Craig Russell - The Valkyrie Song

The first people Fabel spoke to were the forensics team. Brauner had rolled up in a convoy of vans carrying twelve specialists and all the technical support they needed to carry out a thorough processing of the scene.

‘If you don’t mind,’ Brauner said to Fabel, ‘I’d like Astrid to go in alone to start with. She has a knack of getting trace from older scenes.’

‘It’s up to you, Holger,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s your thing, not mine. But she must be good — normally you would be all over a scene like this like a rash.’

‘Trust me, Jan, she is. One of the best I’ve worked with.’

Fabel held a cramped briefing in the Commissariat’s main conference room. His strategy was simple: to get every door knocked on, every memory jogged, every detail noted. At the same time, he hoped against hope that the forensic survey of the murder scene would reveal something that would point them in the direction of the Valkyrie. He and Vestergaard plotted out when the assassin had been in Oslo, and an estimate, from Astrid Bremer’s initial observations, of when Sparwald had died. From that Fabel worked out a rough schedule for the killer, and put a team on to looking at flights, trains, ferries. It was a long shot, particularly as they were dealing with someone who clearly did not leave traces. Or make mistakes. Ever.

Fabel got home about ten and told Susanne what his day had yielded.

‘You look bushed,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘I grabbed something at Poppenbuttel.’ He sighed. ‘We spent hours trying to trace her steps. I don’t know, Susanne… this killer, the thing with Margarethe Paulus, sometimes I think it’s all beyond me. For the first time in years I feel totally lost with a case.’

Susanne smiled and pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen over Fabel’s brow. ‘Do you want me to tell you what I think?’

‘Of course I do. I always want your opinion. You know that.’

‘I’m not talking about my professional opinion. I mean my personal opinion.’

‘Okay.’

‘Men are always trying to work out the secret of being a success with women. You’re always asking each other that. The answer is that the man who is most successful with women is the man who has no secret. The man who doesn’t treat them as if they’re from another planet.’

‘Are you trying to improve my courting skills?’

‘No, Jan. You did all right in that department. But this case… because you’re dealing with women, with a female serial killer and/or a professional female assassin, you think you have no frame of reference. The truth is there are differences in the offending behaviours of each gender. But you are basically thinking about this all the wrong way because you’re thinking about it in a different way. Just do what you do, Jan. Forget the gender and focus on the crimes.’

Fabel thought about what Susanne had said. ‘You might be right,’ he said.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to bed. You need a good night’s sleep. Things will look different in the morning.’

It took a while for Fabel to drift off and when he did fragments of dreams punctuated his sleep. Vague fragments. Irma Grese. Margarethe Paulus. And another woman whose face he could not make out.

‘You’re looking for me.’ He broke off. Another coughing fit and muffled sounds indicating he had covered the mouthpiece with his hand. When he came back on the line his voice sounded harder, more determined, as if annoyed at his own weakness. ‘I know you’ve been looking for me.’

‘Of course I’ve been looking for you,’ said Sylvie Achtenhagen. ‘What did you expect? Have you got more information for me?’

‘You’ve seen all you need to see. You don’t need to look for me. You don’t need to find me,’ said Siegfried. ‘I want us to meet.’

‘Face to face?’ asked Sylvie. As she spoke, she looked out of the hotel window. It was a transit hotel, one of the ones just off the autobahn, and she watched the rain-fudged dark shapes of cars and lorries drift silently along the ribbon of motorway in the near distance.

‘Face to face,’ he said. ‘Have you got my money?’

‘You know the answer to that already. You know it’s not that simple.’

‘Everything in life is as simple as you choose to make it. Decisions about life and death are the most straightforward. A decision about whether you want someone else to get this scoop is a simple one.’

‘Listen,’ said Sylvie, ‘we can sort something out.’

‘Of course we can. I want something from you and I know you will give it to me. Like I said, it’s simple.’

After Siegfried hung up, Sylvie remained at the window for a moment, still watching silent cars in the distance. She was closing in on him. She knew that. He knew she was looking for him because she had obviously been looking in the right places. Sylvie went across to the bed and laid out the sheets with the names she had narrowed it down to. They were all over the East of Germany and one was back in Hamburg. One of these was Siegfried, she was sure of it.

Sylvie rose early the next morning and drove the fifty kilometres to Dresden. There she met with a retired accounts clerk called Berger. Berger, like Frau Schneeg, had sought to hide his past as a Stasi officer by moving from his home town to Dresden. Nonetheless, word, Berger explained, had a habit of getting around.

‘You were on Ulrich Adebach’s staff, is that right, Herr Berger?’ Sylvie looked around his apartment. Clean but small and cheaply furnished. Depressing.

‘You say there’s something in this for me?’ Berger asked. He was a small man in his sixties, his hair still dark, his face narrow and pinched.

‘I can pay you something,’ said Sylvie. ‘If the information is useful.’

‘And no one will know about my involvement? My helping you?’

‘No one knows I’m here, Herr Berger, and no one will find out, I promise you. Anything you tell me will stay between us.’

‘Yes. I was on Adebach’s staff. He was an old bastard.’

‘How long?’

‘Six and a half years. From nineteen seventy-seven until eighty-four. Then I was transferred.’

‘Voluntarily?’

‘No. I ended up in another department, going through tapes of bugged conversations, that kind of thing.’

‘Why were you transferred?’

‘Adebach got a new adjutant. A mean bastard called Helmut Kittel. He had it in for me.’

‘While you were on Adebach’s staff, did you ever come across a Major Georg Drescher? He was HVA or special operations. I think he might even have been Section A. I have reason to believe he worked on a project called Operation Valkyrie.’

Berger thought hard. Sylvie could see he was making a big effort to earn his money. ‘No… I can’t say I ever came across him at the department. Never heard of any Operation Valkyrie, either.’

‘It involved the training of young women for special operations.’

Again Berger looked gloomily thoughtful, then his expression lightened. ‘Wait a minute, there was something… I remember Adebach requested some files that had been couriered in to be brought through to him. The courier had asked for Kittel — he’d obviously been told to deliver them into his hands so that he could in turn take them in to Adebach. But Kittel was on a meal break so I took the files through. Adebach was on the phone and he told me to wait. He checked through the files and then waved me away. But I do remember the files had photographs of young women in them. Teenagers, really. They also had an HVA stamp on them. When Kittel came back from his meal break he went crazy. Not long after that I was transferred.’

‘What did Kittel look like?’

‘A miserable streak of piss. He was about one metre ninety tall and as skinny as a rake. Probably because of all of the cigarettes he smoked. A real chain-smoker.’