Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

‘It’s a very, very long shot, Chef,’ said Anna.

‘At the moment it’s the best we’ve got.’

They were joined by Karin Vestergaard and Werner Meyer, who had been watching the interview from the next room.

‘Well?’ Fabel asked Vestergaard.

‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘It’s difficult to read expression and body language over a CCTV link.’

‘There was none to read, believe me. There’s a very big chunk of humanity missing from Margarethe Paulus. But you heard what she said about Jespersen’s death. She claims she had nothing to do with it and she has a point when she says she has nothing to gain by lying about it.’

‘That’s the thing,’ said Vestergaard. ‘I tend to believe her.’

‘So do I,’ said Fabel. ‘So where does that leave us?’

‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘we’ve got a professional assassination in Norway, Jorgen Halvorsen, and the death of Jens Jespersen in Hamburg. It’s pretty safe to assume that they are directly linked.’

‘Then we’ve got the murders in the Kiez — the Brit Westland and Armin Lensch,’ said Werner. ‘The so-called return of the Angel of St Pauli. They must be connected.’

‘And the murder of Georg Drescher,’ said Anna. ‘Whether Margarethe was involved in the Jespersen and Halvorsen killings or not, there is a connection. So effectively we have three sets of murders that have a common link, and that link is this Stasi conspiracy to place Valkyrie assassins in the West.’

‘There’s maybe one more,’ said Fabel. ‘Peter Claasens — the suicide that maybe isn’t a suicide in the Kontorhaus Quarter. Maybe the link lies there.’ He turned to Karin Vestergaard. ‘And I think maybe you and I should take another look at this environmental analyst Sparwald, who has had some kind of contact with Halvorsen.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Vestergaard. ‘If they were both supposed to be travelling to China, and Halvorsen didn’t make it, then who’s to say that Sparwald did?’

Fabel straightened up from leaning on the wall. ‘Do you still have the address?’

Karin Vestergaard held out the note that Sparwald’s boss had given her.

‘Let’s go,’ said Fabel.

Fabel rang Sparwald’s cellphone number from his car.

‘Number unavailable,’ he said to Vestergaard as he snapped his phone shut.

‘That’s not surprising, if he’s in a remote part of China.’

‘Like you say, if that’s where he is,’ said Fabel. He looked at the note Luttig, Sparwald’s boss, had given them. ‘But I hope to God he is. If Sparwald really was due to make this trip with a Norwegian travelling companion, and that travelling companion was Halvorsen…’

Sparwald didn’t live far from his work. But if you were someone who appreciated the environment, Poppenbuttel was not a bad choice of place to live. Even in winter, with its branches bare and its tones muted, Nature still made her presence felt here. Sparwald lived in a small house near the banks of the Alster, set tight into a mass of trees. The house was constructed out of wood, but most of the south-facing side of the house was made up of windows, over which shutters had been pulled.

‘It reminds me of a lot of the houses we have in Denmark,’ said Vestergaard. She pointed to a large area of the garden that had been dug up. There were spiralled coils of pipe lying on the muddy exposed undersoil. ‘Look — he’s been installing a geothermal energy converter. It’s not finished. Now that’s a very odd project to leave half-done when you’re about to go off to China for a month or so.’ She nodded up towards the roof. ‘And these solar panels are new. It doesn’t look to me like they’re connected. Sparwald was obviously in the middle of a pretty major home-improvement project.’

Fabel rang the front doorbell and knocked on the door for good measure. As he expected there was no answer. He turned to Vestergaard.

‘I’m going to have a look around the back. See if you can find a window where the blinds haven’t been drawn.’

Fabel made his way around the side of the building. Again there were signs of work in progress: building materials propped against the side of the house; tools left out. Fabel tried the back door. It was locked.

‘Jan!’ He heard Vestergaard call from the other side of the house. He ran around, slipping on the mud churned up by Sparwald’s excavation for the heat pump.

‘Take a look at this,’ said Vestergaard. ‘There’s a space between the blind and the edge of the window.’

He peered through but could see nothing. He took a small torch from his pocket and shone the beam through.

‘You see it?’ said Vestergaard.

‘I see it,’ said Fabel. For a moment he tried to convince himself it was just a shoe. But he knew that what he saw, just visible from behind the sofa, was a foot.

He called the Presidium from his cellphone and told them to send a blue-and-silver from Police Commissariat 35 at Poppenbuttel.

‘And could you alert the Forensics Department. It would appear we have a murder scene here.’

‘This is different,’ said Vestergaard without a hint of irony. It had taken less than two minutes for the first uniformed unit to arrive and for the door of Sparwald’s home to be shattered with a ram. The first thing that had struck them on entering the house was the smell. The real stench of death. They found Sparwald’s body in the lounge, his foot projecting beyond the edge of the sofa, as they had seen through the window. This was horror of a different kind from that they had experienced at the Drescher scene, and Fabel understood exactly what Vestergaard had meant by her comment. The smell was because Sparwald had lain undiscovered for days, maybe weeks, but the method of his death had been much cleaner than Drescher’s. Without symbolism or ritual. Without passion.

Fabel and Vestergaard had put on forensic overshoes and latex gloves before entering the house and instructed the uniformed officers to do the same. Clutching a handkerchief to his mouth and nose, Fabel bent down and examined Sparwald, who lay staring up at the ceiling, the skin on his face pale and blotchy. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead and another under his jawline. This had been the professional, efficient extermination of a life.

‘You realise this is exactly the same m.o. as the Halvorsen killing?’ Vestergaard too held the back of her hand to her nose to diminish the smell of death, but Fabel noticed that otherwise she seemed untouched by the scene. Her brow was slightly furrowed, but it was the concentration of a professional analysing the facts she was presented with.

‘Yes,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m guessing he’s been killed with a low-velocity hollow-point.’

‘The Valkyrie,’ said Vestergaard, but quietly, as if to herself.

Poppenbuttel police station was part of Polizei Hamburg Division East and could not have been more different from Davidwache or Klingberg. Police Commissariat 35 was situated on Wentzelplatz, next to the S-Bahn station. The Commissariat was an imposing, brand-new construction composed of solid modernist blocks, angles, curves and sweeps. There was, Fabel thought, something almost intimidating about the severity of the building and he found himself thinking just how much more approachable Davidwache must seem to the public.

Fabel had assembled the resources he needed there, bringing in Holger Brauner and his forensics team, plus Anna, Werner, Henk and Dirk. The Poppenbuttel uniformed branch had kept on the on-duty shift after its replacement came on, doubling the number of officers available. Fabel had also made a call to van Heiden, whose disapproving tone all but suggested that he held Fabel personally responsible for another murder being discovered. But, again, there had been no reluctance to comply with Fabel’s request for more officers.