Detective Jan Fabel is a troubled man. His relationships with the women in his life are becoming increasingly complicated: his partner, Susanne, is looking for commitment. His daughter is considering joining the police and his ex-wife holds him responsible.
Then an English pop star is found dead in Hamburg’s red-light district with savage knife wounds. Is this the work of the Angel of St Pauli – a female serial killer who eluded capture 10 years ago?
Links emerge with a series of violent events. A murdered journalist. The death of a Serbian gangster. And a long-forgotten project by East Germany’s Stasi conceived at the height of the Cold War, involving a highly-trained group of female assassins, and codenamed Valkyrie.
Fabel’s hunt for the truth will bring him up against the most terrifyingly efficient professional killer. The ultimate avenging angel …
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Craig Russell
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Epilogue
Copyright
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Craig Russell was born in 1956 in Fife, Scotland. He served as a police officer and worked in the advertising industry as a copywriter and creative director. In 2007, his second novel, Brother Grimm, was shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, and in the same year he was presented with a Polizeistern (Police Star) award by the Polizei Hamburg for raising public awareness of the work of the Hamburg police.
For more information about Craig Russell and his books, please visit www.craigrussell.com
The lots of life and death were distributed by the Valkyries, the handmaidens of Odin in the warrior hall of Valhalla.
It was the Valkyries, their terrible war cries filling the heavens, who swept across the battlefield, gathering up the souls of those to whom they had allocated death.
In Old Norse, Valkyrja means chooser of the slain.
Sisters, she thought, are reflections of each other.
Ute sat and watched herself in younger reflection: Margarethe. Margarethe looked weary. And sad. It hurt Ute to see her like that: when they had been small, it had been as if the energy had been divided unequally between them – Margarethe had always been the livelier, cleverer, prettier sister. It also hurt Ute to see her sister in a place like this.
‘Do you remember,’ said Margarethe, gazing at the blue-tinged window glass, ‘when we were little? Do you remember we went to the beach and looked out across the Schaalsee and you said that one day we would sail away across it? To the other part of Germany – or to Denmark or Sweden – and you told me that it wasn’t allowed? Do you remember how angry I got?’
‘Yes, Margarethe, I remember.’
‘Can I tell you a secret, Ute?’
‘Of course you can, Margarethe. That’s what sisters are for. Just like when we were little. We always told each other secrets back then. At night, with the lights out; when it was safe to whisper, and Mamma and Papa couldn’t hear us. You tell me your secret now.’
They sat at a table near the window, which looked out over the gardens. It was a bright, sunny day and the flower beds were in full bloom, but the view was tinged slightly cobalt blue by the thick glass of the window. It must be because it’s special glass, thought Ute. The kind you can’t break. At least it was better than looking through bars.
Margarethe eyed the other patients, visitors and staff suspiciously. She shut them out again, confining her universe to herself, her sister and the blue-tinged view. She leaned forward conspiratorially to speak to Ute. In that moment she became again the pretty little girl she had once been. The very pretty girl she had once been.
‘It’s a terrible secret.’
‘We all have those,’ said Ute and rested her hand on her sister’s.
‘It will take me a long time to tell you. Lots of visits. I’ve not told anyone but I have to tell someone now. Will you come back to see me and hear my story?’
‘Of course I will.’ Ute smiled sadly.
‘You remember when they took Mamma and Papa away? Do you remember how we were split up and sent to different state care homes?’
‘You know I do. How could I forget? But let’s not talk about such things now …’
‘They sent me to a special place, Ute.’ Margarethe’s voice was lowered now to a breathy whisper. ‘They said I was different. That I was special. That I could do things for them that other girls couldn’t. They told me I could become a hero. They taught me things. Terrible things. So bad that I’ve never told you about them. Never. That’s why I’m here. That’s what’s wrong with me. All of these scary, horrible things in my head …’ She frowned as if the weight of what was in her mind pained her. ‘I wouldn’t be in here now if I hadn’t been taught to do such terrible things.’
‘What things, Margarethe?’
‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you now. But you have to promise me that after I tell you, you will make things right for me.’
‘I promise, Margarethe. You’re my sister. I promise I’ll make things right.’
She was waiting for him.
She had tracked him from the moment he first came into view on Erichstrasse, opposite the erotic museum. He was coming towards her but could not yet see her. She backed into the darkness of the small cobbled square. This was where it would be. The square had no light other than that which leached in from the streets at either end, and was shadowed further by the two naked-branched trees that erupted from the unpaved disc of earth at its centre.
She was waiting for him.
As he approached she recognised his face. She had never met him, never seen him in the flesh, but she recognised him. His was a face from beyond the real world. A face she knew from the television, from the press, from posters in shop windows. A familiar face, but familiar from a parallel universe.
