The Valkyrie Song

by Craig Russell

  ‘I’ll bet.’ Anna’s expression was close to a sneer. ‘That would screw up your chances of becoming Germany’s Crime Fighter Number One. What is it, Jan – are you afraid I’ll embarrass you?’ This time it was Anna who paused. ‘I’m sorry. This is where I want to work. If you transfer me, I’ll quit.’

  ‘That’s your decision, Anna. And believe me, I wanted things to work out differently. I wanted to move you up to become joint deputy with Werner. But I can’t recommend you for a Senior Commissarship because of your attitude.’

  ‘Have you put the papers in yet?’ asked Anna. ‘For my transfer, I mean.’

  ‘Not yet. I’ve got to get this new Angel case rolling. The other thing is I wanted to give you the chance to put in for a transfer yourself. It would look better on your CV.’

  ‘Give me to the end of this case, Chef. Then I’ll go quietly.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fabel hesitated for a moment. ‘I’m short-staffed as it is. But while you’re still part of this unit, I need you to rein in that independence a little.’

  After Anna left, Fabel sat looking out of his window over the snow-frosted treetops of Winterhude Park. The expression on Anna’s face lingered in his mind. He recalled too the eager if prickly Anna he had recruited five years before. It had been Anna’s edge, her drive that had convinced him she would be an asset to the team. Somehow, somewhere during those five years he had lost his way with her.

  But the thing that churned in his gut was that he was still not convinced he was handling it right.

  Fabel’s thoughts were interrupted by the phone ringing. It was Ulrich Wagner, from the BKA Federal Crime Bureau. Fabel liked Wagner, but could have done without the interruption: he was keen to prepare for his team briefing. After the usual chit-chat, Wagner got down to business.

  ‘There’s a Federal Republic-wide alert gone out – I don’t know, maybe you’ve seen it – about Margarethe Paulus.’

  ‘Sorry, I haven’t,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m up to my eyes with this St Pauli murder. The alleged return of the so-called “Angel of St Pauli”.’

  ‘Well, in a way that’s why I’m calling. Margarethe Paulus was confined to the state mental hospital in Mecklenburg, which isn’t too far away from you. She’s been in there for thirteen years. Three weeks ago she decided to discharge herself. Unofficially. There’s not been a trace of her since. Margarethe Paulus is considered to be a highly dangerous individual. Before she was committed there was a spate of armed robberies, all very efficiently executed and all carried out by a lone woman. It was all very cool and organised. Each time it was a woman of completely different appearance, hitting a different type of target – a bank, then a store, then a security van. But always for cash. Never jewellery or any other loot that would have had to be fenced. And that meant no need to involve any third party.’

  ‘So how did they get her?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘They didn’t. The Mecklenburg police were never able to put together enough evidence to identify the woman, far less to nail Margarethe Paulus. But she started to think bigger. Look for accomplices. Or at least that’s what we think was going on. She got involved with a biker gang. The story she told is that she met up with them to discuss potential cooperation. But they weren’t interested and things turned nasty. Three of the gang attempted to rape her.’

  ‘Attempted?’

  ‘I’ve seen the crime-scene photographs, Jan. It’s almost impossible to believe that a woman, alone against three hardened villains, could have done all that. But forensics proved that she did.’

  ‘She killed all three?’

  ‘More than that. She castrated them. From what the Mecklenburg forensics people could ascertain, she killed two instantly, and castrated them post-mortem. But the third, the ringleader … she kept him alive and conscious throughout the whole process. It was his screaming that alerted people in the neighbourhood who then called the police.’

  ‘God …’ Fabel considered what Wagner had told him. ‘That fits with the original Angel murders.’

  ‘It does. But they couldn’t have been committed by her. She was incarcerated in the State Mental Hospital at the time. However, when I saw the report on the latest killings …’

  ‘I get your point,’ said Fabel. ‘But this time there’s no castration. Evisceration, yes, but balls intact. Can you email me the relevant stuff on her, including the most up-to-date images?’

