The Valkyrie Song

by Craig Russell

  ‘Murder?’ Dahlke raised eyelids heavy with mascara. Genuine shock. Her fear cranked up a ratchet. ‘What have I got to do with murder?’

  ‘You’ve heard about what happened last week? Let’s face it, Frau Dahlke, you can’t have missed it, it’s been all over the press and TV. Jake Westland, the British pop singer.’

  Realisation began to dawn on Dahlke’s face. A terrified realisation. She searched Fabel’s face for something. Reassurance, maybe. He withheld it.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to do with that …’ Her voice was tremulous. ‘I swear I’ve got nothing to do with that.’

  ‘Frau Dahlke, you are a middle-aged housewife masquerading as a prostitute and you tried to lure one of my male officers into a dark corner. Last week, less than two hundred metres from where you were arrested, Jake Westland was lured into a dark corner and murdered by someone pretending to be a prostitute.’

  Dahlke stared at Fabel as if lost for words. Or just lost.

  ‘I take it you can see the seriousness of your position.’

  ‘I didn’t … I wouldn’t … I didn’t mean anyone any harm.’

  ‘Where were you between eleven p.m. on Saturday the twenty-sixth and one a.m. on Sunday the twenty-seventh?’

  ‘I was at home. In bed.’

  ‘Who can confirm that?’

  ‘My husband.’ Again Dahlke’s expression revealed that her fear had suddenly been ratcheted up a couple of notches. ‘Oh please, no … please don’t speak to my husband.’

  ‘Frau Dahlke, you still don’t seem to understand the seriousness of your position. If we cannot establish your whereabouts for the time of the murder you will be held here for further questioning and we will carry out full forensic searches of your home. If you were at home with your husband then we must have him verify the fact.’

  ‘But I didn’t do anything wrong!’ she sobbed. ‘I didn’t hurt anyone. I swear.’

  ‘Do you work, Frau Dahlke?’

  ‘I work in the local library. Part-time.’

  ‘And is your husband in employment?’

  ‘Yes – he’s an engineer.’

  ‘So why do you work as a prostitute?’

  ‘I don’t. I …’ Again she looked at Fabel with eyes desperate for some kind of understanding. Then the desperation was gone: her head bowed and her gaze became fixed on the table in front of her. ‘I’ve only done it three times,’ she said, her voice now leaden and dull once more. ‘I don’t do it for the money.’

  ‘Then why? Why on earth would you put yourself or your health at risk?’

  She looked up again. Her eyes were glossy with tears that tumbled down her cheeks, streaking them with mascara. ‘I’m ordinary. I’ve always been ordinary. Dull. I have a dull life with a dull husband and dull kids. I’d never been with another man before I got married. I went into the Kiez one night. Just to look. I don’t know why. I wanted to see what happened. The type of people who go there. I don’t know why I did it, but I went into a bar and this man … I did it with him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In his car.’ The sobs were now silent convulsions between statements.

  ‘I still don’t understand why,’ said Fabel. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. No man would understand. I did it for the excitement. To be wanted. Desired.’

  ‘Did you get all that?’ asked Fabel when he met Anna and Werner in the hall. They had been watching the interview on the closed-circuit video monitor in the next room.

  ‘Yep,’ said Werner. ‘Weird. Do you believe her?’

  ‘There’s absolutely no way she could have dumped the knife before you arrested her?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘None,’ said Anna. ‘She was in Werner’s sight all the time and we searched her thoroughly immediately after she was arrested. Nothing. And nothing dropped or dumped, either.’

  Fabel shook his head. ‘I give up sometimes. Keep her in and check out her alibi for last week with her husband. And try to be – I don’t know – diplomatic.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe I should ask him if he’s ever seen Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour. I’m not being funny, Chef, but there’s no diplomatic way of telling some guy that his wife’s been moonlighting as a hooker. “And, oh, by the way, don’t feel too bad about it: it’s not that she’s struggling on what you give her for housekeeping – she’s doing it for the love of dick.”’

  ‘Anna’s got a point, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘There’s no sugaring this pill.’

  ‘Simply keep to the fact that she’s a suspect in a serious crime, and that you need to establish her whereabouts on the night in question. Leave the explaining to her.’