She hesitated for a moment. Because of who he was, there would be others. Attendants. Bodyguards. She stepped back into the shadows. But as he drew closer she saw that he was truly alone. He hadn’t seen her until he was almost upon her and she stepped out of the shadow.
‘Hello,’ she said in English. ‘I know you.’
He stopped, startled for a moment. Unsure. Then he said: ‘Sure you know me. Everybody knows me. You came here for me?’
She held open her coat and exposed her nakedness beneath and his face broke into a grin. She looped her arm around him and drew him into the shadows. He placed his hands on her, inside the coat, her skin hot and soft in the cold winter night. Her breath too was hot as she put her mouth to his ear.
‘I came here for you …’ she said.
‘I didn’t come here for this,’ he said, breathless, but he allowed himself to be pulled into the darkness.
‘And I didn’t come for your autograph …’ Her hand slid down his belly and found him.
‘How much?’ he asked, his voice quiet but tight with excitement.
‘How much?’ She drew back, looked into his eyes and smiled. ‘Why, honey, this is for free. This will stay with you for ever and you get it for nothing.’
She held his gaze but her hands moved fast and expertly. He felt his belt being loosened, his shirt being eased up; the cold night on naked skin.
He fell to the ground.
The cobbles were wet and cold beneath him and he gave a small startled laugh at his own clumsiness. He was slumped against the brick wall behind him, his legs splayed wide. Why had he fallen down? His legs felt as if they didn’t belong to him and he stared at them, wondering why they had simply given way under him. Then he gazed up at her: she stood astride him and the fire in her eyes terrified him. He vomited without warning, without first feeling sick. A sudden, bone-penetrating chill spread through his body. He looked at the vomit that covered his chest and the cobbles around him. It glistened black-red in the dim light.
He looked up at her again, as if she could explain why he had fallen; why there was so much blood. Then he saw it: the sliver of steel that glinted in her gloved hand. He felt something warm and wet inside his clothes. His trembling fingers found his shirt front and he tore at it, buttons flying into the dark and bouncing off the cobbles. His belly was split and something bulged from the wound, grey and glistening and wet, red-streaked in the half-light. Steam fumed from his rent belly and into the winter night. Blood surged rhythmically from the wound, keeping time with the pounding of his pulse in his ears. He felt cold. And sleepy.
The woman leaned down and used the shoulder of his expensive coat to wipe his blood from the blade. Then, with the same expert speed and precision with which she had stabbed him, she went through his pockets. After she took his diary, wallet and cellphone, she leaned towards him again, and he once more felt the heat of her breath in his ear.
‘Tell them who did this to you,’ she whispered, still in English. Still seductively. ‘Tell them it was the Angel who ripped you …’ She stood up, slipping the knife into her coat pocket. ‘Make sure to tell them that before you die …’
‘We’re talking about children here. We are talking about children here, aren’t we?’ Major Georg Drescher’s question hung in the smoke-laden air. Everyone remained silent while a young woman in a Felix Dzerzhinsky Watch Regiment uniform came in with a tray laden with a coffee pot and cups.
The Ministry for State Security – the MfS – of the German Democratic Republic, commonly and resentfully known by the population it purportedly served as the Stasi, occupied an entire city block in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. The huge room in which Major Georg Drescher sat was on the first floor of the main Headquarters building on Normannenstrasse. The impressive conference room was dressed in oak panelling with a large map of Germany – East and West – dominating one wall. Next to the map was a large mounted escutcheon of the Ministry seal, the motto of which promised that the Stasi was ‘the sword and shield of the Party’. Like an aircraft carrier in a dry dock, a vast oak conference table dominated the centre of the room. A small bust of Lenin stood in the corner and, mounted on the opposite wall, portraits of General Secretary Erich Honecker and Minister of State Security Erich Mielke glowered disapprovingly at the assembly gathered around the table.
This was the Ministry’s conference chamber: a room for talking, for deciding strategies and planning tactics. This was where the world’s most successful secret police schemed against its enemies abroad. And against its own people.
The Stasi had other rooms. Rooms in this complex and, just a couple of kilometres to the north, at Hohen-schönhausen. Rooms where things other than talking were going on. Storerooms were stacked high with underwear stolen from the homes of potential dissidents: names and numbers tagged to each item so that, if ever the need arose, the Stasi’s specially trained tracker dogs would have a scent to follow. In other rooms, listening devices and special weapons were designed and constructed, poisons and serums developed and tested, while elsewhere countless hours of secretly taped conversations were transcribed, thousands of photographs developed, kilometres of clandestine film and videotape examined. Whole floors of the Stasi headquarters were devoted to the vast archive of files on citizens of the GDR. No state had ever amassed so much intelligence on its own people: information collected through the Stasi’s network of ninety-one thousand operators and three hundred thousand ordinary people who ‘informally cooperated’ with the Ministry for the good of the State, for money or for promotion at work. Or simply to stay out of prison themselves. One in fifty of the East German population spied on neighbours, friends, family members.