  ‘I’ve already arranged it.’

  ‘The Mecklenburg police will have a record of her DNA: could you arrange for that to be sent too? This time our killer may have left a trace of herself behind. A hair.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Wagner. ‘So you maybe have a break this time.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m not counting on it.’

  Fabel held his team briefing in the Murder Commission’s incident room. In addition to his now depleted core team of Werner, Anna and Anna’s partner Henk Hermann, there were other detectives who had been drafted in by Fabel to beef up the team. Thomas Glasmacher was a large, burly blond who, at the moment, was sniffing and sneezing into his handkerchief, struggling, as he had been for the last week, to fight off a winter cold. Dirk Hechtner was smaller and dark-haired. Fabel had borrowed Hechtner from a Police Direction in Hamburg-Harburg. In their brief careers to date, both Glasmacher and Hechtner had shown a great deal of promise as well as an ability to think unconventionally when needed. Neither was aware of the fact that Fabel was considering recruiting them both permanently. In total, Fabel had to find four new investigators for his unit: five once Anna was gone. In addition, he was going to push for specialists to be attached to the Commission.

  There were three photographs of Jake Westland on the incident board: an enlargement of his passport photograph, a publicity photograph and the last photograph that would ever be taken of him, lying bleached of colour on a slab in Eppendorf’s mortuary. On the other side of the board were smaller pictures of five other men and some cuttings from newspapers. Fabel walked over to the board and wrote four words in red marker: MOTIVATED, STALKER, ANGEL and COPYCAT.

  ‘Okay, you’ve all read through the case file as we have it so far. The only direct witness to the murder was Westland himself – and his account only comes to us second-hand. As far as I can see, these four categories are the options which present best at the moment.’ He pointed to the word MOTIVATED. ‘Everything seems to point to Westland being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Westland’s actions last night after the concert seemed all to be spur-of-the-moment. But if for a moment we assume that someone knew he would be at the back of Herbertstrasse and when he would be there, then we could be looking at a premeditated, motivated murder. Westland’s wallet, diary and cellphone are missing, so we could be looking at theft as a motive, although I feel that’s highly unlikely. He had a few minutes alone and undisturbed in his dressing room earlier in the evening. It could be that his phone and diary were taken to hide details of a planned meeting, though God knows why he would pre-arrange to meet anyone in a sleazy Kiez backstreet. I’ve been in touch with the British police and asked them to provide us with his cellphone records. In the meantime, I want us to do all the usual investigations into Westland’s background, his marriage, his business affairs – all the usual checks.’

  Fabel jabbed a finger at the word STALKER.

  ‘Jake Westland was a singer, a celebrity. A late seventies, early eighties pin-up. He was also a multimillionaire. He was exactly the kind of figure who attracts the wrong kind of attention from obsessives. I’ve emailed the police in England to see if I can get any information about stalkers, persistent fans, threatening fan mail, that kind of thing. In the meantime, I’ve been able to talk with Westland’s bodyguards …’ Fabel ignored Werner’s knowing smirk. ‘And they confirm that there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary that took place either before or after his concert. They’ve actually been with him during his whole tour, and they say there’s been nothing unusual or that caused them concern since he arrived in Germany.
They are also pretty certain that Westland suggested visiting the Kiez as a spur-of-the-moment thing. In short, I think either of these options is unlikely. And that brings us to …’

  Fabel circled the word ANGEL.

  ‘Between nineteen ninety-six and nineteen ninety-nine, five men were murdered in the Kiez district. Their ages ranged from thirty-five to fifty-seven. All the victims were repeat visitors to the Reeperbahn area and all were frequent users of prostitutes. Every victim met his end the same way – throat cut with a single lateral slice. The entry wound was always on the right side of the neck, straight through behind the trachea and out. Death would have been pretty swift and, because the windpipe had been severed, silent. The bodies were found in different parts of the Kiez, more often than not in their own cars. Forensic evidence pointed to them being attacked from the front passenger seat of their own cars. Absolutely no forensic traces – fingerprints, DNA, fibre samples – were ever found. But maybe our killer has slipped up this time – we’ve retrieved a single blonde hair from the scene. If it really does belong to the killer, it’s yet one more difference from the original killings. The other difference is that the original killer certainly never left his or her victims alive long enough to tell us that it was the “Angel” who killed them. The last in the original series, a forty-nine-year-old ship engineer, was found in November ’ninety-nine. Then nothing.’

