The Valkyrie Song Read online

  Contents

  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

  About the Book

  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 Author

  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

  Also by Craig Russell

  The Jan Fabel Novels

  Blood Eagle

  Brother Grimm

  Eternal

  The Carnival Master

  A Fear of Dark Water

  The Lennox Novels

  The Long Glasgow Kiss

  The Deep Dark Sleep

  CRAIG RUSSELL

  The

  Valkyrie

  Song

  For Wendy

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my wife, Wendy, for her support and advice; to my editor Paul Sidey and my agent Carole Blake; to Tess Callaway, Joanna Taylor and James Nightingale; to my copyeditor Nick Austin; also to my friend and translator, Bernd Rullkötter.

  The Hamburg police remains one of the most open and transparent forces in Europe and I again owe special thanks to the leadership and officers of the Polizei Hamburg, particularly Erste Polizeihauptkommissarin Ulrike Sweden and Polizeipräsident Werner Jantosch for their help, support and enthusiasm for my work.

  I want to express my gratitude to and affection for one of the greatest cities in the world: Hamburg.

  The heavens are stained with the blood of men,

  As the Valkyries sing their song

  Njál’s Saga

  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.

  Prologue

  i.

  Mecklenburg

  1995

  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.’

  ii.

  Hamburg

  January 2008

  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 wa
s 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 …’

  iii.

  Twenty-four years before: Berlin-Lichtenberg, German Democratic Republic

  February 1984

  ‘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 o
f 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?’