The Valkyrie Song

by Craig Russell

  ‘I don’t know, Jan,’ said Kaminski, fiddling with the desk calendar on Fabel’s desk. ‘It could simply be that he was trying to give Martina Schilmann and her guy the slip. Just acting on an impulse. If Mann’s hooker is our killer, she certainly didn’t arrange to meet him.’

  ‘No … but maybe he had arranged to meet someone else and simply ran into the killer. It’s just that it seems so … purposeful, I suppose. The way he rushed along Herbertstrasse and out the other end, knowing he had only minutes before Martina would start looking for him coming out onto Davidstrasse. But whatever Westland’s intentions, I reckon we’ve got an Angel copycat on our hands. I also reckon Jürgen Mann is probably very lucky that he wasn’t her second victim. Brace yourself, Carstens,’ said Fabel. ‘My thinking is that we’re just at the start of a whole new series of killings.’

  8.

  He looked at his watch: four-fifty. Nothing irritated Fabel more than people being late.

  He was the first to admit that he was too obsessive about punctuality. Ever since he had been a boy, the idea of being too late for something had tied knots in Fabel’s gut. It was one of those things, like his inability to get drunk, to push himself that one carefree drink too far, that characterised him. That made Jan Fabel who he was.

  But this time, as he sat at his desk fuming, Fabel felt justified in his irritation: he had impressed on Jespersen that he was in the middle of launching a major murder inquiry. To be twenty minutes late was more than a lack of courtesy: it was unprofessional. Fabel picked up his phone and called the number he’d been given for Jespersen’s cellphone. It rang for a while and then switched to voicemail. Fabel left a message for Jespersen to call him as soon as possible.

  Fabel’s desk phone rang almost instantly he hung up and he answered expecting it to be Jespersen. It wasn’t.

  ‘Hi, Chef,’ said Anna Wolff. ‘I’ve got something you’ve got to see.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m up in Butenfeld.’ Butenfeld was police shorthand for the morgue at the Institute for Judicial Medicine which was based on the Eppendorf street of that name. ‘You’re really going to want to see this.’

  Fabel looked at his watch and thought about the Dane’s infuriating lack of punctuality. ‘Okay, I’ll come right up.’

  9.

  ‘How long has the apartment been vacant?’ Ute Cranz turned and smiled at the younger woman. They had spent half an hour viewing the attic apartment and the young female estate agent had done her best to project a maturity and experience that she was clearly years from possessing. She was dressed in a mannish dark blue trouser suit. Why was it, thought Ute, that so many women in business think that to compete with men they have to dress like them?

  ‘It’s only just become available for rental. We haven’t even advertised it – in fact, we were surprised when you enquired about it. How did you know it was vacant?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for a flat in this area. I heard that the previous tenant was moving out.’

  ‘I see,’ said the estate agent, although she didn’t sound entirely convinced. ‘You were right to move quickly. Properties of this quality in Altona don’t tend to hang around. We’ve just completed a full renovation of an apartment building around the corner in Schillerstrasse. We had the apartments filled before we had finished the work.’

  ‘How much?’ Ute Cranz walked across the lounge to the window, her high heels clicking on the hardwood floor.

  ‘Well, this is nearly two hundred square metres. And it has a balcony with views out across to Palmaille. The monthly rent is two thousand nine hundred euros. Excluding utilities. That’s pretty standard for this area.’

  Ute looked out of the window at the street below. She saw a man approach the front door of the apartment building. He had grey-white hair but had broad shoulders and moved like a younger man. He was dressed in what she would have described as an ‘English-style’ heavy tweed jacket and corded trousers.

  ‘Is this one of the neighbours?’ she asked the estate agent, who came across to the window and looked down.

  ‘Yes – yes, it is,’ she said. ‘That’s Herr Gerdes. He has the apartment above. A very quiet neighbour, as are the rest of the people in the building. A nice class of resident, as it were.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’ Ute turned back to the agent and smiled. ‘But I’d like to see the kitchen again …’

  10.

