The Valkyrie Song

Chapter One
1

Hamburg brickwork was unique. The very fabric of the city was woven in red brick. In fact, the saying went that the craftsmen who had constructed buildings like these hadn’t built with brick, they had knitted with it.

Martina Schilmann looked up at the narrow-fronted red-brick face of Davidwache: the most famous police station in Germany. Davidwache stood right at the heart of the St Pauli red-light district of Hamburg and, as well as being a fully functioning police station, was a state-protected national landmark. Martina had been stationed here for six of her fifteen years in the Polizei Hamburg. Then she had moved on. Moved up. And, eventually, she had moved out.

Standing here in the cold damp night air, waiting for a B-list British celebrity to satisfy his prurient interest in the Reeperbahn, she wondered why. Martina had been a rising star in the Polizei Hamburg, but she had wanted more. Setting up her own company had been her way of getting what she wanted. And now, at forty, she had got it: money, prestige, success. But right now, looking up at the red-brick frontage of Davidwache, she thought back to those six years stationed there. Great times. A great team.

Martina pressed the earpiece of her concealed TETRA radio into her ear and squeezed the PTT transmit on her lapel mike. ‘Where the hell is he?’

‘I don’t know, boss — I’m in Gerhardtstrasse,’ Lorenz, Martina’s subordinate, answered in his thick Saxon accent. ‘He went into Herbertstrasse and hasn’t come out yet.’

‘Why in God’s name didn’t you go in with him? I told you to stick close.’ Martina couldn’t keep the frustration out of her voice. She walked briskly around to the side of Davidwache and crossed Davidstrasse to the entrance of Herbertstrasse. She could go no further: a baffle of metal walls obscured the view but allowed concealed access into the eighty-metre-long street. Or allowed access unless you were a woman or a male under eighteen. Eighty metres of Hamburg street was forbidden to the city’s women except for the prostitutes who worked in Herbertstrasse, sitting illuminated behind hinged glass, like joints of meat in a butcher’s window. Although the Hamburg government had paid for the erection of the metal baffles at either end, the prohibition against women entering was not imposed by the city but by the prostitutes themselves. Any woman who dared to encroach was likely to have water or beer — or even urine — thrown over them.

‘He said he wanted me to wait for him…’ Lorenz sounded plaintive over the radio link. ‘That he wanted to have a look on his own. You know what these bloody celebrities are like — they think everything’s a game.’

‘Shit.’ Martina looked at her watch. The British guy had been in Herbertstrasse for twenty minutes. That meant he’d probably gone with one of the girls. ‘Lorenz, go in and see if you can find him.’

‘But if he’s…’

‘Just do it.’

It was then that Martina heard the sound of a woman screaming. Somewhere in the distance, behind Herbertstrasse.