Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

‘A week ago,’ Fabel broke the silence. ‘A young man called Armin Lensch was murdered in the Kiez district of Hamburg. His belly was sliced open with a blade. What can you tell me about that?’

‘I can tell you nothing about it. It had nothing to do with me. I didn’t kill him.’ Margarethe’s frighteningly blank expression suggested a complete lack of guile. Of emotion. Of anything.

Fabel placed the srbosjek, still cased in a clear plastic evidence bag, on the table. He kept a firm hold on the bag, just outside her reach.

‘Did you use this on Armin Lensch? Is this what you sliced open his belly with?’

‘I’ve never seen that before,’ Margarethe said, looking at the weapon without interest. ‘And I wouldn’t use that for slicing open a gut. That’s for cutting throats.’

‘If you haven’t seen that before,’ said Fabel, leaning forward, ‘then how do you know how it’s used?’

‘I’ve never seen your car, but if I did I would know how to drive it. And I know that that is called a graviso knife. Or a srbosjek. It was used by Croat Usta e. It’s very simple but highly effective. But it’s not an assassin’s weapon, particularly. This is for killing large numbers of people. Although I have to say that used expertly, it would silence and kill a single meeting efficiently.’

‘Meeting?’ asked Susanne.

‘That’s what we call them,’ said Margarethe. ‘A meeting is when the agent and the target encounter each other and the mission is executed. We call them meetings because there should be no engagement with the target prior to execution, making the meeting the first and final encounter. We also call the target a meeting.’

Fabel placed a second evidence bag on the table. It contained the automatic that Dirk and Henk had found.

‘Is this yours?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never seen it before,’ she said.

‘It was retrieved from your apartment. Again, there is a Croatian connection.’

‘I know. It’s a Croatian PHP MV-9 automatic. It’s about eighteen years old. It was a model developed in a rush for use in the Independence War.’

‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Once again I’m impressed by your encyclopaedic knowledge of weapons and assassination techniques. But your knowledge of this weapon could come simply from the fact that it is yours. That you had it ready to use if your drugging of Drescher didn’t work out as planned.’

Again an empty stare. Margarethe was attractive. Her features perfectly proportioned. But there was still something about the way she looked at him that reminded Fabel of the photographs he had seen of Irma Grese. The same void in the eyes and expression. He had no way of knowing if Margarethe was lying to him. After nearly twenty years as an investigator of murders, of conducting interviews like this, he found himself lost in a strange country, completely without any recognisable landmarks.

‘Who are “we”?’ asked Susanne, filling the silence. ‘You said “We call the target a meeting.”’

‘My sisters and I. The Valkyries.’

‘How many Valkyries were there?’ asked Anna Wolff. Margarethe stared at her for a moment, still expressionless, before answering.

‘Only three of us were selected for final training.’

‘But you didn’t finish your final training,’ said Fabel, ‘did you?’

‘I was selected along with the other two. Out of dozens of girls who in turn were the best of the best. Only three of us were chosen to be Valkyries. It was Drescher who dropped me from the programme.’

‘Is that why you killed him? Is that why you kept him alive to suffer first?’

Margarethe gave a small smile. It was the first time Fabel had seen her smile and it did not reach her cold, empty eyes. She shook her head. ‘I didn’t kill him because he dropped me. I killed him because he chose me… because he selected me for this kind of life in the first place. My head…’ She winced as if some terrible migraine was cutting through her. ‘The things in my head. He put them there. And I can’t get them out.’

‘What things?’ asked Susanne.

‘I’ve already shown you. They were all there for you to see. In the flat. I didn’t think I was being ambiguous.’ There was a flicker of impatience in Margarethe’s expression. On anyone else it would have gone unnoticed, but it flashed across the empty canvas of her face. ‘He taught me how to kill. That more than anything. Him and the others, all the different ways to kill. How to shatter someone’s nose and drive the bone fragments into their brain. Or cut off the blood to the brain with an embrace and kill without the meeting knowing what was happening. How to seduce a man, or a woman, and fuck them in a way that they become completely obsessed with you. How to cut yourself off from your own body so that you can do anything, with anyone. How to follow someone without them knowing, to hunt and trap them and kill them in an instant. They told us we could learn from everything. No matter how bad it was, we could benefit from it. Every war, every crime, had a lesson to be learned.’ She nodded to where Fabel had shown her the forensic-bagged knife. ‘That’s where I learned about the srbosjek. And more. So much more. And the thing was… the totally mad thing was that they tried to teach you that you could switch off from it all and have a normal life in between the meetings.’

Fabel paused for a moment, leaning back in his chair, as if creating a punctuation mark in the interview.

‘I have to say, I am most impressed with your organisational abilities. Planning, arranging the apartment below Drescher’s. Very impressive. But there’s no way — absolutely no way — you could have organised that yourself in the time available since your escape from Mecklenburg. Who is helping you, Margarethe?’

Another hollow stare and silence.

‘Okay,’ sighed Fabel. ‘Jens Jespersen. Politiinspektor Jens Jespersen of the Danish National Police. Someone picked him up in a restaurant in the Hanseviertel and persuaded him to meet with her later. Then, when they were in bed together, she killed him with an injection of suxamethonium chloride. Exactly the means you used to immobilise Georg Drescher. You’ve just described to us the way Major Drescher and his Stasi colleagues trained you in concealment, disguise and seduction techniques. Those sound to me exactly the kind of skills used to get Drescher into a vulnerable position and kill him. I suppose you are going to tell me that you don’t know anything about that?’

‘I don’t.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Fabel fixed Margarethe with a penetrating stare that failed to penetrate.

‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’

‘I have a colleague of Jespersen’s in the other room, watching this interview. His superior officer. She is here because Politiinspektor Jespersen was here to try to find Georg Drescher. He was also following up rumours that a female contract killer, going by the name the Valkyrie, was operating out of Hamburg. That is a hell of a lot of coincidences, Margarethe.’

No comment, no shrug, no expression.

‘He was here to find the man you were hunting. In turn he was hunting a killer called the Valkyrie, and he was killed with the same drug you used on Drescher. You killed Jens Jespersen, didn’t you? He got in the way of your mission. A secondary target. Or what would you call it: an unplanned meeting?’

Margarethe ignored Fabel and turned to Susanne. ‘You are a criminal psychologist?’

‘I’ve already told you that.’

‘And you have spoken with Dr Kopke?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you think I am a psychopath.’

‘I believe you have dissocial personality disorder, yes. But I think you have something else going on as well. You’re not just psychopathic, you’re psychotic. Delusional.’