Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

‘I’ll bear it in mind in the future,’ Fabel said and turned his attention to the rest of the room. ‘You’ve all heard that we have had a breakthrough. Well, I don’t know how much of a breakthrough we’ve had. Another man is dead. Tortured and killed as an act of revenge. It may well be that Margarethe Paulus is also responsible for the murders in the St Pauli district, as well as that of the Danish detective, Jens Jespersen.’ Fabel took another sip of coffee and sat on the corner of the desk nearest the front. ‘We retrieved a single blonde hair from the Westland murder scene, which we had good reason to believe belonged to the killer. I have to tell you before we go any further that we don’t have a DNA match with the woman we have in custody.’

‘That doesn’t mean it wasn’t her,’ said Werner. ‘It could equally prove that the hair didn’t belong to the killer.’

‘Could be,’ said Fabel. He was distracted by the arrival of Dirk Hechtner and Henk Hermann ‘I didn’t expect to see you back so quickly,’ said Fabel. ‘I told you to bag all the suspect’s stuff.’

‘We did,’ said Hechtner. ‘There wasn’t much to bag. She had three changes of clothes, one dressy, one businessy, one casual. We’ve handed what looks like a surgical kit over to forensics. From what we could see she had taken the tools she needed from the kit through to the kitchen.’

‘What else did you find?’ asked Fabel.

‘Four thousand euros in cash,’ said Henk Hermann. ‘A gun-’

‘What kind of gun?’ asked Fabel.

‘Nothing that I’ve seen before,’ said Henk Hermann. ‘It looked a bit like an old PPK, but it was clearly not that old and it had “Made in Croatia” stamped on the side. So we ran it through the computer. Apparently it’s…’ Henk referred to his notebook ‘… a PHP MV-9. It was developed by the Croatians in the early nineties, during the Independence War. Apparently, amongst gun freaks it’s a bit of a collector’s item. A rarity. There was also this really weird glove-knife thing… really odd. It was a leather strap that fastened around your hand and wrist, with a hidden metal plate that fitted in your palm and a short curved blade that stuck out of the bottom. We’re guessing it was some kind of weapon rather than a tool.’

‘Where is it now?’ asked Fabel.

‘We gave it to forensics for testing,’ said Dirk Hechtner. ‘If that blade has been used as a weapon, then I’ll bet a week’s pay we’ll get blood out of the leather bit.’

‘Good,’ said Fabel. ‘Anything else?’

‘A make-up kit,’ said Dirk. ‘It had several shades of hair dye, different types of make-up — not ordinary women’s cosmetics, it was stuff you could use to alter your appearance. Other stuff too… it took us a while to work out what some of it was for. Cheek prosthetics to change the shape of her face, that kind of thing. We also found a folder with paperwork to support her identity as Ute Cranz.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Anna said. ‘Margarethe Paulus was an escaped loony on the run from a mental hospital where she’d spent the last fifteen years. Where the hell did she get all these resources?’

‘Now that,’ said Fabel, ‘is a very good point. It’s pretty obvious that she had outside help. Very professional outside help. Let’s go back to what we’ve found out. The victim is a Robert Gerdes, except he probably isn’t. It looks pretty certain that he was Major Georg Drescher, a former major in the HVA wing of the East German Stasi. What we know so far is that Drescher was the control for three highly trained female agents, specifically trained as assassins. It kind of looks like Drescher embraced the free-market economy with relish and set up his own little Murder Incorporated, right here in the Free and Hanseatic City. It is perfectly safe to assume that Margarethe Paulus, while she may be a former protegee of Drescher, was not one of his active hit women. Mainly because, as Anna pointed out, she was locked up in a Mecklenburg secure hospital.’ He took a deep breath. ‘What we have here is the suggestion that there is a female contract killer — one of the world’s most successful — operating out of Hamburg. And she’s called, supposedly, the Valkyrie. Now we have an ex-Stasi officer killed by one of the three women he was supposed to have trained. And these female political assassins also went by the name Valkyrie. Maybe Drescher was the outside help. For argument’s sake, let’s accept he has one or both of the other Valkyries operating under his command, but let’s say business is too good and he’s turning work away. Maybe he wanted to expand the business and add another of his former protegees to his staff.’

‘Isn’t that unlikely?’ asked Werner. ‘Think about it: what you’re talking about is a highly skilled and disciplined operation. You wouldn’t take on a nutcase.’

‘Maybe he thought she wasn’t a nutcase when she was under his command. That he could control her. That he provided a context for her to function in.’

‘Oh yeah,’ snorted Anna, ‘that’ll be it. Every woman needs a man to complete her, after all.’ Then, before Fabel could respond: ‘I think you’re way off, Chef. He couldn’t have misjudged her that much — look what she did to him.’

‘But look at the resources she had at her disposal within weeks of escaping from the hospital. If Drescher didn’t do it, who set her up with everything she needed?’ asked Fabel. When no one responded he moved on. ‘What else have we got?’

‘I chased up Theo Wangler,’ said Anna, ‘and I’ve got a still from the Reeperbahn CCTV of the fake taxi,’ said Anna. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t help much. They’ve done everything they could to enhance it, but it’s worth nothing. The Merc had false plates and you can’t see the face of the driver clearly enough for identification. You couldn’t even really say whether it was a man or a woman at the wheel. But we’ve had more luck with the Hanseviertel. You were right — Jens Jespersen had lunch there. There are no cameras in the basement restaurant itself, but we picked up this…’ Anna handed Fabel a print of an image taken from the CCTV. Jespersen was standing next to the glass elevator in the central atrium, near the restaurant. Next to him was a woman with a mass of chaotic blonde hair. Her face was partly turned from the camera and detail in the enlarged image was fuzzy. But it was clear enough to establish that Jespersen and the woman were engaging each other in conversation.

‘You get more than this?’ he asked Anna.

‘Nope. A few shots of her back, that’s all. They went their separate ways: he went out onto Neuer Wall and she headed out onto Poststrasse. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t arrange to meet later. We’ve been able to work out a height for her, though, from the security-camera shots — roughly one seventy-three or — four centimetres tall, give or take heels.’

‘Get someone down to the restaurant to-’

‘Done it,’ interrupted Anna. ‘I’ve got someone to take a photograph of Jespersen and a copy of that.’ She nodded towards the CCTV image. ‘And talk to all of the staff who were on duty at the time. So far, nothing.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘We’re going back to Drescher’s apartment. This time we’re going to take it apart. If these Valkyries are real, and we remove Margarethe Paulus from the equation, that leaves two more out there. And one of them, or maybe both, were working for Drescher. Now they are rudderless. It would appear we’ve had as many as two highly trained professional killers under our noses for years. Now they are out there on their own and maybe desperate. It’s not an idea I’m too comfortable with. What is it, Werner?’ Fabel had noticed his deputy’s thoughtful expression.