The Valkyrie Song

2

Sylvie Achtenhagen took a break from the chaos of press cuttings and files that seemed to have exploded across the polished wood floor of her living room. She went to the French window and opened it, stepping out onto the balcony. The night air was ice-knife sharp and she welcomed its bite: she had been bent over the files for an hour and a half and her brain felt fogged and slow. Sylvie’s apartment was on the third floor of a block on Edgar-Ross-Strasse in Hamburg-Eppendorf. It was elegant and spacious, with its own balcony and set in a pastel-coloured apartment building with a fancy Art Deco facade. She had moved into the apartment when her career — and her income — had started to kick off seriously. She had originally had her eye on one of the Jugendstil villas on Nissenstrasse, one street back. But they had been too expensive. And they would stay too expensive if she didn’t deliver the goods for the station soon.

HanSat TV was jointly owned by the NeuHansa Group and Andreas Knabbe, who ran the station. Knabbe was a thirty-year-old who looked about twelve and had spent so much time in the US that he seemed more American than German; his management style was definitely more American than German. Knabbe had the habit of calling all his staff by their first names and frequently used the informal du form of address, even to the older and more respected members of staff. It was all meant to be shirtsleeves-informal and friendly and family atmosphere and crap like that. Truth was, though, that if Knabbe thought you weren’t worth your salary, or if you didn’t fit with his business model, then you were history. And Knabbe had often talked about Sylvie’s success with the Angel case back in the nineties: increasingly he talked about her career in the past tense.

Sylvie began to feel at the mercy of events: that she was just being pulled along by the forces around her, just like everybody else. That was the problem. She had become reactive. Lazy. Back then, she hadn’t waited for things to happen: she’d made them happen.

Sylvie hugged herself against the cold, pulling her thick woollen cardigan tight around her, and went back into her living room, closing the windows against the chill night. She poured herself another glass of red wine and sat cross-legged on the floor, letting her eyes range over the scattered material around her. Somewhere in there was a starting place. Somewhere there was some detail, some forgotten remark or photograph or piece of information that would point her in the direction of this killer. The Angel killings in St Pauli had launched her career: she had put so much into the case and had reaped the rewards. If she wasn’t first to deliver the scoop on these latest killings, they could equally easily end her career.

She sipped again at her wine. She could be pretty certain that she would get no help from that pompous arse Fabel. The Polizei Hamburg were no great fans of her after her groundbreaking documentary on the case ten years ago. Cops have long memories. And anyway, there was something about Fabel she disliked intensely, and she got the idea that the feeling was mutual.

Sylvie knew that there was only one way forward for her: she had to find out who murdered Jake Westland before the police did. She didn’t have their resources, but she also didn’t work under the same kind of restrictions they did. And, she knew, she was a whole lot smarter. But her main advantage was that she was pretty sure the cops were looking in the wrong direction. They were probably trying to establish links between the current murders and the Angel killings ten years ago.

And this wasn’t the Angel. These latest killings were the work of a copycat. Sylvie just knew it.