  ‘Until now …’ said Werner.

  ‘So how did she get the name “the Angel”?’ asked Dirk Hechtner.

  ‘There was massive media interest in the case at the time, as I’m sure everybody remembers,’ said Fabel. ‘When I turned up at Davidwache last night I was greeted by Sylvie Achtenhagen and her camera crew. As you know, Frau Achtenhagen has become quite the celebrity herself, with her own news-magazine show on HanSat. But ten years ago no one had heard of Sylvie Achtenhagen. At that time she was a young and very ambitious new reporter for one of the public broadcasters. She built her reputation on her coverage of the murders and she ended up getting to do an hour-long special on the case. I have to admit she handled the whole thing very cleverly, even if she was way off with her conclusions. Basically, Achtenhagen gave the whole thing a feminist twist. Her take on it was that almost exactly one hundred years after Jack the Ripper, a female Ripper was doing pretty much the same thing in Hamburg. We’ve all heard the saying that Hamburg is the most easterly suburb of London … anyway, Achtenhagen exaggerated the similarities between the two cities. She also drew parallels between the cases: both involved the use of a surgically sharp blade, mutilation of the bodies and the removal of trophies. In the case of Jack the Ripper those trophies were sometimes the genitals; in the case of the Angel they were exclusively the genitals. Both series of murders took place in red-light districts: Whitechapel in London, the Kiez in Hamburg. And, of course, both series of murders seemed to be within the context of prostitute and client.’

  ‘The Angel was – is – definitely a prostitute?’ asked Werner.

  ‘It looks likely. Or pretending to be one. Anyway, Sylvie Achtenhagen turned this idea on its head; there was a hint that while Jack the Ripper represented the age-old repression and abuse of women, the Angel represented their liberation. Total crap, of course, but it captured the imagination. It came close to making the Angel a feminist icon. Achtenhagen managed to imply – very subtly, mind – that it was the victims who were the aggressors.’

  ‘And Sylvie Achtenhagen’s documentary was the first to describe the killer as “the Angel”?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Achtenhagen planned to make a name for herself with her hour-long TV special. She succeeded. But she also made a name for the killer. The “Angel of St Pauli” caught the public’s imagination and it stuck.’ Fabel threw the marker down onto the conference table. ‘What I resented about what Achtenhagen did is that it cemented the idea of a female avenging angel stalking the streets of Hamburg looking for male victims. While that is maybe the case, the truth is we have only one witness account of one of the victims being seen in the company of a youngish blonde prostitute shortly before the supposed time of death. Apart from that, for all we know the killer could have been a man. And the precision and method of the throat cut could suggest a military or even special-forces background. But Achtenhagen succeeded in closing the public’s eyes to anything other than an iconic female vigilante.’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Werner winced. ‘The castration thing. To kill another guy is one thing … but to slice off his todger. My money’s on it having been a woman …’

  ‘All right, settle down,’ Fabel said to suppress the laughter that broke out. ‘Like I said, I think it’s more likely that the Angel was a prostitute. From what I’ve gleaned from the original case files, the Angel was suspected to be an Aileen Wuornos-type serial killer. A woman, abused as a child, who turned to prostitution and carrying out revenge killings against clients. But whether male or female and whatever her motives, the so-called Angel was very, very careful not to leave forensic evidence or to give any clue to his or her identity. And that makes me very doubtful about the Angel disclosing her identity to Westland as an announcement that she is rising from the ashes. Which brings me to what I think is our most likely prospect …’ Fabel slapped his hand onto the board next to the word COPYCAT.

