‘You look tired,’ said Fabel as they picked up their trays and inched along in a queue of blue uniforms. Susanne had a large thick leather-bound notebook tucked under her arm. Fabel could see Post-it notes sprouting like foliage from its edges and he noticed that she had jammed various other folded sheets between its pages.
‘I’ve had a lot to take in,’ she said wearily. ‘You say you’ve spoken with Kopke?’
‘I’ve had that pleasure,’ said Fabel, with a wry smile.
‘I don’t think I’ve been talked at like that since I was a first-year student,’ said Susanne. She broke off to place her order with the canteen assistant. ‘He’s not the most patient of people, is he? In fact, for a psychiatrist, he doesn’t seem much of a people person.’
‘If you mean he’s an arsehole,’ said Fabel, ‘then I would agree with your professional assessment. I thought you southerners were direct and outspoken.’
‘I’m acclimatising. Another year or two up here and I’ll be locking up all that emotion deep inside till it rots away at me, just like the rest of you. Anyway, arsehole or not, I had to take a hell of a lot of notes while I spoke to him. He was well prepared. And he thinks we should be too, before we talk to Margarethe Paulus again.’
‘He has a point,’ said Fabel.
‘How is the head?’ asked Susanne.
‘It’s fine — it really wasn’t too bad. It’s my pride that’s taken the bruising.’
‘What, because you were beaten up by a woman?’ They found a place over by the window and reasonably distant from the majority of occupied tables.
‘Because I mishandled the whole situation. What have you got?’
Susanne dropped her notebook with a thud onto the canteen table. She looped a stray lock of raven hair behind her ear, slipped on her glasses and started to flick through her notes.
‘She’s a psychopath. That’s for sure. But, whatever else has been going on, she’s not a serial killer. Kopke insists that she could not be responsible for any of the other killings.’
‘That’s not right — she had escaped from the hospital before Jake Westland and Armin Lensch were killed. And Jespersen, too. She could well have committed those murders. The only thing she’s in the clear for is the original Angel killings.’
‘No, no — that’s not what Kopke means. Margarethe may well have been available to commit those other murders, but Kopke is certain that she was focused exclusively on killing Drescher. She would have no compunction about killing others, but she saw herself as being on a mission. The only other people she would have murdered would have been anyone who stood in the way of her killing Drescher.’
‘Maybe she found out that Jespersen was on Drescher’s trail,’ said Fabel between mouthfuls.
‘Isn’t that pretty unlikely? Anyway, let me summarise what Kopke told me: Margarethe Paulus is a psychopath, but it’s difficult to decide whether she’s a primary or a secondary psychopath. Primaries tend to be born that way or are genetically predisposed to psychopathy, whereas secondaries are made that way by experience, environment or as the result of drug abuse, et cetera. Margarethe clearly went through a neurological trauma as part of her childhood brain surgery. Maybe her psychopathy is iatrogenic, the adverse side effect of medical intervention. But it’s hard to tell — psychopathy only really begins to manifest itself in adolescence. We’re all egocentric as kids: it goes with the territory. But whereas we mature and get an idea of ourselves as social beings, psychopaths don’t. The scary thing is that there’s a good chance that one in every hundred of the population are psychopaths.’
‘You’re kidding…’
‘No joke. And a lot more are borderline. We’ve all known someone who is totally egomaniacal. The husband who dumps his wife of twenty years along with his kids without a second thought. Or the business boss who sacks loyal workers without a twinge of conscience… A lot of people we consider self-centred arseholes are often psychopathic. They have a piece of their make-up missing. The majority of psychopaths in society manage to fit in and never become involved in criminal or overtly antisocial behaviour.’ Susanne took a sip of her coffee. ‘You know we were talking about Irma Grese, the Bitch of Belsen? Well, maybe that’s a perfect example of someone who could have gone through life and had a perfectly normal existence. That’s the danger, Jan, that when someone like Hitler comes along he can tap into that one per cent of the population. When you have a core of people who are incapable of feeling guilt or remorse, and who possess absolutely no capacity for pity or compassion or empathy for other human beings, you can persuade them to do almost anything.’
‘And Margarethe is one of those people?’
‘Not quite. There’s nothing borderline with Margarethe. Kopke says she’s a true sociopath and, quite unusually, she’s suffering from a dissocial personality disorder, rather than an antisocial personality disorder.’
‘What’s the difference?’ asked Fabel.
‘Mainly that she can function, or seem to function, more normally. Dissocial sociopaths don’t get into trouble to the same degree — delinquency, criminal behaviour, that kind of thing — as the antisocial type. And they’re better at disguising their behaviour. She won’t have sought out opportunities to act antisocially, but she will act without pity to get or do whatever she wants. The main thing is she has absolutely zero empathy for other human beings. She is simply incapable of simulation… imagining that other people have feelings or even the same kind of consciousness as she does.’
‘Ideal for a professional assassin,’ said Fabel.
‘Not really. As you’ve experienced yourself, the typical individual with full dissocial personality disorder has an extremely low violence threshold. So does an antisocial, for that matter. If everything she has claimed about the Stasi training is true — and bear in mind all sociopaths are inventive, compulsive liars — then her trainers would no doubt have identified her instability and dropped her from the programme. Another trait of the disorder, unfortunately for Drescher, is the tendency to pin the blame or responsibility for their failures on others. Combine that with a tendency towards obsession, and you’ve got the ultimate stalker from hell. Kopke believes that in Margarethe’s case there’s co-morbidity with another personality or even a schizoaffective disorder… or maybe it’s to do with the neurological damage done in childhood. Something that makes her even more focused and obsessive. Her belief that her sister exists, and the way she allows the sister to speak and act through her, isn’t psychopathic, it’s psychotic. Delusional. In Margarethe we have something extra going on in the mix: sociopathy with a twist.’
Fabel looked through the window, out across the treetops. The sky was heavy and grey. ‘Do you think the other so-called Valkyries will be similar? Sociopaths, I mean?’
Susanne shrugged. ‘To take human life for money doesn’t show a lot of empathy for others. But sociopaths are egomaniacal, narcissistic and extremely impulsive. I’m guessing that these women who were trained as professional assassins had a high degree of self-discipline and were willing to subordinate their will to that of others. But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. The opposite, in fact.’
‘I don’t want you sitting in on the interview, Susanne,’ said Fabel. ‘You can watch from the other room through the CCTV.’
‘That’s no good, Jan. I need to be able to observe her closely. And I want to be able to ask her questions. Surely you will have her restrained this time?’