JF05 - The Valkyrie Song (5 page)

‘Ask the boss,’ she said. ‘It’s his yacht.’

‘You own everything around here?’ Vuja
i
ć
asked Knudsen.

Knudsen stood up and beckoned to the deck crew. ‘You can serve it now.’

Vuja
i
ć
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. Vuja
i
ć
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.’