‘Okay… but if she kicks off again, you leave right away. I’ll have extra bodies in there with us.’
Susanne’s perfect porcelain smile had a hint of wickedness about it. ‘I don’t know, Jan… you’re going to have to learn to deal with your fear of women or I’m going to end up a permanent chaperone.’
Fabel, Susanne and Anna Wolff were seated in the interview room before Margarethe Paulus was brought in. Karin Vestergaard, Werner and others from the Murder Commission team were in the connecting room, watching on closed-circuit TV.
When Margarethe was brought in by two uniformed officers, her wrists braceleted in Speedcuffs, her strong, attractive face was as impassive as it had been before.
‘Sit down, Margarethe.’ Fabel indicated the floor-fixed chair. One of the officers unfastened her Speedcuffs, only to use them again to fix her right hand to the metal securing loop on the table. A tall woman of about forty took the seat next to Margarethe. She was Lina Mueller, the state-appointed attorney.
‘This is Frau Doctor Eckhardt,’ said Fabel, gesturing towards Susanne, ‘from the Institute for Judicial Medicine. She is a criminal psychologist and she has spoken to Dr Kopke, who of course you know. Frau Doctor Eckhardt will have some questions for you. You will have already spoken to Frau Mueller, who is here to represent your interests.’
‘I don’t need a lawyer,’ said Margarethe. Again it was a simple statement of fact, made without resentment or anger.
‘We feel you should have one present,’ said Anna. ‘It’s your right.’
Margarethe didn’t respond, in voice or expression.
‘What is your name?’ asked Fabel.
‘I am Margarethe Paulus.’
‘But you told Herr Fabel earlier that you were Ute Paulus,’ said Anna.
‘You are confusing me with my sister,’ said Margarethe. ‘Ute is my sister’s name.’
‘Where is your sister right now?’ asked Susanne.
Margarethe gazed at the small, reinforced-glass window. ‘My sister is resting. She is waiting for me.’
‘Where is she waiting?’ asked Susanne. Margarethe remained silent. Inanimate.
‘Margarethe,’ said Fabel, changing tack. ‘There are a number of killings that have taken place in Hamburg since you escaped from the hospital. I would like to ask you what you know about them. Do you understand?’
‘I have an IQ of one hundred and forty,’ said Margarethe. ‘Dr Kopke has probably already told you that. There is not a question you are capable of asking that I would be incapable of understanding.’
‘Okay, Margarethe. I’m impressed, if it’s important to you that I am impressed. Let’s start with the most recent murder. Robert Gerdes.’
‘You know by now that Robert Gerdes was not his real name. It was Georg Drescher. And it wasn’t murder, it was an execution. I told your colleagues when I phoned that I had executed Drescher.’
‘So it was you who tortured and killed him? It wasn’t your sister?’ asked Susanne.
‘We both did. Ute tracked him down and found him. She kept her promise. She promised me she would make it all right for me, and she did. But when we killed him we acted together. We were one.’
‘Why the torture?’ asked Susanne. ‘All that terrible pain. What did he do to you to have deserved that?’
Margarethe sat mute. Fabel repeated Susanne’s question, but it was as if Margarethe could not hear him. Fabel had years of experience of silences in interviews: he had learned to read them, interpret them. Sometimes a suspect’s refusal to speak said more than their answers. This was different. It wasn’t a silence, it was a complete shutting down of all responses. He knew then with absolute certainty that Margarethe would answer only those questions that suited her. He just hoped that he would get enough from her to start putting what had happened into some kind of understandable context.
‘A week ago,’ Fabel broke the silence. ‘A young man called Armin Lensch was murdered in the Kiez district of Hamburg. His belly was sliced open with a blade. What can you tell me about that?’
‘I can tell you nothing about it. It had nothing to do with me. I didn’t kill him.’ Margarethe’s frighteningly blank expression suggested a complete lack of guile. Of emotion. Of anything.
Fabel placed the srbosjek, still cased in a clear plastic evidence bag, on the table. He kept a firm hold on the bag, just outside her reach.