  ‘What have you got?’ asked Fabel. Anna had been waiting for him at the reception of the Eppendorf mortuary.

  ‘Well, from the look of it, a middle-aged man and a heart attack,’ said Anna as she led him into the mortuary’s body store.

  Fabel stopped in the hall. ‘A heart attack? So what’s that got to do with us?’

  ‘Not what,’ said Anna. ‘Who. The victim was found dead in his hotel bedroom this morning. On the face of it, the cause of death doesn’t seem suspicious: all the signs are that it was a heart attack but he’ll be given the full treatment, of course. But the victim is a Jens Jespersen, a Danish national.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Fabel. ‘The Danish police officer. I was supposed to be meeting with him.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Half an hour ago.’

  ‘Well, you better not keep him waiting any longer,’ said Anna, with a grin.

  A mortuary attendant wheeled a trolley into the centre of the morgue and removed the covering sheet. The man on the trolley was tall; his short-cropped hair was blond and looked a sickly yellow against the grey pallor of his skin. His lips had a bluish tinge. The Danish passport Anna handed Fabel told him that Jens Jespersen was fifty-four years old, but the man on the trolley had the physique of a much younger man and Fabel guessed he was looking at someone who had been serious about keeping fit.

  ‘He doesn’t look like the usual heart-attack candidate,’ said Anna as if she’d been reading his mind. Fabel took the plastic bag containing the rest of Jespersen’s smaller personal belongings. The watch was a heavy-duty military type. Jespersen’s Danish National Police ID card identified him as a Chefpolitiinspektør, which Fabel guessed would be somewhere equivalent to his own rank. There was a notebook with general reminder notes scribbled in it, including the Hamburg Police Presidium number, but Fabel could see that this was a personal notebook, not one used for police work. On one page of the notebook was the name OLAF, written in block capitals and double underlined. He slipped the notebook back into the plastic evidence holder.

  ‘Is this it?’ He held up the bag and its contents.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Anna. ‘Oh, except he didn’t like to sleep alone.’ Anna arced an eyebrow and tossed a second evidence bag to Fabel. This one held a souvenir teddy-bear toy, dressed in nautical gear with a Prinz Heinrich peaked cap. Fabel took the bag from Anna and stared absently at the stuffed teddy.

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you that something’s missing?’

  ‘He doesn’t have Moin! Moin! embroidered on his little jumper?’ Anna smirked. ‘I know what you mean. Something is missing. Jespersen was here to talk to you about something, yet there’s no sign of his official notebook, no notes of any kind, no paperwork, except for his travel documents. And take a look at this …’

  She tossed Fabel Jespersen’s cellphone. Fabel had to reach quickly to catch it and he scowled at Anna. Flipping the phone open, he searched through its memory.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No recorded incoming or outgoing calls,’ said Anna. ‘No stored numbers. No registered service. My guess is someone’s switched SIM cards on him thinking that no one would think to examine his phone.’

  ‘Damn it,’ said Fabel. ‘Has forensics looked at any of this?’

  ‘No. The emergency-service doctor who came out to the hotel treated it as a heart attack. Obviously, as a sudden death, the body was sent up here and Möller and his team will have a look at it. I’ve suggested to Möller that he has a good look at it.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘You know Möller. Top pathologist but world-le
ading asshole. He told me not to tell him his job, but you know he’ll give this one the full works. I’ve also told the hotel to seal off the room and alerted Holger Brauner that we may need his forensics boys over there, but I wanted to wait till you saw this. I didn’t want to overstep my authority …’

  Fabel fired a warning look at Anna. She stared back, her face empty of expression. It was a trick she had.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘the scene has been trodden on by God knows how many by now. I don’t know, Chef, this could be innocent enough and there’s no evidence of it being anything other than natural causes …’

  ‘No, Anna – you were right. Something stinks here.’

  ‘If this isn’t kosher,’ said Anna, ‘then we’ve got trouble. If this is a deliberate killing then it’s been a professional job. A very professional job.’

