The Valkyrie Song

3

Birta drew close to the house, keeping to the edge of the shields of yellow light cast out onto the snow by the uncurtained windows. It was, she reflected, something you would never think about: drawing your blinds or curtains when you lived in a place like this. The forest was your shutter against the world. No one else to see you.

She could see no one in the lit rooms: she scanned the blank, dark windows too. Nothing. She made her way around the side of the house. There was a door halfway along. Locked. She went around to the back, keeping tight against the wall. There was another door at the back. She turned the handle and was rewarded with the door easing open. It led into the kitchen of the house: a large pine-clad room with expensive-looking fittings and a clutch of unmatched leather and upholstered chairs in one corner. The large fridge was bedecked with children’s drawings, scribbled notes, fridge magnets. Birta eased the door closed behind her and stood perfectly still, diverting all of her attention to any sounds from inside the house. Nothing. Shit, maybe he wasn’t here. That would normally not be a problem: she could replan, reschedule. But Birta had left her mark on this location: there was a middle-aged man with a ripped heart lying out in the woods.

She edged out into the hall. Still no sounds of life. Birta made her way along towards the study. She was about halfway along, checking every room as she passed, when the door to the left immediately ahead opened and the sound of a refilling toilet cistern filled the hall. The client stepped out into the hall and gave a start when he saw Birta standing there. She snapped the pistol up and aimed at his head.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said, and smiled falteringly.

‘Me?’ Birta said.

‘Well, not you specifically, but someone like you.’ He looked past her along the hall. ‘I suppose I expected it to be a man.’

‘I’m not a man,’ said Birta. No point in looking behind me, she thought. Your handyman is not coming. No nasty surprise for me. No reprieve for you.

‘I can see that… listen, you don’t have to…’ The client didn’t finish the sentence. Birta’s bullet hit him in the centre of his forehead and he toppled backward, his body rigid, like a felled tree. She walked over to where he lay. Birta knew he was already dead: there were sounds from his body — post-mortem sounds — his pale trousers were stained with urine and she thought she could smell excreta. Violent death, she knew, was seldom clean. Or odourless. Dark red, almost black blood oozed from a nostril and his left ear. Nevertheless, she crouched down at his feet, aimed along his fallen body at the underside of his jaw and fired a second shot. The client’s head twitched as if he was shaking his head in protest, but Birta knew it was the low-velocity hollow-point doing its work inside the confines of his skull, destroying his brain.

She stood up and marked in her head where she was in the hall and how she had got there. Measuring the forensic distance.

Meeting concluded.

She drove back through the night. There were flurries of snow but the highways had been cleared. She settled back into the comfort of the driver’s seat and switched on her music, making sure she was relaxed but not so much that she would make a mistake that would draw attention to her. She again crossed the Swedish border on a road without a customs point and headed towards Stockholm. Birta returned the car to Stockholm-Bromma airport the next morning and then made her way to the airport car park where her Danish-registered car was parked. As she did so Birta Hennigsen, who had existed as an identity for only a little more than thirty-six hours, began to fade from being.