And then, of course, there were the other rooms. The rooms with the thickly padded soundproofed walls. The rooms where pain was an instrument of the State.
But this was a room for talking.
Drescher knew the man who sat at the top of the table: Colonel Ulrich Adebach was in uniform, as was the boyish-looking lieutenant who sat to his left smoking, with an open red pack of Salem cigarettes in front of him. Adebach was a heavy-set man in his fifties, greying hair brushed severely back and sporting an inadvisably Walter Ulbricht-type goatee. His shoulder boards showed he carried the rank of colonel. Major Georg Drescher, on the other hand, wore a sports jacket and flannels with a polo-neck sweater, all of which looked of suspiciously non-domestic design and manufacture. But, there again, as an officer of the Stasi’s HVA foreign-intelligence service, he enjoyed a level of contact with the West denied to almost all of his countrymen.
Drescher didn’t know the male officer sitting to the left of the colonel nor the older woman dressed in civilian clothes and Adebach had made no effort to introduce them. Drescher guessed that the young lieutenant whose uniform collar hung loose around his thin neck was Adebach’s adjutant. The air in the conference room was tinged blue with cigarette smoke and Drescher noticed that the young adjutant lit another Salem as soon as he had stubbed one out.
While everyone waited for the young female Watch Regiment officer to finish serving the coffee and leave the room, Drescher contemplated the lugubrious face of Minister of Security Erich Mielke as he scowled from his portrait. If General Secretary Honecker was East Germany’s Tiberius, then Mielke was its Sejanus.
Drescher suppressed a smile. Humour and imagination were not attributes appreciated in a Stasi officer. And a sense of inner silent rebellion certainly wasn’t. Drescher concealed all these aspects of his character whenever he was in the presence of his superiors. Whenever he was in the presence of anyone. But Drescher’s unique way of rebelling consisted of composing in his head caricatures that he would never commit to paper: imagining his superiors naked and in humorously compromising situations.
The female Watch Regiment soldier finished serving the coffee and left the conference room.
‘What are you saying? Are you telling me that you have moral objections to this operation?’ Colonel Ulrich Adebach asked, shattering Drescher’s mental picture of short, fat, joyless Erich Mielke naked except for a ballerina’s tutu and giggling like a schoolgirl while being spanked by General Secretary Honecker.
‘No, comrade colonel, not moral – practical. These girls all seem very young. We are talking about taking immature girls and setting them on an immutable course … sending them out on dangerous and complex assignments completely isolated from any form of direct command structure.’ Drescher grinned bitterly. ‘I have three nieces of my own. I know how difficult it can be to get them to tidy their rooms, far less carry out hazardous missions.’
‘The age range is between thirteen and sixteen years of age.’ Adebach didn’t return Drescher’s smile. ‘And they will not be deployed in the field for several years yet. Maybe I should remind you, Major Drescher, that I was fighting fascists when I was exactly the same age as some of these young women.’
No, you don’t have to remind me, thought Drescher, you’ve told me every time you’ve seen the slightest chance to lever it into the conversation.
‘Fifteen,’ continued Adebach. ‘I was fifteen when I fought my way through the streets of Berlin with the Red Army.’
Drescher nodded, but wondered what it had been like to kill fellow Germans; to stand aside while countless German women were raped by your comrades-in-arms. Or maybe not stand aside. ‘With respect, comrade colonel,’ said Drescher, ‘these are young girls. And we are not talking about combat. The heat of battle.’
‘Have you read the file?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you will know that we have very carefully selected these twelve girls. They all meet a consistent set of criteria. Each of these young women displays athletic or sporting ability, they are all of above-average intelligence and they all have, for one reason or another, displayed a certain disconnectedness in terms of their emotions.’
‘Yes. I saw that in the file. But that disconnectedness, as you put it, has for the most part come about from some psychological trauma in their pasts. I have to say that one could describe them as, well … disturbed. These are problem children.’
‘None of the girls is mentally disordered.’ It was the older woman who responded this time. Drescher was not surprised to hear her speak German with a Russian accent. ‘Nor are they truly sociopathic. But through experience or simply by nature they are emotionally less responsive than their peers.’
