JF05 - The Valkyrie Song Read Online Free PDF

and Criminal Commissar Anna Wolff.
    ‘How in God’s name did Achtenhagen find out about the Angel claim?’ asked Fabel.
    ‘Money talks,’ said Anna Wolff. ‘That bitch isn’t above bribing ambulance crew or hospital staff to get a scoop.’
    ‘You’re probably right. She’s all we need. She practically built her career on the Angel case.’ Fabel nodded in the direction of the commotion outside in Davidstrasse. ‘What the hell is going on?’
    ‘A case of perfect timing,’ said Werner. ‘A feminist group decided to pick tonight of all nights to stage a protest. They invaded Herbertstrasse. They object to a Hamburg street being closed off to women. They claim it’s against their human rights or something.’
    ‘They’ve got a point, to be honest,’ said Fabel. He sighed. ‘Okay … what have we got?’
    ‘The victim is Jake Westland, fifty-three years old, British national,’ Werner read from his notebook. ‘And yes, he is that Jake Westland. From what we can gather he was having a little impromptu jaunt around the Reeperbahn – and not to recapture the spirit of the Beatles, if you catch my drift. Funny, though … I would have thought it would have been the gay bars he would have been interested in – him being English, that is …’
    Fabel responded to Werner’s joke with an impatient face.
    ‘I don’t know why they do it,’ continued Werner. ‘These celebrities, I mean. Anyway, Westland deliberately gave his bodyguards the slip and disappeared into Herbertstrasse. Next thing a working girl on her way into the Kiez finds him with his insides turned into his outsides. He tells her that his attacker told him that she was the Angel, then he passes out.’
    ‘What’s his condition?’
    ‘He was still alive when they put him in the ambulance. Apparently the girl who found him knew a bit about first aid. But my guess is that his producers are already planning a memorial greatest-hits CD.’
    ‘We’ve got the girl who found him through the back,’ said Anna Wolff. She exchanged a look with Werner and her red-lipsticked mouth broke into a grin. ‘And the bodyguards. I thought you’d like to interview them personally.’
    ‘Okay, Anna,’ Fabel said, with a sigh, ‘what’s the deal?’
    ‘Westland was being looked after by Schilmann Security and Close Personal Protection.’
    ‘Martina Schilmann?’
    ‘You and she used to be close, I believe?’
    ‘Martina Schilmann was an excellent police officer,’ said Fabel.
    ‘Then she must have been a better cop than she is a bodyguard,’ said Werner.
    A uniformed superintendent joined them. He was shorter than Fabel and had thick, dark, unruly hair.
    ‘What I really want to know is,’ he said sternly as he shook hands with Fabel, ‘did anyone get his autograph?’
    ‘Hello, Carstens,’ said Fabel, with a grin. ‘Still cracking tasteless jokes?’
    ‘Comes with the territory.’ Carstens Kaminski was in charge of the Davidwache team. Davidwache – Polizei Hamburg’s Police Commissariat 15 – was the station that controlled the Kiez, Hamburg’s 0.7 square kilometres of red-light district centred on the Reeperbahn. Every weekend the normal population of ten thousand residents would swell as over two hundred thousand visitors would pass through the Kiez, some of whom would be drunk, some of whom would be relieved of their wallets or valuables. And for some, their walk on the wild side would end in real disaster.
    The uniformed officers who worked out of Davidwache had to have a particular skill: they had to be able to talk. The Kiez was an area populated by pimps, hookers, petty crooks and not so petty crooks; visited by young men from the suburbs who often drank too much, too quickly. Most of the situations that the Davidwache officers were faced with demanded sympathy and humour and more than one reveller had been talked into going home peacefully and out of a night in the cells. Carstens Kaminski had been born and grew up in St Pauli