Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

Drescher stared at the photograph and listened, because there was nothing else he could do except stare and listen. The face in the photograph. He knew it. He remembered it. And what terrified him was that Ute Cranz didn’t seem to realise whose face, without the make-up, without the change of hair colour, it really was. And all the time his heart pounded within the cage of his locked body.

‘I’ve hunted you for fourteen years. Fourteen years of preparing for this moment. I promised my sister, promised Margarethe, that I would make it right. Well, I will. And I will take my time. Enjoy every moment. Do you remember when you taught your girls about blood supply? How you could use it to quicken or delay death? Remember how you told them about execution by saw in the Middle Ages? The victim was hung upside down and sawn in half, from the groin to the neck. Because they were hanging upside down, the brain stayed supplied with blood and the victim was conscious through the whole thing.’ She stood up and kicked away whatever had been supporting his head and neck. His head thudded against the floor and pain stabbed through it. She stood astride his body now and looked down at him. ‘You drove my sister insane. You drove her to her death. I am going to drive you mad. You are going to die, but before you die you will be in so much pain that you will lose your mind.’

He looked up at her and thought how beautiful she was. How terribly beautiful.

It had been a long time since Fabel had had a dream like it. He had been plagued by nightmares throughout his life as a murder detective: the dead would visit him in the night. The victims whose murders he had not been able to solve would glare accusingly at him, holding their wounds out for him to see. The dreams had been one of the reasons he had seriously, a year and a half before, considered leaving the police for good. Then, after he’d made his decision to stay on in the Murder Commission, the dreams had stopped.

But this dream was different from the others.

He stood at the centre of a vast yard enclosed by barbed-wire fences and with a row of low wooden huts at one distant end. He didn’t need a sign or a motto above the gates to know where he was. He was German: the symbolism was burned deep into his consciousness. There was no one else in the yard. There were no sounds from the huts. Some dust was stirred from the brushed earth by a soundless wind. He turned slowly: a full 360 degrees.

She was there, standing in front of him.

‘You are looking for me?’ asked Irma Grese. She was young — only nineteen or twenty — short and stocky, dressed in a shapeless grey dress. She wore the jackboots he had read she habitually wore when tormenting prisoners. She had hard, broad, almost masculine features and a thin-lipped mouth turned down at the corners. Her blonde hair was brushed back from a face that seemed to be half forehead.

‘No,’ said Fabel, distracted by the rope burn on her throat and neck. ‘I’m not looking for you. I’m looking for someone like you.’

‘If she is like me,’ said Grese, ‘then someone made her like me. Do you understand that?’ The broad brow furrowed. It was clearly important to her that he understood. ‘Someone made her like me.’

‘I understand,’ he said.

Grese looked Fabel up and down. ‘Are you frightened of me?’

‘No, I’m not frightened of you. I despise you,’ he said. ‘I hate everything about you and everything you did. I loathe you most of all because you make me glad they hanged you.’

‘No, you are frightened of me. Deep down, all men are frightened of women. You fear me because you fear all women. You are afraid that something like me burns deep inside every woman.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Fabel. ‘Your gender has nothing to do with it. You and all the others like you were freaks. Ordinary, dull, nobodies. But freaks. You were waiting for someone to open your cages and let your freakishness escape.’

‘We come out of our cages for you, Jan. Don’t we?’ For a moment Fabel thought he was looking at Christa Eisel, then Viola Dahlke, the housewife they had arrested in St Pauli, but she became Irma Grese again. ‘We’ve been your life for twenty years.’

Suddenly, without moving, without taking a step, Grese was nearer. Her face close to his, looking up at him. She screamed, shrill and inhuman, her eyes wild and her dark eyebrows arching on the too big forehead under the blonde hair. She was, at the one time, terrifying and comical. Her right arm shot up above them and Fabel saw the cellophane whip flash in the pale sunlight.

He woke up.

Fabel turned to make sure Susanne was still asleep. He didn’t want her to know he had had another bad dream. It had been so long since the last. Susanne was his lover and as such she had begged him to leave the police to make the dreams stop; but she was also a psychologist, and her concern had always been professionally informed. It wasn’t the dreams themselves that worried her, she had explained, it was the hidden turmoil that had caused them. Renate had never worried about the dreams. Renate had never really worried about him.

He got up, went through to the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea. It still took him a while to find things in the new apartment: in his head, especially in the small hours of the morning, he was still living in his Poseldorf flat.

The phone rang. Looking at his watch, Fabel saw it was five-forty in the morning.

‘This had better be good,’ he said into the phone.

‘It is…’ It was Glasmacher, one of the Murder Commission team. ‘I’m just around the corner from you in Altona. We’ve got her, Chef — we’ve got the Angel.’

The apartment block had been sealed off and barriers set up in the street fifty metres on either side of the entrance, but the media throng had yet to materialise. There hadn’t been time for word to get out. It only took Fabel ten minutes to get to the scene from his own flat and he parked at the barrier, showing his ID to the uniformed officers guarding the location.

A tall pale-complexioned blond man of about thirty, wearing a brown leather jacket and a muffler at his throat, stood waiting for Fabel at the entrance to the apartment block. He sniffed as Fabel approached and Fabel noticed his nose was tinted red-pink.

‘You should be in bed, Thomas,’ Fabel said.

‘I wish I had called in sick. If I hadn’t been on call I wouldn’t have seen this.’ Glasmacher indicated the apartment building with a nod of his head.’

‘Bad?’

‘Oh yeah… One of the worst I’ve seen. The victim’s been tortured for hours. By the way, I’ve called in a few extra bodies. Dirk Hechtner’s on his way over, too.’

‘You said we’ve got the Angel?’

‘The m.o. has similarities to both the recent killings and the older ones. Whatever this woman’s mission was, it’s clearly over. When she was finished, she dialled 110 and said she’d killed this guy and she wanted to “come in”.’

‘Who’s the vic?’

Glasmacher pulled his notebook out of the pocket of his leather jacket, and with it a bundle of used paper tissues. ‘Sorry, Chef… Robert Gerdes, sixty-three, a retired teacher from Flensburg, in Schleswig-Holstein. He’s been living in Hamburg for fifteen years. His apartment is the penthouse and he was murdered in the flat below, rented by the woman who claims to have done it.’

Fabel looked up at the apartment building. ‘The penthouse, you say? His schoolteacher’s pension went a long way. What’s the woman’s name?’

‘Ute Cranz. She’s just moved in, apparently. I’ve got a uniformed unit to take her into the Presidium.’