The Valkyrie Song

3

The penthouse had been finished to the same quality and in the same style as the apartment below. It was slightly larger and better use had been made of the space available, but the main difference was the furnishings. Like its downstairs neighbour, the flat was ultra-modern and bright, but much of the furniture was traditional. Some looked like genuine antiques. Fabel thought of the man who had occupied this space and somehow couldn’t connect it with the mass of bloody tissue lying on the kitchen counter downstairs.

‘He’s got some nice furniture,’ said Vestergaard in an unusually conversational tone. ‘Walnut, most of it. Some maple. I’ve seen this kind of stuff before. It’s Hungarian art deco, a lot of it. Made in the nineteen-thirties. Some of the other pieces are French.’

Fabel looked at her questioningly.

‘Hobby…’ she said and he nodded. They walked slowly through the apartment. There was a lounge, a study, a bedroom and an open-plan kitchen and dining room. They stopped for a moment in the study.

‘No sign of a struggle,’ said Fabel. ‘It doesn’t look like he even had company recently. The whole party must have taken place downstairs. But I’ll have Holger’s forensics boys give the place a thorough going-over.’

Vestergaard picked up a sketch pad that had been lying on the desk. Fabel noticed that it was the same brand and size as the ones he used for laying out his thoughts during an investigation. Vestergaard flipped through it and gave a couple of small laughs. In response to Fabel’s questioning look, she turned the open pad towards him.

‘Whatever else he did,’ said Vestergaard, ‘he had a talent for caricatures. That’s meant to be your illustrious Chancellor, Angela Merkel, isn’t it?’

‘Yes — you’re right, he wasn’t half bad.’ Fabel grinned. ‘I know Frau Merkel is keen to promote good international relationships, but I really don’t think she would do that with Monsieur Sarkozy. And I don’t think he’s really quite that small.’

‘I have to say he had expensive tastes…’ Vestergaard put the drawing pad back down and examined a deco bronze on the desk: a stylised eagle perched on a walnut base. ‘For a retired school teacher from Flensburg.’

‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ said Fabel. ‘I think we should start here in the study. You take the desk, I’ll go through the filing cabinets and the bookshelves.’

Three-quarters of an hour later they had examined every piece of correspondence, every bill, the victim’s notebook and his desk diary.

‘Either he had a very limited social life or a very secret one,’ said Vestergaard. ‘Even with official and household correspondence — there’s nothing here other than the barest minimum of paperwork. No personal computer. This is either a life only half lived, or a cover. And from the look of the furniture and the quality of the selection in his wine rack, he was not a man of an ascetic disposition.’

Fabel wandered through to the lounge and looked around. ‘So, Major Drescher, this is where you hid yourself.’ He turned back to Vestergaard. ‘I got on to the Federal Commissioner’s office in Berlin to dig up his files. Nothing. Only the odd mention here and there. He did a good job of hiding himself and I thought we’d never find him. Now he’s dropped right into our laps.’

‘He’s still hiding from us, Jan,’ said Vestergaard, looking around the study.

Before heading back to the Presidium, Fabel asked Holger Brauner if his team could seal off the penthouse apartment and give it a good going-over once they were finished with the primary locus.

As he and Karin Vestergaard headed out of the apartment building and towards his BMW, Fabel noticed that the street had a completely different look to it in the daylight, even the winter daylight. He took a few deep breaths of the cold air. Over the years Fabel had found that after visiting a murder scene there was one aspect, one image, that haunted you for weeks afterwards. This time, every time he closed his eyes, it was the lidless stare of Drescher’s corpse.

‘You okay?’ asked Vestergaard.

‘Yeah… I’m fine.’ Fabel sighed. ‘Just another day in the meat factory.’

When they arrived at the Presidium, Fabel fetched coffee for them both and they sat in his office drinking it.

‘We should take a break before questioning Cranz,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s going to be a long haul.’

There was a knock on the door and Werner came in. Something about his face told Fabel that relaxation time was over.

‘This is all seriously messed up, Jan,’ he said, not bothering to switch to English for Vestergaard’s sake.

‘What is?’

‘The woman we’ve got in custody rented the apartment under the name of Ute Cranz. But she claims her real name is Ute Paulus, and that she is the sister of Margarethe Paulus-’

‘Hold on,’ said Fabel, the weariness swept from his expression. ‘The woman who escaped from the secure hospital in Mecklenburg?’

‘The very same.’

‘So Ute Paulus has taken up her sister’s trade of knackering male victims? It would certainly explain why Margarethe has been able to stay out of sight, if she has had outside help.’