  11.

  In his office with its view out across Hamburg’s Altstadt, Peter Claasens frowned and thought about the questions he had just been asked. He had put the receiver down but sat with his hand resting on the phone, for once oblivious to the rhythmic thumping and clanging that resounded through the building.

  He had been reworking a draft of the letter that Emily had asked him to write when the phone had rung. Maybe it was because he had been concentrating on the letter that the journalist’s questions had caught him completely off guard.

  The Norwegian hadn’t actually alleged anything, and his questions had been carefully put; yet Claasens could see what he was trying to find out. No one else would have drawn such a clear conclusion from the Norwegian’s questions but they had struck a chord with Claasens. Claasens knew better than to confirm or deny anything to a member of the press: he was scrupulously discreet, maybe even overcautious in his professional life, if not in his private life.

  Why had the Norwegian specifically asked about Norivon and shipments to China? It had been that specific question that had struck a nerve and Claasens was worried he had let it show in his voice. It had been two months ago that Claasens had noticed the anomaly: an inconsistency between two shipments and the legally required paperwork. Both shipments had been to China. Claasens had queried them, naturally. Lensch, his contact at Norivon, had sounded equally confused at first. Then, within twenty-four hours, Lensch had come back to him with a reasonable explanation and the paperwork to back it up. Reasonable – but not entirely convincing.

  Claasens punched up the account file on his computer and buzzed through for the hard-file paperwork to be brought to him. It was Minna who came in, laid the binder on his desk and walked out again. Sulkily. Claasens cursed himself for having broken his ‘not on my own doorstep’ rule. He had banged Minna for a month or two, tired of her and had then expected everything to go back to business as usual. It hadn’t worked out that way. Minna had been a bitch ever since, and he couldn’t think of a way to get rid of her without making even more trouble for himself.

  He suddenly became aware of the reverberating thudding of the workmen again. Peter Claasens’s office was on the top floor of a building in Hamburg’s Altstadt, a block to the north of Willy-Brandt-Strasse and next to the Kontorhaus Quarter. It was a brand-new building, but with a view out over the Speicherstadt and sitting so close to brick-built icons such as the Chilehaus and the Sprinkenhof that it had been designed to be a modern but sympathetic interpretation of a traditional Kontorhaus, with a huge central atrium open to the sky. Claasens had moved his offices there on the scheduled completion date only to find there were dozens of things still to be finished off by the builders. One of them had been the balustrade on his floor around the central atrium, which had meant he had been forbidden to move staff into his offices for a further week. Even now there was a gap in the railings that was blocked off, meaning that staff often had to walk around the entire circumference of the building to reach adjoining offices.

  Claasens snapped off the band that held the binder closed. He had slipped Lensch’s paperwork in there along with the original documentation showing the shipment discrepancy. He had tagged the relevant sections with yellow Post-it notes.

  Claasens looked at his watch. It was five p.m. The rest of the staff would go and Emily would phone soon, just to check the coast was clear. Emily made everything go away: all the stress, all the hassle. When he was with her he became someone else. Someone better. He smiled, thinking of her phoning; of the cutely ungrammatical German she spoke with her sweet English accent. Then she would come up to his office and they would be alone. But first he had to double-check those figures. Just in case the Norwegian had had a point.

  It was exactly like when you lost your keys and kept going back to where you thought you had left them.

  Claasens stared at the page as if his concentrated attention on the words and figures would restore them to what he had seen before. And he had seen the error before. Except it wasn’t there now. No paperwork from Lensch. No yellow Post-it notes. This was mad. He flipped the thick binder over and checked inside its back cover, just in case the paperwork was there. Of course, that didn’t make any sense, but what he’d been looking at had made even less sense.

  He tried to shut out the sound of the workmen and focused on the file. He felt he was going mad. Everything tallied. No discrepancies.

  What the hell was going on?

  His cellphone rang and he knew it would be Emily.

  Chapter Two

  1.