‘I see …’ said Drescher. ‘But surely that on its own is hardly a qualification for what we expect of them. I mean … how can I put this … I know we live in the ideal society of gender equality and opportunity, but there is no doubt that the male … well, the male is more aggressive. Men are more inclined to violence. Killing comes more naturally.’
Adebach smiled wryly and rose to his feet. He walked around the table and stood behind the seated woman. ‘Perhaps I should introduce you,’ he said to Drescher. ‘This is Major Doctor Ivana Lubimova. The major has been assigned to us by our Soviet comrades. I should tell you that Major Lubimova also served in the Great Patriotic War. She fought with the Seventieth Rifle Division. Special weapons training at Buzuluk.’
‘Sniper?’ asked Drescher.
‘Thirty-three confirmed kills,’ said Lubimova, blankly.
‘And now you’re an army doctor?’ said Drescher, thinking of thirty-three dead Germans.
‘Psychiatrist. And not for the army.’
‘I see,’ said Drescher, and he knew that the matronly Russian hadn’t had far to come: just from Karlshorst, immediately to the south of Lichtenberg. KGB headquarters.
‘I specialise in the psychology of combat,’ continued the Russian. ‘What you have said is actually true: women are much less inclined to kill in hot blood than men are. The vast majority of murders around the world are committed by men and are fuelled by rage, sexual jealousy or alcohol. Or any combination of these elements. And you are also right to say male soldiers perform more aggressively in front-line combat, particularly hand-to-hand. However, when it comes to cold-blooded killing – planned, premeditated homicide – then the pendulum swings the other way. Women who kill often kill in cold blood and for motives other than rage: motives that can be quite abstract. That was why so many of my female comrades made such excellent snipers. That is why these girls are perfect for what we have planned.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Drescher. ‘The killing is only a small part of it. These girls … women … will have to exist isolated from their controls.’
‘That is where you come in, Major Drescher. You have a great deal of experience in Section A,’ said Adebach, referring to the ‘education’ unit of the Stasi’s HVA, responsible for training East Germany’s spies. ‘You will head up a team of instructors that will train these girls in the broadest spectrum of skills. The kind of skills they will need to infiltrate and maintain deep cover in the West.’ Adebach took his seat again.
Drescher sipped his coffee and smiled: Rondo Melange. Drescher was a man who enjoyed good coffee. He had tasted the best around the world – in Copenhagen, in Vienna, in Paris, in London – but for Drescher nothing compared with Rondo. It was one of the few things that the GDR manufacturing monolith had managed to get right.
‘What do you have in mind?’ Drescher said.
Adebach nodded to his adjutant, who passed a file to Drescher. ‘Are you familiar with the Japanese term kunoichi? The kunoichi was the female counterpart of the male ninja. Both kunoichi and ninja were trained as the ultimate assassins, but there was a recognition that gender had a role to play in how they went about their tasks. The kunoichi were expert in all forms of unarmed combat, but they were also trained in the art of seduction. They were experts on the human body, both on how to make it respond erotically and on where the weak spots were: how to kill swiftly and with the minimum of force and, whenever necessary, leaving little or no evidence of violence. They were also experts at concealment – disguising themselves as servants, prostitutes, peasants – and concealing weapons or improvising them from household objects. Added to this, the kunoichi were the ultimate poison-masters: they were trained in botany and could extemporise a deadly toxin from what they found growing around them. What we are aiming to achieve, Major Drescher, is to develop our own kunoichi force and bury it deep in the fabric of Western capitalism. These operatives will have all the skills of the kunoichi … but they will also be expert with every form of modern weapon.’
‘Why?’ asked Drescher. ‘I mean, why specifically this type of operation? Why now? And why are the Stasi being asked to run it?’
‘I’m sure the comrade major won’t mind me saying this’ – Adebach nodded in Lubimova’s direction – ‘but we have by far the best success rate in penetration of Western security services and organs of state. Of course, we enjoy an advantage that none of our allies in the Pact possesses – we speak the same language as our main opponent.’ Adebach lit a Sprachlos cigarette and drew on it slowly.
‘As to why we are launching this now …’ Major Lubimova picked up Adebach’s thread. ‘We need new strategies to fight the West. We need to use a scalpel rather than a blunt instrument. As you know, we have just stood down from our greatest mobilisation. Late last year the West took us to the very brink of full-scale nuclear war. We now believe that NATO did not realise how close we came to launching a pre-emptive defensive attack. The so-called “Operation Able Archer Eighty-three” turned out, after all, simply to be a NATO exercise, but it was the biggest deployment of Western arms and forces since the end of the War. The capitalists were stupid enough to make it completely accurate, right down to the transmissions they sent between command structures. Transmissions which we intercepted. Added to which, our monitoring revealed that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in daily encrypted contact with President Reagan, often several times a day. What we didn’t know then, but do now, is that this contact was about the Americans invading Grenada, and not preparations for a major war. It was simply two imperialists squabbling over who had the colonial rights to a scrap of land.’