‘Ah, well… that’s where it all gets very complicated.’ Werner gave a wry smile and rubbed the stubble on his scalp. ‘I’ve been in touch with the state hospital in Mecklenburg and I spoke to the chief psychiatrist there who’s responsible for Margarethe Paulus’s case. It’s a Dr Kopke. According to Kopke, there is no Ute Paulus. No sister. Just Margarethe.’

Werner placed a printout of a file photograph on Fabel’s desk. ‘That is Margarethe Paulus, taken a year before her escape. I’ve had a look at the woman in custody. The hair colour is different, but apart from that, if she’s a sister she would have to be a twin.’

‘ Shit.’ Fabel turned to Vestergaard and explained everything that Werner had just said. ‘What else did Kopke say?’ he asked, turning back to Werner.

‘Two things. First, he needs to talk to you urgently. He needs to know the identity of the victim and how he died. Dr Kopke says that he might have information that will be indispensable to us. He would also like to talk to any criminal psychiatrist or psychologist who sits in on or monitors the interview — which he strongly recommends we do.’

‘And the second?’

‘That we use maximum security when dealing with Margarethe Paulus. He said that she is probably the most dangerous individual that he has ever dealt with.’

On the way down to the interview room, Karin Vestergaard took a call on her cellphone. After a brief exchange in Danish she paused to make a few notes in her notebook. Fabel waited for her.

‘That was my office in Copenhagen,’ she said as they continued along the corridor. ‘The NCID in Norway have been doing some more digging into Jorgen Halvorsen’s affairs. They have found a contact he had here in Hamburg. We can talk about it after you’ve interviewed this woman. Do you think she’s the one who killed Jens?’

‘I don’t know. There seems to be a hell of a lot of coincidences going on and she fits perfectly as someone we should be looking at for all these killings, if it weren’t for the simple fact that we know absolutely for certain that she was locked up in an asylum. There’s no way she can be either our Angel or our Valkyrie.’

‘But she was out when Jens was killed,’ said Vestergaard.

‘True. She’s well worth a look for it. I’ll establish her whereabouts at the time — if I can.’ Fabel stopped their progress along the corridor by turning to her. ‘Listen, Karin, this will just be our initial interview to establish basics. It won’t take long. I’d like us to talk the whole thing through afterwards. There’s another couple of deaths that have cropped up that are not, strictly speaking, being treated as murder. I just think there’s so much going on that there’s a chance we’ll miss something.’

The woman who waited for them in the interview room looked nothing like a killer. Professional or serial. The forensics department had taken all her clothes for examination and she was now dressed in a shapeless disposable white overall. She was of slim build and was, Fabel couldn’t help noticing, very attractive. She looked up at him with empty disinterest as he entered, as if she had no stake in what was happening and his presence had nothing to do with her. Fabel recognised her from the photograph sent from the Mecklenburg hospital. He went into the interview without Vestergaard, leaving her to join Werner and Anna in the adjoining room from where they could watch the interview on the monitor.

Fabel nodded to the uniformed officer who had been watching over the prisoner, sat down opposite Paulus, laid his papers out on the metal desk and informed her of her rights.

‘I want you to understand something, Margarethe,’ he said. ‘I will be interviewing you again later, with another officer, and we will have a psychologist in the room as well as a lawyer to represent your interests. We can talk about things in more detail then. In the meantime, I want you to simply confirm your name for me.’

‘I am Ute Paulus. You called me Margarethe; I am not Margarethe Paulus. She is my sister.’

‘But that’s simply not true, Margarethe. There is no Ute Paulus. You have no sister. It’s a matter of record.’

She laughed coldly. ‘Records are falsified all the time. In the East people’s records were changed or falsified all of the time. I am not Margarethe. I am Ute.’

‘Who is this?’ Fabel asked and slid a copy of the hospital photograph across the table to her.

‘That is Margarethe.’

‘That is you. Listen, there’s no point in denying it. We have samples of your fingerprints and they match those of this patient.’ He jabbed a forefinger at the picture on the table. ‘Margarethe Paulus, thirty-eight years old, born in Zarrentin, north-west Mecklenburg. You have no sister, no brother and both your parents are dead. This is you. And you were committed to the Mecklenburg state secure hospital in May nineteen ninety-four.’

Paulus said nothing. Fabel drew a long breath.

‘Why did you do what you did to Robert Gerdes?’

‘His name wasn’t Gerdes.’ There was no anger in her voice. There was nothing in her voice. Or in her eyes as she spoke. ‘His name was Georg Drescher and he was a major in the Stasi.’

‘Why did you do what you did to him?’