  ‘Okay, Chef.’

  Fabel made his way to his office. He checked his email. There was an internal note from van Heiden to remind him that Politidirektør Vestergaard, the boss of the dead Danish cop, Jespersen, was flying down to see them in a couple of days. Van Heiden helpfully provided the flight’s arrival time.

  ‘I’ve got nothing better to do,’ muttered Fabel. He really wanted to talk to Jespersen’s boss but he had thought, given that he was up to his neck in a major murder inquiry, that van Heiden could at least have arranged the pick-up.

  He looked at his watch. Two a.m. He’d go home, catch four or five hours’ sleep and head back into the Presidium. He yawned. He was really getting too old for this. He thought of Viola Dahlke and the fact that she would be lying, wide awake and afraid, considering every thread as the fabric of her life unravelled. What the hell had she thought she was doing? She had been right: he didn’t understand; just as he hadn’t understood why so many of the people he had encountered in his career had done the things they had done. Human sexuality was a perplexing thing. A lot of the murders he had investigated had had bizarre sexual elements to them and Fabel had been forced to navigate some dark and stormy seas over the years. Sometimes it was as if women remained an unknown continent for him.

  He took his English tweed jacket from the back of his chair and unhooked his raincoat from the rack. As he made for the door he almost expected the phone to ring.

  It did.

  6.

  It was strange, given the very nature of his job, that the one thing that Fabel had never fully come to terms with was the sudden extinction of life.

  He had heard that astronauts, once they are truly in space, look back at the Earth and tend to become, in that instant, either entirely atheistic or totally convinced of the existence of a god. No middle ground. Whether in reality it was as absolute as that, Fabel could understand the experience. He had a similar feeling every time he looked at the dead. A corpse has no humanity: it doesn’t look like someone sleeping, it becomes nothing more than a human-like object. An empty shell. And in Fabel’s case, most of the dead he looked upon had been forcibly evicted from that shell.

  Where some would have seen the vessel abandoned by the departing soul, Fabel saw only emptiness. The final shutting down of an interdependence of biological systems. The ending of a universe seen from a never-to-be-repeated viewpoint.

  However Armin Lensch had seen the world, he wasn’t seeing it now.

  His body lay on a scrubby patch of grass and rubble down near the shore of the River Elbe, close to Hafenstrasse. A few empty beer bottles and the wheel of some long-discarded child’s toy served as his pillow, and the grass on which he lay was framed by broken red bricks from whatever dock building had stood there at one time. The rain had turned to sleet, then to snow so the technicians had erected a white forensics tent to protect the crime scene and had illuminated it with lights on telescopic stands. Like Westland, Lensch had been sliced across the belly and his viscera, spilling sideways from the mouth-like gape of the wound, glistened in the harsh light of the arc lamps the forensic team had erected. A nauseating stench from his sliced-open abdomen lingered in the air of the forensics tent.

  A man almost completely concealed in white hooded coveralls, blue latex gloves and a surgical
mask came over to Fabel.

  ‘Hello, Jan.’ Holger Brauner, the forensics chief, slipped the mask from his face and smiled. ‘It’s a nippy one tonight …’

  Fabel returned the smile. Brauner was almost invariably cheerful, despite the nature of his work. Or maybe because of it. ‘Hi, Holger. What’s the story?’

  ‘From my estimation, we’re talking about a male, twenty-nine years old, one-seventy-nine centimetres tall, white-collar job – finance sector – blood group O rhesus negative, suffers from a nut allergy and lives in Eppendorf.’

  ‘Very impressive, Sherlock,’ said Fabel. ‘You found his wallet, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, of course not. I established it all with DNA and the arcane skills of the forensic wizard. Do you never watch CSI?’ Brauner grinned and held up a plastic evidence bag containing a black leather wallet and a state identity card. ‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘All his credit cards and cash too, as far as I can see. Cellphone as well. Robbery doesn’t seem to have been the motive.’