  ‘The Angel of St Pauli exists as a concept, if perhaps not as a reality. A powerful concept that has maybe caught more than the general public’s imagination. I think it’s entirely possible that Westland’s murder is the work of the Angel by inspiration rather than execution. There are fundamental differences between his murder and the original killings: the killer didn’t carry out a post-mortem castration or take a trophy …’

  ‘That could simply be because she was disturbed,’ said Werner. ‘Christa Eisel found Westland still alive and bleeding out fast. If she hadn’t applied pressure he wouldn’t have made it to the ambulance. Maybe the killer heard Christa coming.’

  ‘Maybe so, but a panicked escape doesn’t fit with the fact that no one was seen leaving the scene. Carstens Kaminski’s Davidwache team have spoken to almost every girl working the Kiez that night – and bear in mind that most of them sit watching the streets from their windows. Normally any unknown woman passing through the street would stand out. The problem we have is that it was an exceptional night in the Kiez, given this near-riot feminist protest. But, prior to the protesters’ invasion of Herbertstrasse, no one noticed a woman who didn’t belong wandering around. Also, Christa Eisel swears no one passed her coming out of the square. But let’s say the killer was disturbed – it still doesn’t alter the fact that she eviscerated Westland instead of cutting his throat. What’s more, Westland was on foot, where all of the original victims were in their cars. And let’s remember we are nearly a full decade on from the last Angel murder. There are, however, specific similarities – particularly the expert use of a blade. For the moment my money stays on this being the work of a copycat.’ Fabel slipped a large printout from the folder on his desk. He stuck it up on the incident board. A woman of about thirty stared blankly out from the photograph. She was wearing no make-up and her blonde hair had been brushed back severely from her face. The image had the bleached, stark lighting of an official photograph.

  ‘This is Margarethe Paulus,’ explained Fabel. ‘I’ve just been sent her details by the BKA. Three nights ago, she escaped from a secure mental hospital in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. I haven’t had a lot of time to go through all the details, but the main thing you should know is that she is a highly dangerous individual. She killed and castrated three men in nineteen ninety-four and would have been a prime suspect for the original Angel killings had she not already been locked up. And we have to bear in mind that her murders were spree, rather than serial. She is familiar with Hamburg, apparently, and was brought up in Zarrentin, in north-west Mecklenburg. Although it was in the former East, it’s only seventy kilometres from Hamburg. It’s highly unlikely, given that she only escaped three days ago, that she’s in
volved with these latest killings, but we have to keep an open mind. She would certainly be a candidate for a copycat killer. At the very least we need to be on the lookout for her.’

  ‘How did she manage to escape?’

  ‘Walked out of the main gate, apparently. She had complained of feeling unwell and an orderly and a nurse were escorting her to see a doctor. She broke the male orderly’s arm before knocking him out, then stole the nurse’s uniform, electronic door key and identity card before locking her in a storage room, bound and gagged. It’s clear that Paulus is a highly organised type. Somehow she had managed to collect make-up and hair dye over God knows how long so that she could make herself look like this nurse.’

  ‘So she had targeted the nurse, rather than just grabbing an opportunity to escape?’ asked Dirk Hechtner.

  ‘Probably months in advance.’

  Fabel spent the rest of the briefing going through what they had in the way of statements and the initial forensic evidence. He then allocated investigative tasks to each team member. After he had wound the meeting up, Werner loitered until the others were gone.

  ‘Let’s have it, Werner,’ said Fabel, gathering up his papers. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Anna told me about your chat.’

  ‘My God, it didn’t take her long to find a shoulder to cry on.’

  ‘It’s not like that, Jan. I asked her how it had gone. She’s in shock, I think. So am I, truth be told.’

  ‘You think I’m making a mistake?’ Fabel asked.

  ‘I think you would have handled it differently if Anna had been a man, to be frank, Jan.’

  ‘Not that again, Werner. I don’t let gender influence how I deal with my officers.’

  ‘Well, whatever the reason, I think you should give Anna another chance. She’s put her neck on the line more than once for the sake of catching a killer.’