‘I thought you said we would only talk about this later,’ she said. She placed her hands on the metal surface. Her fingers were long and slim. He noticed how clean her fingernails were, and then remembered that Brauner’s forensics team would have scraped beneath them for trace evidence. Fabel found it difficult to imagine those fingers committing the horrors he had witnessed in her flat.

‘I want to go back,’ she said.

‘Go back where? To the apartment?’

‘To the hospital.’

‘How can you go back to the hospital if you’re not a patient there?’ asked Fabel. He pointed again to the photograph. ‘This is the patient. Margarethe is the patient. You say you’re not Margarethe.’

‘That’s where I see my sister. Where I talk to her. I visit her. Now I can visit her all the time.’

Fabel sighed and gathered up the papers. ‘I think we really should wait until later.’

‘I want to go back now,’ she repeated, but there was no insistence in her voice. ‘To the hospital.’

‘I’m afraid you won’t be going back for some time. You’re going to have to stay with us for a while.’ Fabel stood up.

‘I want to go back. To the hospital.’ Margarethe stood up too. Fabel held his hand out to stop her. ‘You have to remain sitting, Margarethe. Stay here. The officer will take you back to your cell.’

Margarethe’s hand seized Fabel’s wrist and he was amazed at the strength in the slender fingers. He moved his other hand to free himself but was stunned by the blow she delivered to his forehead with the heel of her free hand. He heard the uniformed officer rush forward. Margarethe grabbed Fabel by the hair and rammed his face into the metal table as she used him for leverage and swung a high kick at the other policeman’s head. Fabel heard the uniformed cop slam into the interview-room wall and gasp for breath. He felt her fingers probe under his arm to find his service SIG-Sauer automatic but the anti-snatch holster resisted her tugging. He thrust his weight against her and she fell onto the floor. Despite the adrenalin surging through his system, he noticed how gracefully she fell, rolled and sprang back to her feet. The other cop was pulling himself to his feet and he launched himself from the wall at her. It was a clumsy move and she dodged him easily, slashing him across the throat with the flat of her hand. Fabel made to draw his weapon and she leaped across the table at him, hitting him at chest height with her knee. His head slammed painfully against the wall and he heard his automatic clatter on the floor. The door next to him suddenly burst open and Werner, Anna and two uniformed officers rushed into the room.

‘Get my gun!’ yelled Fabel.

He pulled himself to his feet in time to see Margarethe slam a fist into Werner’s face. Anna Wolff got behind her and wrapped an arm around her throat in a tight grip. Margarethe slammed her elbow into Anna’s ribs but Anna didn’t let go. Instead, she let herself drop, her weight pulling Margarethe to the floor. Werner and the other officers threw themselves onto her and, after a few seconds of desperate struggling, Margarethe was handcuffed.

‘Yours, I believe…’ Fabel looked up to see Karin Vestergaard staring down on him, his service automatic in her extended hand.

‘Thanks,’ said Fabel and allowed her to help him up. ‘That went well, I thought…’ He felt something trickle down his forehead and when he gingerly reached up to touch it, his fingertips were wet with blood.

Werner, Anna and the others hoisted Margarethe to her feet. She looked directly at Fabel and the look chilled him. There was no rage, no hatred, just the same emptiness in the eyes that he had noticed when he’d first entered the interview room. It was as if the intense violence that had just exploded there had simply never happened.

‘Get her back to her cell,’ said Fabel. ‘And keep her restrained.’ The uniforms ushered Margarethe, who didn’t even seem to be breathing hard, from the room. Anna and Werner stayed behind. There was a trickle of blood from Werner’s nostril.

‘You should get that looked at,’ said Vestergaard, nodding towards Fabel’s head.

‘I think I should…’ said Fabel, taking the folded handkerchief that Vestergaard handed him and holding it to his head. ‘You did well, Anna. She took some taking down.’

‘A woman’s touch. I thought it looked like you and Grandad here needed help.’ Anna grinned knowingly at Werner. ‘What with you having your asses kicked by a girl.’

‘How’s the uniform?’ asked Fabel.

‘He’ll be fine,’ said Werner, dabbing the bleeding nostril with the back of his hand. ‘He’s going to have one hell of a sore throat, that’s for sure.’

‘Get him to the hospital,’ said Fabel. ‘Any blow to the airway can be very dangerous and she knew what she was doing.’ He leaned against the interview-room wall and drew a deep breath. ‘Shit… she knew what she was doing.’

‘I gather that’s what Dr Kopke, the Chief Doctor from the Mecklenburg state hospital, wanted to tell you. He was on the phone again… when you were in there with psycho-girl.’

‘I’ll phone him,’ said Fabel. ‘But first, could someone get me some codeine and a plaster for my head…’