The Valkyrie Song

7

Fabel rang Sparwald’s cellphone number from his car.

‘Number unavailable,’ he said to Vestergaard as he snapped his phone shut.

‘That’s not surprising, if he’s in a remote part of China.’

‘Like you say, if that’s where he is,’ said Fabel. He looked at the note Luttig, Sparwald’s boss, had given them. ‘But I hope to God he is. If Sparwald really was due to make this trip with a Norwegian travelling companion, and that travelling companion was Halvorsen…’

Sparwald didn’t live far from his work. But if you were someone who appreciated the environment, Poppenbuttel was not a bad choice of place to live. Even in winter, with its branches bare and its tones muted, Nature still made her presence felt here. Sparwald lived in a small house near the banks of the Alster, set tight into a mass of trees. The house was constructed out of wood, but most of the south-facing side of the house was made up of windows, over which shutters had been pulled.

‘It reminds me of a lot of the houses we have in Denmark,’ said Vestergaard. She pointed to a large area of the garden that had been dug up. There were spiralled coils of pipe lying on the muddy exposed undersoil. ‘Look — he’s been installing a geothermal energy converter. It’s not finished. Now that’s a very odd project to leave half-done when you’re about to go off to China for a month or so.’ She nodded up towards the roof. ‘And these solar panels are new. It doesn’t look to me like they’re connected. Sparwald was obviously in the middle of a pretty major home-improvement project.’

Fabel rang the front doorbell and knocked on the door for good measure. As he expected there was no answer. He turned to Vestergaard.

‘I’m going to have a look around the back. See if you can find a window where the blinds haven’t been drawn.’

Fabel made his way around the side of the building. Again there were signs of work in progress: building materials propped against the side of the house; tools left out. Fabel tried the back door. It was locked.

‘Jan!’ He heard Vestergaard call from the other side of the house. He ran around, slipping on the mud churned up by Sparwald’s excavation for the heat pump.

‘Take a look at this,’ said Vestergaard. ‘There’s a space between the blind and the edge of the window.’

He peered through but could see nothing. He took a small torch from his pocket and shone the beam through.

‘You see it?’ said Vestergaard.

‘I see it,’ said Fabel. For a moment he tried to convince himself it was just a shoe. But he knew that what he saw, just visible from behind the sofa, was a foot.

He called the Presidium from his cellphone and told them to send a blue-and-silver from Police Commissariat 35 at Poppenbuttel.

‘And could you alert the Forensics Department. It would appear we have a murder scene here.’

‘This is different,’ said Vestergaard without a hint of irony. It had taken less than two minutes for the first uniformed unit to arrive and for the door of Sparwald’s home to be shattered with a ram. The first thing that had struck them on entering the house was the smell. The real stench of death. They found Sparwald’s body in the lounge, his foot projecting beyond the edge of the sofa, as they had seen through the window. This was horror of a different kind from that they had experienced at the Drescher scene, and Fabel understood exactly what Vestergaard had meant by her comment. The smell was because Sparwald had lain undiscovered for days, maybe weeks, but the method of his death had been much cleaner than Drescher’s. Without symbolism or ritual. Without passion.

Fabel and Vestergaard had put on forensic overshoes and latex gloves before entering the house and instructed the uniformed officers to do the same. Clutching a handkerchief to his mouth and nose, Fabel bent down and examined Sparwald, who lay staring up at the ceiling, the skin on his face pale and blotchy. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead and another under his jawline. This had been the professional, efficient extermination of a life.

‘You realise this is exactly the same m.o. as the Halvorsen killing?’ Vestergaard too held the back of her hand to her nose to diminish the smell of death, but Fabel noticed that otherwise she seemed untouched by the scene. Her brow was slightly furrowed, but it was the concentration of a professional analysing the facts she was presented with.

‘Yes,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m guessing he’s been killed with a low-velocity hollow-point.’

‘The Valkyrie,’ said Vestergaard, but quietly, as if to herself.

Poppenbuttel police station was part of Polizei Hamburg Division East and could not have been more different from Davidwache or Klingberg. Police Commissariat 35 was situated on Wentzelplatz, next to the S-Bahn station. The Commissariat was an imposing, brand-new construction composed of solid modernist blocks, angles, curves and sweeps. There was, Fabel thought, something almost intimidating about the severity of the building and he found himself thinking just how much more approachable Davidwache must seem to the public.

Fabel had assembled the resources he needed there, bringing in Holger Brauner and his forensics team, plus Anna, Werner, Henk and Dirk. The Poppenbuttel uniformed branch had kept on the on-duty shift after its replacement came on, doubling the number of officers available. Fabel had also made a call to van Heiden, whose disapproving tone all but suggested that he held Fabel personally responsible for another murder being discovered. But, again, there had been no reluctance to comply with Fabel’s request for more officers.

The first people Fabel spoke to were the forensics team. Brauner had rolled up in a convoy of vans carrying twelve specialists and all the technical support they needed to carry out a thorough processing of the scene.

‘If you don’t mind,’ Brauner said to Fabel, ‘I’d like Astrid to go in alone to start with. She has a knack of getting trace from older scenes.’

‘It’s up to you, Holger,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s your thing, not mine. But she must be good — normally you would be all over a scene like this like a rash.’

‘Trust me, Jan, she is. One of the best I’ve worked with.’

Fabel held a cramped briefing in the Commissariat’s main conference room. His strategy was simple: to get every door knocked on, every memory jogged, every detail noted. At the same time, he hoped against hope that the forensic survey of the murder scene would reveal something that would point them in the direction of the Valkyrie. He and Vestergaard plotted out when the assassin had been in Oslo, and an estimate, from Astrid Bremer’s initial observations, of when Sparwald had died. From that Fabel worked out a rough schedule for the killer, and put a team on to looking at flights, trains, ferries. It was a long shot, particularly as they were dealing with someone who clearly did not leave traces. Or make mistakes. Ever.

Fabel got home about ten and told Susanne what his day had yielded.

‘You look bushed,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘I grabbed something at Poppenbuttel.’ He sighed. ‘We spent hours trying to trace her steps. I don’t know, Susanne… this killer, the thing with Margarethe Paulus, sometimes I think it’s all beyond me. For the first time in years I feel totally lost with a case.’

Susanne smiled and pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen over Fabel’s brow. ‘Do you want me to tell you what I think?’

‘Of course I do. I always want your opinion. You know that.’

‘I’m not talking about my professional opinion. I mean my personal opinion.’

‘Okay.’

‘Men are always trying to work out the secret of being a success with women. You’re always asking each other that. The answer is that the man who is most successful with women is the man who has no secret. The man who doesn’t treat them as if they’re from another planet.’

‘Are you trying to improve my courting skills?’

‘No, Jan. You did all right in that department. But this case… because you’re dealing with women, with a female serial killer and/or a professional female assassin, you think you have no frame of reference. The truth is there are differences in the offending behaviours of each gender. But you are basically thinking about this all the wrong way because you’re thinking about it in a different way. Just do what you do, Jan. Forget the gender and focus on the crimes.’

Fabel thought about what Susanne had said. ‘You might be right,’ he said.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to bed. You need a good night’s sleep. Things will look different in the morning.’

It took a while for Fabel to drift off and when he did fragments of dreams punctuated his sleep. Vague fragments. Irma Grese. Margarethe Paulus. And another woman whose face he could not make out.