertheless, she crouched down at his feet, aimed along his fallen body at the underside of his jaw and fired a second shot. The client’s head twitched as if he was shaking his head in protest, but Birta knew it was the low-velocity hollow-point doing its work inside the confines of his skull, destroying his brain.

She stood up and marked in her head where she was in the hall and how she had got there. Measuring the forensic distance.

Meeting concluded.

She drove back through the night. There were flurries of snow but the highways had been cleared. She settled back into the comfort of the driver’s seat and switched on her music, making sure she was relaxed but not so much that she would make a mistake that would draw attention to her. She again crossed the Swedish border on a road without a customs point and headed towards Stockholm. Birta returned the car to Stockholm-Bromma airport the next morning and then made her way to the airport car park where her Danish-registered car was parked. As she did so Birta Hennigsen, who had existed as an identity for only a little more than thirty-six hours, began to fade from being.

Fabel headed into the Police Presidium early, driving through Winterhude just as the sun was coming up. The sky was clear and the lying snow had been crisped by the overnight frost. Fabel loved it when it was like this. Since he was a boy, he had been a winter person.

When he arrived at his office he checked the internal email and found there was a reminder from van Heiden about the conference on violence against women. Another reminder. Fabel typed in a brief response explaining he needed a meeting with van Heiden urgently. He also left messages for Anna and Werner that he wanted to see them as soon as they came in.

Fabel opened his desk drawer and took out the sketch pad, laid it on his desktop and flipped it open. He stared at the empty, clean expanse of white paper and sighed. It always started this way. Fabel had used these sketch pads for fifteen years of murder investigations. Singles, multiples, serials. No one except Fabel ever saw these pads. For Fabel, this was a completely different exercise from the plotting of an investigation on an incident board. This exercise had nothing to do with a team effort: it was the externalisation of his thought processes. These clean pages would fill with names, times, places: all connected by a web of lines. Alongside them would be phrases, press cuttings, quotes from statements. And ideas: foul, dark ideas. Fabel remembered how once, when investigating a serial-murder case, he had come across the notebook of the killer: obsessively neat but tangled threads connecting; words underlined, scored out, circled, triple question-marked. It had chilled Fabel to the bone to see how similar the insane methodology of the killer was to his own.