some doubt — it was a reasonably large teratoma that could have been interpreted as fetus in fetu.’
‘I’m sorry…’ Fabel sounded more irritated than apologetic. ‘You’re going to have to explain.’
‘A teratoma is a tumour that is composed of all kinds of tissue. There can be hair, teeth, eye tissue in it. Sometimes it can have limbs — a hand or a foot, for example. In rare examples, a child is born with what appears to be a twin inside it. Fetus in fetu. Medical opinion is divided on whether these are actual foetuses that have formed within their twin, instead of alongside it, or if they are simply a more complex form of teratoma. Whatever they are, they are incapable of independent life. What was removed from Margarethe’s brain had the appearance of a rudimentary foetus. Somehow, maybe later after reading up on the subject, she decided that she had had a sister living inside her.’
‘And she still believes that?’
‘We learned to handle Margarethe and — with appropriate medication and management — she was able to live amongst the general hospital population. I’ll come back to why the medication and handling were so important, although I think you’ve experienced the reason first-hand. Anyway, Margarethe would sit over by the window for hours on end, talking to no one except her own reflection.’
‘Her sister,’ Fabel sighed.
‘That’s what we established in therapy, yes. But this is where I get to the most important bit. The tumour that was removed was benign, but it was large. When you take something like that out of someone’s brain things change. The chemistry changes; intracranial pressure alters and parts of the brain that have been constricted are relieved and have room to expand, particularly if the patient is a child. In Margarethe’s case, her personality changed. She had been a normal, emotional child of average ability. After the operation, she became distant, remote. But her academic and sporting ability improved radically. And that brings me back to the claims she has made.’
‘Which were?’
‘You have to remember that here in the East our post-war experience was very different. There are things that went on here that you couldn’t imagine. That we still have problems accepting. But what Margarethe told us was so incredible, so fantastic, that we put it down to schizoid paranoia. But then, as time went on, I began to have doubts. I mean, some patients have the most detailed and elaborate paranoias, but this was just too elaborate. Part of my job is to try to expose the falsehood of a paranoid delusion, to find a crack and use logic to lever it open so that the patient themselves, with the aid of the right medication, can see their fantasy for what it is.’
‘But there were no cracks in Margarethe’s story.’
‘None. I did a little research, too. At the Federal Commission for Stasi files. I discovered that many of the names she had given me were indeed real former Stasi people. But she had first given me this information at a time when the files were still being collated and reassembled.’
‘So if she was telling the truth…’
‘It still didn’t change the fact that she was very seriously disturbed. Or that she had murdered someone. The other thing was that there was this massive rage and hunger for revenge burning deep inside her. And most of it was directed at Georg Drescher. You see, Herr Fabel, Margarethe claims she was one of three young women selected by the Stasi and trained by Major Georg Drescher.’
‘Trained as what?’
‘Assassins. She claimed that she and her friends were trained to use a whole variety of methods to take human life, as well as concealment, espionage techniques — even how to seduce their victims. She said they were given code names. They were called the Valkyries.’
Walking into the Murder Commission incident room, Fabel felt like he was an unprepared act walking into the spotlight, centre stage. There were always times like this during an investigation — a development, a breakthrough, or another murder — when suddenly there was an electric tension in the air and the entire team looked on him expectantly. The truth was his head hurt, he was tired and felt sick, and he was struggling to deal with the enormity of what he had just heard from Margarethe’s psychiatrist.
Anna handed him a coffee and a couple of codeine. ‘You realise the mistake you made,’ she said in a low voice.
‘I’m sure you’re about to tell me.’ Fabel flipped the tablets from his palm into his mouth and washed them down with too-hot coffee.