‘I can tell you, Major Drescher,’ said Adebach, ‘that the ordinary man and woman here or in the West will never know how close we came to cataclysm. The only thing that prevented all-out nuclear war was the collection and analysis of intelligence by the covert intelligence services – on both sides, it has to be said. Our agents only just managed to stop the Cold War turning hot. We have got to find new ways of striking at the enemy without escalation to war. Your department has achieved great things in infiltrating the West with intelligence gatherers. Our experience last year has emphasised just how impractical it is to use conventional military means against each other. If we have to take the fight to our enemy then we must do so on the “invisible front”. We have several operations in planning, all of which aim to use intelligence, sabotage and subversion as they have never been used before. This is one of them. These young women will become our weapons deep inside enemy territory. They may sit there in the West and never be deployed, or they may be in continual use, depending on the prevailing political situation. The main thing is that, if the need arises, they can seriously impair the enemy’s capabilities, or disrupt their plans.’
‘By assassination?’ Drescher refilled his coffee cup. ‘I have to say, comrade colonel, that we already have the means and personnel to carry out eliminations in hostile territory.’
‘We’re not talking about Scandinavian journalists or the odd errant football star,’ said Adebach, with a glance across at Mielke’s portrait. ‘I am talking about the ability to kill key personnel, even leaders, in the West. And, where the need arises, to do so without raising suspicion. For example, we have a plan to infiltrate a Valkyrie into one of the terrorist groups we sponsor in the West.’
‘Valkyries?’ Drescher suppressed a grin. Barely. He knew of Adebach’s fondness for Wagner. ‘Is that what we’re going to call them? Isn’t it all a bit, well … Wagnerian? It sounds like they could have been a special division of the Nazi League of German Girls.’
‘That is the code name we’ve assigned to them,’ said Adebach sternly. ‘Your job, Major Drescher, is to head the team of instructors who will train these young women. Twelve girls, of whom only three will make final selection for deployment. And these final three … let me put it this way: there will never have been three assassins, three killing machines so perfect. Until then, you, comrade major, will be father, mother, confessor, teacher and keeper of these girls. It’s all in there …’ Adebach nodded to the file in Drescher’s hands. ‘Take that with you but make no copies. The status of each of these young women will be that of a UC, an Unofficial Cooperator like many of your freelance operatives. At the end of the week I want the file returned. All personal files on your students will be destroyed on completion of the training. There is to be no surviving record of the preparation and deployment of these operatives.’
Drescher stood up. ‘Very well, but surely that is unnecessary … no outsider is ever going to set eyes on the files of the Stasi …’
Goran Vuja
ić watched the blonde girl stretch languidly on the steamer chair at the stern of the yacht. Her limbs were long and lithe but she didn’t have the skinny, boyish narrowness across the hips that the other girl had. Vujaić liked his women to look like women. He sipped his beer, appreciating its chill on the hot day. And it was hot. Vujaić hadn’t expected it to be just as warm as it was. He was no great lover of the northern European climate: he belonged in the humid Mediterranean heat of the Adriatic or under the baking sun of a Balkan summer. But today the weather was good, and he could watch the girls dive from the rear of the boat into the North Sea. He would have the blonde one. That would be part of the deal, a goodwill gesture of trade: that he would get to fuck the blonde one. After all, that was what women were for. That, and being deck ornaments.
‘This little rowboat of yours must have cost you,’ he said to Knudsen, running his hand over the red leather and varnished teak of the recessed deck sofa. Vujaić the Bosnian Serb spoke to Knudsen the Dane in English: the international language of business. And of organised crime.
‘It’s worth about five million euros. But I managed to get it cost,’ said Knudsen wryly. ‘I came to an agreement with the owner. Sure you don’t want champagne?’
‘I’m fine with the beer just now,’ said Vujaić, glancing over his shoulder again at the girls. ‘But maybe later …’
‘Yes,’ said Knudsen. ‘Later you can let your hair down a little, huh, Goran? After everything is taken care of.’
Vujaić smiled. He felt relaxed. But not relaxed enough not to have brought Zlatko along with him. Zlatko stood mutely behind them, unsheltered from the sun and sweating menacingly into his Hawaiian shirt. It amused Vujaić to think that he now had a Croat watching his back. How times had changed.
Knudsen, a tall, tough-looking Dane, sat with Vujaić in a plush recessed area of the deck at the stern of the motor yacht. Uniformed crew members stood in the shade of the awning, far enough away not to hear the conversation, waiting to serve lunch. Vujaić breathed in deeply, as if inhaling the yacht’s odour of wealth.