  ‘Anna …’ Werner asked tentatively. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but have you just farted?’ He hit the button and the side window of the Polo slid down. They were parked in the Kiez, at the far end of Silbersackstrasse, facing towards the Reeperbahn. Here the street was narrow and dark.

  ‘Close the window, Grandad,’ said Anna. ‘It’s freezing out there.’

  ‘I’d rather take my chances with the cold.’

  ‘Anyway, who smelt it dealt it.’ Anna smiled innocently.

  ‘Sometimes you’re less than ladylike.’ Werner closed the window but left a small gap at the top.

  ‘Well, you make up for me. You remind me of my Auntie Rachael. Except you’ve got less facial hair, of course. What’s the time?’

  ‘Twenty past midnight.’

  ‘I’m bored. I am really, really, really, seriously bloody bored.’

  ‘It’s part of the job. I thought you would be used to it by now.’

  ‘How come I’m teamed up with you, all of a sudden?’ asked Anna. ‘Is this Lord Gentleman’s idea of keeping me on a tight rein until he can dump me on someone else?’

  ‘Lord Gentleman?’ Werner turned to her.

  ‘You know – Fabel … the English Commissar. Where the hell does all that Anglophilia come from? I mean, he’s a Frisian, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘His mother is Scottish,’ said Werner. ‘You knew that. And he went to school there for a while. You know, you could be more ladylike in the way you speak as well.’

  ‘Half Scottish, half Frisian – no wonder I’ve never seen him get a round in. Anyway, I take it this was his idea?’

  ‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t. It was mine.’

  ‘What? Oh, I see … so now you think I’m the problem child of the family too.’

  ‘Anna, sometimes – and don’t take offence – but just sometimes you are the most insufferable pain in the arse. I used to wonder why you always wear that heavy-duty leather jacket: it’s to stop the chafing from all those chips you carry around on your shoulders. I suggested he team you up with me because I thought we could work well together. To be honest, I’m trying to keep you as part of the team. I think Jan really wants that too.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Anna with sarcastic earnestness. ‘He really showed me that by giving me the sack.’

  ‘You know, Anna, a little less attitude would suit you a whole lot better. And you’re not sacked. Yet.’

  ‘So you thought we would work well together …’ Anna grinned.

  ‘That was before I knew about the farting.’

  ‘L
ook … over there …’ Anna rested her hand on Werner’s forearm and nodded towards the corner of the street. A tall woman with blonde hair, tied back into a ponytail, wearing a long black or dark blue coat, moved quickly along the street, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. She passed the bar on the corner and kept heading towards Silbersacktwiete. ‘This looks promising.’

  There were six unmarked cars dotted around the Kiez, as there had been every night for the last week since Westland’s murder, all watching over unlit courtyards or, like Werner and Anna, the occasional piece of open ground, shadowy and dense with bushes and trees. The woman slowed her pace, looked up and down the street, then disappeared into the large triangle of waste ground.

  ‘I think we’re on,’ said Anna. She switched the interior light to the off position, so that the car would not light up when Werner got out.

  ‘I’ll head in the other direction, then cut back,’ he said, getting out of the Polo and easing the door closed behind him. In the dark, Anna unholstered her SIG-Sauer service automatic, checked the magazine and pushed back the safety with her thumb.

  Werner passed the car on the far side of the street. He maintained an even pace and kept his gaze straight ahead, not giving away that he had seen the woman move, a shadow within a shadow, up ahead and off to the left. He was now only thirty metres away from where the woman had concealed herself. He guessed that Anna was now out of the car and shadowing him on the other side, crouching to keep concealed behind the other parked vehicles. He kept his shoulders hunched and his hands rammed into the pockets of his thick woollen pea coat, as if shunning the cold night, but his hand was closed around the automatic he had stuffed into his right pocket. Without indicating he knew where she was, Werner angled his course out from the wall that would soon give way to bushes and trees, and walked on the cobbled street. There was no one else around. If this was their woman, she would make her move soon.