‘Did you use this on Armin Lensch? Is this what you sliced open his belly with?’
‘I’ve never seen that before,’ Margarethe said, looking at the weapon without interest. ‘And I wouldn’t use that for slicing open a gut. That’s for cutting throats.’
‘If you haven’t seen that before,’ said Fabel, leaning forward, ‘then how do you know how it’s used?’
‘I’ve never seen your car, but if I did I would know how to drive it. And I know that that is called a graviso knife. Or a srbosjek. It was used by Croat Usta e. It’s very simple but highly effective. But it’s not an assassin’s weapon, particularly. This is for killing large numbers of people. Although I have to say that used expertly, it would silence and kill a single meeting efficiently.’
‘Meeting?’ asked Susanne.
‘That’s what we call them,’ said Margarethe. ‘A meeting is when the agent and the target encounter each other and the mission is executed. We call them meetings because there should be no engagement with the target prior to execution, making the meeting the first and final encounter. We also call the target a meeting.’
Fabel placed a second evidence bag on the table. It contained the automatic that Dirk and Henk had found.
‘Is this yours?’ he asked.
‘I’ve never seen it before,’ she said.
‘It was retrieved from your apartment. Again, there is a Croatian connection.’
‘I know. It’s a Croatian PHP MV-9 automatic. It’s about eighteen years old. It was a model developed in a rush for use in the Independence War.’
‘Okay,’ said Fabel. ‘Once again I’m impressed by your encyclopaedic knowledge of weapons and assassination techniques. But your knowledge of this weapon could come simply from the fact that it is yours. That you had it ready to use if your drugging of Drescher didn’t work out as planned.’
Again an empty stare. Margarethe was attractive. Her features perfectly proportioned. But there was still something about the way she looked at him that reminded Fabel of the photographs he had seen of Irma Grese. The same void in the eyes and expression. He had no way of knowing if Margarethe was lying to him. After nearly twenty years as an investigator of murders, of conducting interviews like this, he found himself lost in a strange country, completely without any recognisable landmarks.
‘Who are “we”?’ asked Susanne, filling the silence. ‘You said “We call the target a meeting.”’
‘My sisters and I. The Valkyries.’
‘How many Valkyries were there?’ asked Anna Wolff. Margarethe stared at her for a moment, still expressionless, before answering.
‘Only three of us were selected for final training.’
‘But you didn’t finish your final training,’ said Fabel, ‘did you?’
‘I was selected along with the other two. Out of dozens of girls who in turn were the best of the best. Only three of us were chosen to be Valkyries. It was Drescher who dropped me from the programme.’
‘Is that why you killed him? Is that why you kept him alive to suffer first?’
Margarethe gave a small smile. It was the first time Fabel had seen her smile and it did not reach her cold, empty eyes. She shook her head. ‘I didn’t kill him because he dropped me. I killed him because he chose me… because he selected me for this kind of life in the first place. My head…’ She winced as if some terrible migraine was cutting through her. ‘The things in my head. He put them there. And I can’t get them out.’
‘What things?’ asked Susanne.
‘I’ve already shown you. They were all there for you to see. In the flat. I didn’t think I was being ambiguous.’ There was a flicker of impatience in Margarethe’s expression. On anyone else it would have gone unnoticed, but it flashed across the empty canvas of her face. ‘He taught me how to kill. That more than anything. Him and the others, all the different ways to kill. How to shatter someone’s nose and drive the bone fragments into their brain. Or cut off the blood to the brain with an embrace and kill without the meeting knowing what was happening. How to seduce a man, or a woman, and fuck them in a way that they become completely obsessed with you. How to cut yourself off from your own body so that you can do anything, with anyone. How to follow someone without them knowing, to hunt and trap them and kill them in an instant. They told us we could learn from everything. No matter how bad it was, we could benefit from it. Every war, every crime, had a lesson to be learned.’ She nodded to where Fabel had shown her the forensic-bagged knife. ‘That’s where I learned about the srbosjek. And more. So much more. And the thing was… the totally mad thing was that they tried to teach you that you could switch off from it all and have a normal life in between the meetings.’