‘You know, Peter,’ he said, ‘this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And do you know why? Because we complement each other. Supply and demand. What you need, I can deliver. This little operation of ours will become the main trading route for major drugs into Scandinavia and Northern Germany. You and I, my friend, are about to become very, very rich. Or in your case richer. Maybe I’ll get a yacht like this – if you can find another one going at cost.’ Vujaić grinned at the blonde girl. ‘And maybe some of the fixtures too …’
‘Tell me, Goran,’ said Knudsen. ‘Are you sure you’ve got everything tied up at your end? I mean on the distribution side. I heard that you had problems with some of your competitors.’
‘Not any more. Any problems there had been were all dealt with before we first talked. I told you at our first meeting that I was totally in control of the distribution network. And I still am. I had to arrange for a few people to retire from the business. Permanently. Unfortunately I had to be more discreet than usual, so it all proved a little more expensive than expected.’
‘You hired an outsider?’ asked Knudsen.
Vujaić didn’t answer for a moment. Instead he sipped his beer, keeping his gaze on the tall Dane as if weighing up how much he could trust him. Vujaić knew that Knudsen was rich. Well connected. Everything about him had checked out. But Vujaić had fought in war; often in wars where he had no place to be fighting. For the Serb, experience had taught him to divide men into two clear groups: fighting men and the others. Just like women were divided into the ones you’d fuck and old women. Knudsen bothered him: he was late forties, maybe early fifties, but there was no softening about him; none of the angles had been dulled by the good life. But there again, maybe that was just down to membership of an expensive gym.
‘You know I have a partner … another partner,’ Vujaić said at last, leaning forward and lowering his voice conspiratorially. This was clearly not even for Zlatko’s ears.
‘Yes, your other partner …’ Knudsen frowned. ‘I still don’t like it, Goran. I mean, not knowing who this third party is.’
‘But it doesn’t affect you, my friend. My business with my other partner has nothing to do with what we’re doing here. Just like you don’t know anything about them, they don’t know anything about you. Different businesses. I supply your pharmaceutical needs, while I’m a sort of recruitment consultant, you could say, for my other partner.’ The Serb laughed at his own in-joke. ‘And anyway, yours and mine is more of an equal partnership. Substantial as our little enterprise here is, it would be peanuts to my other associate. We’re talking about a big fish. A really big fish. They play a much bigger game than you or I do, Peter. And for stakes beyond even your reach.’
‘And what is their game?’ asked Knudsen.
‘Not drugs, if that’s what’s worrying you. Like I say, I supply them with …’ Vujaić ran his hand over the close-cropped bristle on his scalp while he considered the best description ‘… workers. And if I knew all of it, which I don’t, I couldn’t tell you about it. Anyway, as I was saying, I needed to sort out some difficulties with competitors. My other partner knows a contractor. The best in the business, apparently.’
‘A hit man?’
‘Yeah. Or maybe a hit woman, if the code name is anything to go by.’ Vujaić leaned even closer; lowered his voice more. ‘The Valkyrie. But what woman would be capable, huh, Peter? This so-called Valkyrie is based in Germany. Hamburg, apparently. He – or she – is supposed to be the best contract killer in the world.’
‘Better than the Mexican?’ asked Knudsen.
‘Carlos Ramos? Last I heard he’d quit the business. But yes. At least as good, maybe better. I mean, I could take care of things myself. God knows I took care of a lot of things back home in the nineties …’ Vujaić cast an eye over his shoulder as if to check that Zlatko could not hear him, then he turned back to the Dane. ‘But this little exercise needed a little more finesse, if you know what I mean. So, this Valkyrie took care of all of the loose ends. Made most of them look like accidents or suicide. The cops are only looking into two of them. Really nice work. Tidy. Anyway, the important thing is that you don’t need to worry about the distribution side.’
‘Okay,’ said Knudsen, ‘if you say so, Goran. Are you ready?’
‘I’m ready …’ Vujaić turned and nodded to Zlatko. The huge Croatian bodyguard laid a computer case on the deck table in front of Vujaić, who took out a slim black laptop. The Serb tapped on the keyboard and the secure bank website opened up on the screen. ‘Isn’t Bluetooth wonderful?’ He grinned.
Knudsen beckoned to the blonde girl. She folded a wrap around herself, came over to the men and handed Knudsen a cellphone. Knudsen made two calls: both brief.
‘My contact has taken delivery of the merchandise,’ he said and handed the phone back to the girl.