  ‘Leave the detective work to us, lab rat,’ said Fabel, with a grin. Someone entered the tent behind him and he turned to see Anna and Werner. It had been Werner who had called Fabel. Werner rolled his eyes as he and Anna stepped back into the enclosed scene of crime. Fabel read his meaning: Anna’s make-up was thrown out in stark contrast to the pallor of her skin. It was the same effect he had seen on Viola Dahlke; in Anna’s case it was Armin Lensch’s mutilated belly, which she worked so hard not to look at, that was the cause of her lack of colour. Tough little Anna’s Achilles heel and another reason for her to consider a transfer.

  ‘You all right?’ Fabel asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Anna defensively, but she still avoided looking at Lensch. ‘So we’ve got number two. Looks like we’re at the start of another series.’

  ‘I need you two to get on to finding out when he was last seen, who he was with … Werner, what is it?’ Fabel noticed Werner leaning close to the body, staring at the dead man’s face intently.

  ‘Anna, come here and look.’

  ‘Yeah … very funny.’

  ‘No, Anna, I mean it. Look at him – isn’t he the guy from earlier? When we were arresting Dahlke?’

  Anna moved closer, holding the back of her hand to her nose. ‘Shit … you’re right.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Let’s have it.’

  ‘Just a coincidence, Chef,’ said Anna. ‘I think it’s a coincidence. Remember we told you there was a bit of trouble when we arrested Dahlke – the drunks …’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘He was the ringleader,’ said Werner.

  Fabel looked down at Lensch. The dead man’s lips gaped slightly as if to speak and his eyes were still half open, as if a camera had caught him mid-blink. His hair was cut short and had been styled with some form of gel. The shirt looked as if it had been expensive, but the lower half was now sodden with blood. Lensch’s trousers were unfastened and his fly half unzipped. The slice across his belly again spoke of a single, purposeful stroke. Whoever had killed him had known what they were doing. Had done this before.

  ‘So why wasn’t he arrested?’ asked Fabel. ‘Did he go quietly?’

  ‘He moaned a bit,’ said Anna and Fabel caught Werner firing a look at her.

  ‘Don’t tell me, Anna …’ Fabel said, exasperated.

  ‘Listen, Chef, things were starting to turn ugly. We were waiting for back-up and Sonny Boy here started to give us gyp. It is regulations that if someone acts aggressively and they’ve been warned to stay one and a half metres away, if they step closer we can knock them to the ground.’

  ‘Is that what happened? Did you give him a formal warning?’

  ‘We told him to back off,’ said Werner. ‘It was this guy who was stirring it up. Anna acted properly, Jan.’

  ‘Did you draw your firearm?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna.

  ‘So why haven’t you submitted a report? Did you strike him?’

  ‘Well, yes – kind of.’ A sigh. ‘I kneed him in the groin.’

  ‘Marvellous! Bloody marvellous, Anna. You realise you’re going to have to make a full report to that effect? Any swelling you caused will probably be noted in the autopsy. For Christ’s sake, Anna. And you, Werner – I thought you’d have the sense to keep her on a short chain.’

  ‘A short what?’ Anna glowered at Fabel.

  ‘Okay, Anna, leave it …’ said Werner. ‘Jan – when this guy here started to kick up, we thought there was a good chance we had the Angel in custody. Or at least Jake Westland’s murderer. And like Anna said, we were outnumbered. I think you should let this one go.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you?’ Fabel sighed. ‘Anna, make sure you have a complete report on my desk tomorrow.’ He looked at the ID Brauner had handed him in the polythene evidence bag. ‘Armin Lensch … Did you see where he went after you had dealt with him?’

  ‘He followed on after his mates,’ said Anna. ‘They went in the direction of Hans-Albers-Platz.’

  ‘Then I suggest you get enlargements of this …’ He tossed her the evidence bag with Lensch’s identity card. ‘And start going around the bars to see if you can find where he was and when. Werner, check out next of kin. Speaking of which, have you seen Dahlke’s husband?’

  ‘Not yet. We were on our way when we got this shout.’

  ‘Okay, leave Anna to get started on the bars – I’ll arrange a uniform to chaperone her – and you head out to get the story from Dahlke’s husband.’

  ‘Okay, Jan,’ said Werner. ‘But it’s a bit redundant now, isn’t it? I mean, she can’t have done this guy. She’s been in custody since we last saw him alive.’