‘You made a sexist judgement,’ said Anna. ‘And don’t go off on one — I’m not saying you’re a sexist. But what happened in there happened because you treated her differently because she was a female. You saw what she did to that guy in her apartment. If she had been a male suspect she would have been handcuffed to the restraint on the table.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind in the future,’ Fabel said and turned his attention to the rest of the room. ‘You’ve all heard that we have had a breakthrough. Well, I don’t know how much of a breakthrough we’ve had. Another man is dead. Tortured and killed as an act of revenge. It may well be that Margarethe Paulus is also responsible for the murders in the St Pauli district, as well as that of the Danish detective, Jens Jespersen.’ Fabel took another sip of coffee and sat on the corner of the desk nearest the front. ‘We retrieved a single blonde hair from the Westland murder scene, which we had good reason to believe belonged to the killer. I have to tell you before we go any further that we don’t have a DNA match with the woman we have in custody.’
‘That doesn’t mean it wasn’t her,’ said Werner. ‘It could equally prove that the hair didn’t belong to the killer.’
‘Could be,’ said Fabel. He was distracted by the arrival of Dirk Hechtner and Henk Hermann ‘I didn’t expect to see you back so quickly,’ said Fabel. ‘I told you to bag all the suspect’s stuff.’
‘We did,’ said Hechtner. ‘There wasn’t much to bag. She had three changes of clothes, one dressy, one businessy, one casual. We’ve handed what looks like a surgical kit over to forensics. From what we could see she had taken the tools she needed from the kit through to the kitchen.’
‘What else did you find?’ asked Fabel.
‘Four thousand euros in cash,’ said Henk Hermann. ‘A gun-’
‘What kind of gun?’ asked Fabel.
‘Nothing that I’ve seen before,’ said Henk Hermann. ‘It looked a bit like an old PPK, but it was clearly not that old and it had “Made in Croatia” stamped on the side. So we ran it through the computer. Apparently it’s…’ Henk referred to his notebook ‘… a PHP MV-9. It was developed by the Croatians in the early nineties, during the Independence War. Apparently, amongst gun freaks it’s a bit of a collector’s item. A rarity. There was also this really weird glove-knife thing… really odd. It was a leather strap that fastened around your hand and wrist, with a hidden metal plate that fitted in your palm and a short curved blade that stuck out of the bottom. We’re guessing it was some kind of weapon rather than a tool.’
‘Where is it now?’ asked Fabel.
‘We gave it to forensics for testing,’ said Dirk Hechtner. ‘If that blade has been used as a weapon, then I’ll bet a week’s pay we’ll get blood out of the leather bit.’
‘Good,’ said Fabel. ‘Anything else?’
‘A make-up kit,’ said Dirk. ‘It had several shades of hair dye, different types of make-up — not ordinary women’s cosmetics, it was stuff you could use to alter your appearance. Other stuff too… it took us a while to work out what some of it was for. Cheek prosthetics to change the shape of her face, that kind of thing. We also found a folder with paperwork to support her identity as Ute Cranz.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Anna said. ‘Margarethe Paulus was an escaped loony on the run from a mental hospital where she’d spent the last fifteen years. Where the hell did she get all these resources?’
‘Now that,’ said Fabel, ‘is a very good point. It’s pretty obvious that she had outside help. Very professional outside help. Let’s go back to what we’ve found out. The victim is a Robert Gerdes, except he probably isn’t. It looks pretty certain that he was Major Georg Drescher, a former major in the HVA wing of the East German Stasi. What we know so far is that Drescher was the control for three highly trained female agents, specifically trained as assassins. It kind of looks like Drescher embraced the free-market economy with relish and set up his own little Murder Incorporated, right here in the Free and Hanseatic City. It is perfectly safe to assume that Margarethe Paulus, while she may be a former protegee of Drescher, was not one of his active hit women. Mainly because, as Anna pointed out, she was locked up in a Mecklenburg secure hospital.’ He took a deep breath. ‘What we have here is the suggestion that there is a female contract killer — one of the world’s most successful — operating out of Hamburg. And she’s called, supposedly, the Valkyrie. Now we have an ex-Stasi officer killed by one of the three