Vujaić closed the laptop. ‘And the transfer of the funds has been confirmed.’ He grinned at the blonde girl again, his eyes penetrating the diaphanous wrap and following the curves of her body beneath. ‘Maybe now we should celebrate. Now we can party. You want to party, honey?’
‘Ask the boss,’ she said. ‘It’s his yacht.’
‘You own everything around here?’ Vujaić asked Knudsen.
Knudsen stood up and beckoned to the deck crew. ‘You can serve it now.’
Vujaić didn’t have time to react.
Suddenly the calm was shattered with a dozen voices shouting at him, commanding him to be still. The uniformed deck crew had drawn automatic weapons from where they had been hidden on the serving trolley. At the same time, the deck doors flew open and heavily armed figures in black uniforms and body armour burst out onto the deck. Vujaić heard Zlatko being wrestled to the deck behind him. There was nothing he could do. Instinct had moved his hand towards the Beretta tucked into his waistband and concealed under his loose shirt, but he checked the movement, knowing it could cost him his life.
‘That’s a good boy …’ The blonde whispered into his ear in English, simultaneously jabbing the barrel of her service automatic painfully into the soft, stubble-covered flesh under his jaw. ‘Wanted to fuck me, did you, Goran? I’ve got news for you, you piece of shit – you’re the one who’s fucked …’
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.
Jan Fabel sat leaning forward on the leather armchair. On the edge. He still wore his raincoat and held his gloves in one hand. Everything about his posture spoke of imminent departure, even though he had only just arrived.
At one time, a long time ago, this suburban house in Hamburg-Borgfelde had been Fabel’s home. He had been familiar with every room, every floorboard, every angle. It had been the focus in his life. His home. Of course, everything had changed since then: the furniture, the decor, the TV in the corner.
‘You’ve got to talk to her.’ Renate sat opposite Fabel, her legs crossed and her arms folded across her body in the same defensive pose that he remembered. Her hair was not the same shade of rich auburn it had been when he had first met her, when they had been married, and he suspected that she now coloured it. She was still a handsome woman, but the creases around her mouth had deepened and given her face a faint appearance of parsimony. God knows, thought Fabel, she’s got nothing to feel bitter about.
‘I’ll talk to her,’ he said. ‘But I can’t promise anything. Gabi is an intelligent girl. Her own person. She is more than capable of making up her own mind about her future.’
‘Are you saying you approve of this? Support it?’
‘I’ll support anything Gabi chooses to do. But no, personally I’d rather she rethought her career. In the end, if it’s what she wants to do …’ Fabel shrugged resignedly. ‘But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. She has a long time to think it over. And you know what Gabi’s like: if she thinks we’re pushing her she’ll dig her heels in.’
‘It’s your fault,’ said Renate. ‘If you weren’t a policeman then it would never have occurred to her to join. Gabi hero-worships you. It’s easy to be the hero when you’re a part-time parent.’
‘And whose choice was that?’ Fabel fought back the anger surging up within him. ‘It sure as hell wasn’t mine. I was pushed out of her life. And as I remember you did the pushing.’
‘And I was pushed out of your life by that bloody job of yours.’
‘Right into Ludiger Behrens’s bed, as I recall,’ said Fabel and regretted it immediately. Renate was a petty woman; it had only been in the last stages of their marriage that he had seen just how petty. And she had always had the knack of reducing him to her level. ‘Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere. I think you’re making too big a deal of the whole thing: Gabi has only started to talk about this. Let’s just wait until she gets her Abitur results and take it from there. Like I said, it’s a long time before she has to make up her mind about it. I’ll talk to her and make sure she knows what she would be getting into. But I have to tell you, Renate, that if she is determined to become a police officer, then I will support her all the way.’
Renate’s already dark expression darkened further. ‘It’s not right,’ she said. ‘It’s no job for a woman.’
Fabel stared slack-jawed at Renate. ‘I can’t believe you said that. You of all people, Renate. What the hell do you mean, police work is no job for a woman? Just goes to show, all the time we were married I never had you down as a “Children, Kitchen, Church” type. Mind you, given your father’s history …’
Fabel knew he was about to get burned by the fire that suddenly caught light in Renate’s green eyes, and he was relieved to hear his cellphone ring just as she was about to launch something at him.
‘Hi, Chef, it’s Anna. You used to be into British pop in the seventies and eighties, right?’
‘I take it that’s rhetorical,’ said Fabel, his voice laden with warning. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Well, Jake Westland – you know, the lead singer from that group in the seventies? – the thing is he’s on tour in Germany at the moment and he’s supposed to be doing an in-depth interview with NDR radio tomorrow.’
Fabel sighed into the phone. ‘Anna … point?’