  ‘We still need to confirm her alibi for Westland.’

  Fabel made his way down the steep embankment to St Pauli Hafenstrasse, where his car was parked next to the silver and blue police cruisers. He felt tired and irritated and, for a moment, he nearly headed off in the direction of the city centre and Pöseldorf, where he had had his attic flat for five years. Instead he turned west towards Altona: his new home. His shared home.

  Hamburg is a city where gentility and prurience rub shoulders uncomfortably: the deliberate vulgarity of St Pauli sits directly next to the restrained gentility of one of the grander parts of Altona. Back in the days when Altona was Danish, St Pauli was the marshy no-man’s-land between it and German Hamburg. Both Altona and Hamburg were resolutely Lutheran. Catholics seeking freedom to worship had to find it outside the boundaries of both cities: hence the street called Grosse Freiheit, the Great Freedom. But St Pauli had also become a dumping ground: a place known in the late Middle Ages for its unsavoury inhabitants, its poorhouses and its pestilence hospitals.

  Yet, as Fabel headed along Breitestrasse, it took only a couple of minutes for the crude glamour of St Pauli to give way to the wide tree-lined boulevard of Palmaille, with its grand villas on either side. It had started to snow and the naked branches of the trees sparkled in the lamplight.

  Fabel suddenly had an idea. He pulled over to the kerb and reached down between his legs and under the driver’s seat. His fingertips brushed against something small and metallic.

  ‘Got you, you little swine.’ After a little scrabbling he retrieved his MP3 player and put it into the plastic tray behind the handbrake. He replaced his seat belt, pulled out into the road and resumed his journey. As he did so, his smile faded. At the next junction he made a left into Behnstrasse. Then another left into Struenseestrasse. Left again and he was back on Palmaille.

  It was still there.

  Fabel had first noticed it as he had driven off after finding his MP3 player. Headlights about sixty metres behind him, pulling out maybe thirty seconds after he had. The last three manoeuvres had made no sense and the car behind had followed. What bothered Fabel was that he had only just picked up on it. Whoever was following him knew what they were doing. God knew how long they had been on his tail: at least from the murder scene, and maybe before that. Fabel was not
far from the apartment he shared with Susanne, but he was not going to drive there. He had no idea who was on his tail, or how dangerous they were. He swung across Palmaille and headed straight on towards Neumühlen and Övelgönne. As he drove, he flipped open his cellphone.

  ‘Principal Chief Commissar Fabel here,’ he said to the operations room officer who answered his call. ‘I’m in Altona, on Palmaille heading west. I’ve just passed the fishing museum. Where’s your nearest traffic camera?’

  ‘There’s one at the junction with Max-Brauer-Allee.’

  ‘I’m in a dark blue BMW 3-series, old shape. There’s very little on the road but there’s a car behind me. When I turn north into Max-Brauer-Allee, could you get his index number and check it out?’

  ‘Yes, Chief Commissar. Do you need assistance? I could send an area car.’

  ‘It’s probably nothing, but if there’s one available, send it to the Max-Brauer-Allee. Call me back on this number when you have a make on the car.’

  Fabel turned into Max-Brauer-Allee at the intersection. As he drove north he checked that his tail was still there. The white baroque edifice of Altona City Hall slid by on his left and as he passed the road end at Platz-der-Republik, he saw the silver and blue police cruiser waiting at the junction. His cellphone rang.

  ‘Chief Commissar Fabel, Presidium Ops Room here – we got the index plate. The car behind you is a Mercedes CLK cabriolet, registered to a Sylvie Achtenhagen, Edgar-Ross-Strasse, Altona. Isn’t that …?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Thanks. Tell the patrol car to pull her over.’

  Fabel drew into the kerb once he had seen in his rear-view mirror that the Mercedes had been pulled over. He got out and approached Achtenhagen, who was out of her car and remonstrating with the two uniformed officers.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll take it from here,’ he said to the uniforms.

  ‘This looks like harassment,’ said Achtenhagen in halfhearted indignation. ‘Pulling over members of the press for no good reason. Other than, that is, the fact that I’m embarrassing you by pointing out your incompetence to the public.’