‘Just that he won’t be turning up for the interview. He’s already spilled his guts – in the Reeperbahn. And Chef, he said it was a woman who cut him and then she told him to let us know who she was. She told him to say it was the Angel.’
‘Shit.’ Fabel used the English word and looked across at his ex-wife. The fire had been extinguished and she now wore the expression of hostile resignation that she had always had when work had called him away. ‘I’ll be right there.’
They had taken Westland across town to the emergency room at the hospital in St Georg. There was no point in Fabel going there: from what he had heard, Westland was in no condition for an interview. Instead he took the Ost-West Strasse into the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s Sinful Mile. Where ropers had once woven hawsers for sailing ships, giving the Reeperbahn its name, now strip clubs and sex shops, bars and theatres neon-sparkled in the icy night. By the time Fabel arrived at Davidwache he was already in a bad mood. The meeting with Renate had gone as ill-temperedly as expected and he had lost his MP3 player: whenever he felt stressed, he plugged it into his BMW’s stereo system. No music, more stress.
The press had already gathered en masse outside the Davidwache station and three uniformed officers were holding them at bay. In addition to the media circus outside the station, there was some other separate commotion being created in Davidstrasse, to the side of the station. Young riot squad officers in their gear were struggling to load groups of resisting women into the large green police wagons. Some of the media had leached around into Davidstrasse to take pictures of the sideshow, but a fusillade of camera flashes saluted Fabel as he made his way from the car to Davidwache’s double doors. A television news camera crew had jostled its way to the front; Fabel recognised the reporter as Sylvie Achtenhagen, who worked for one of the satellite channels. Great, he thought, as if the media limelight wasn’t bad enough, he had that bitch on his case.
‘Principal Detective Chief Commissar Fabel’ – Achtenhagen emphasised his full rank for the camera – ‘can you confirm that the victim of this attack was Jake Westland, the British singer?’
Fabel ignored her and walked on.
‘And is it true that this is the work of the so-called Angel of St Pauli? The serial killer the Polizei Hamburg failed to catch in the nineteen-nineties?’ Then, when he still did not respond: ‘Are we to take it that your involvement, as head of this proposed so-called “Super Murder Commission”, is significant? Are you being called in to clean up the mess the Polizei Hamburg made of the original investigation?’
Fabel pulled a mask of patience over his irritation and turned to the reporter. ‘The Police Presidium’s press and information department will make a full statement in due course. You should know the drill by now, Frau Achtenhagen.’
He turned his back on her and walked through the double doors and up the steps into Davidwache police station. The small reception area was crammed with personnel. He could hear shouting from through the back and to the left, from the custody area. Fabel was greeted by a bristle-scalped heavy-set man in his fifties and a pretty dark-haired woman wearing jeans and a biker jacket that was at least one size too big for her. Fabel smiled grimly at Senior Criminal Commissar Werner Meyer and Criminal Commissar Anna Wolff.
‘How in God’s name did Achtenhagen find out about the Angel claim?’ asked Fabel.
‘Money talks,’ said Anna Wolff. ‘That bitch isn’t above bribing ambulance crew or hospital staff to get a scoop.’
‘You’re probably right. She’s all we need. She practically built her career on the Angel case.’ Fabel nodded in the direction of the commotion outside in Davidstrasse. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘A case of perfect timing,’ said Werner. ‘A feminist group decided to pick tonight of all nights to stage a protest. They invaded Herbertstrasse. They object to a Hamburg street being closed off to women. They claim it’s against their human rights or something.’
‘They’ve got a point, to be honest,’ said Fabel. He sighed. ‘Okay … what have we got?’
‘The victim is Jake Westland, fifty-three years old, British national,’ Werner read from his notebook. ‘And yes, he is that Jake Westland. From what we can gather he was having a little impromptu jaunt around the Reeperbahn – and not to recapture the spirit of the Beatles, if you catch my drift. Funny, though … I would have thought it would have been the gay bars he would have been interested in – him being English, that is …’
Fabel responded to Werner’s joke with an impatient face.
‘I don’t know why they do it,’ continued Werner. ‘These celebrities, I mean. Anyway, Westland deliberately gave his bodyguards the slip and disappeared into Herbertstrasse. Next thing a working girl on her way into the Kiez finds him with his insides turned into his outsides. He tells her that his attacker told him that she was the Angel, then he passes out.’
‘What’s his condition?’
‘He was still alive when they put him in the ambulance. Apparently the girl who found him knew a bit about first aid. But my guess is that his producers are already planning a memorial greatest-hits CD.’
‘We’ve got the girl who found him through the back,’ said Anna Wolff. She exchanged a look with Werner and her red-lipsticked mouth broke into a grin. ‘And the bodyguards. I thought you’d like to interview them personally.’