‘The Angel?’
‘Now, Frau Achtenhagen, we both know it’s not the Angel — not the original Angel, anyway. I have a pretty good idea who killed those two men last month and it certainly wasn’t the original Angel. But that does bring me to my second point. The most important one and I know you will pay big time to stop me selling it elsewhere. I know the identity of the original Angel. I know her name, where she lives, what she does. I even know why she killed all those men in the nineties.’
‘Really? And how do you know that?’ Sylvie Achtenhagen scrabbled through the shooting schedules and report notes on her desk until she found a pad and pencil.
‘It used to be my job to know things. About people. I worked for the Ministry for State Security in the German Democratic Republic.’
‘You’re ex-Stasi? Why the hell should I pay some ex-Stasi scum for information about murders in Hamburg?’
‘Because I’m a forward-thinking kind of guy. Always have been. I was based in the Ministry’s headquarters, in Berlin-Lichtenberg. I was there right up until the fifteenth of January nineteen ninety. There was a mob outside the gates ready to burst in and everyone was busy shredding files. When the shredders couldn’t cope, they started to rip them up by hand. It was futile. So many files. Too many.’
‘Is there a point to this, Herr…? Listen, what is your name? If you want me to pay you for your story, then I need to know your name.’
‘No, you don’t. I’m not naive. You people pay anonymous sources all the time. And we both know that you won’t be paying me through the usual channels. However, if it makes you feel better about it you can call me Siegfried. It has a nice Wagnerian ring to it, doesn’t it?’ He started to laugh, but his laughter fractured into a crackling, bubbling bout of coughing. That’s more than a cold or flu, thought Sylvie. ‘Just listen to what I have to say,’ he continued breathlessly when his coughing had subsided. ‘Like I said, when everyone else was shredding I was thinking ahead. I took a file. It doesn’t look like much: there’s not a lot of information in it other than a list of names of people on a training programme. A very special training programme. And the file also named the top three students. The ones who made the grade.’
‘Fascinating though this all is,’ said Sylvie, ‘what the hell has any of it got to do with the Angel killings?’
‘Everything. One of these names is the name of the original Angel, and it is my guess that the current St Pauli killer is one of the others. This is a file that I know you must have. And I will sell you the file.’ He paused. ‘For two hundred and fifty thousand euros.’
Sylvie laughed loudly. ‘You have got to be joking. No story is worth that to the station. And certainly not some file on Stasi snoops that I still don’t see having any relevance to these murders. This is old news. No one is interested in the Stasi and the HVA any more.’
There was silence on the other end of the line.
‘Hello?’ said Achtenhagen.
‘If you thought I was joking — or if you thought this was all nonsense — then you would have hung up by now. But you didn’t because you know that it’s the truth. I want two hundred and fifty thousand euros. If I don’t get it I will pass this information on to another broadcaster or the press. And the police. You built your career on the Angel killings, Frau Achtenhagen. Are you really going to let someone else take that all away from you? I will call back in a couple of days. In the meantime I’ll give you something on account. Check your email.’
The phone went dead.
Sylvie Achtenhagen hung up the phone and stared at it as if it would give up some answers. On her desktop computer she opened up her office email. There were several messages for her but all of them were either internal or work-related. None was from an anonymous source. She waited ten minutes and tried again: still nothing. The idea struck her that perhaps he had sent it to her personal email account, but she dismissed the thought almost immediately: only a few friends and colleagues had her private email address. But there was no harm in checking.
It was there. A message from Siegfried.
There were ways of tracing emails, sourcing ISP addresses, but Sylvie knew that if Siegfried was an ex-Stasi operative then he would have covered his tracks. The free account could have been set up anywhere and the email sent from a cyber-cafe or WiFi hotspot. Achtenhagen opened it. There was no message, just a single name: Georg Drescher. She saw there was an attachment and she opened it. Three colour photographs, scanned in side by side. No names. Each photo was a head-and-shoulders shot of a different girl, aged, Achtenhagen guessed, between fifteen and twenty. The photographs were formal shots for a state ID card or passport. The hairstyle of one indicated they were of twenty-odd years’ vintage. Two of the girls were blonde, the third a brunette, although she had striking blue eyes. There was something disturbing about their faces: a frightening void. It went beyond the usual lack of personality projected from an official-pass portrait. The eyes were dead. Emotionless. Particularly the girl in the middle. As Sylvie stared at her image, something twisted at her gut.
‘Siegfried’ had told her that one of these girls was the Angel of St Pauli. And as her eyes passed from one blank face to the next, she knew that he had told her the truth.
11
Emily would be here soon. Then everything in his life would start to make sense again. Peter Claasens had never understood women. He had never really tried, simply because it seemed like too much work.
He had been married for fifteen years and had three children, two of them daughters, but the female world remained a dark continent for Claasens. His wife, in particular, was still a mystery to him. She had turned from the pretty, quiet, unassuming girl he had unintentionally got pregnant to a shrew who nagged him about every evening he spent away from the family home, whether it was business or otherwise. Claasens had to admit, if grudgingly, that his wife had some grounds for her behaviour. Throughout his fifteen years of marriage he had been consistently unfaithful. He had taken great pride, however, in being discreet. Tactful. If his wife had suspicions, then that was what they had remained. He had never been careless enough to furnish her with substantiating evidence. But, there again, his looks were grounds enough for suspicion.
The concept of looks had always puzzled Claasens: why were some people more appealing to look at than others? More desirable? Claasens was a bright man. A very bright man. He had a sharp intellect and was a natural businessman. A commercial predator. Yet people found it difficult to see past his appearance. In the workplace men either resented him or wanted to be seen with him, female colleagues were either awkward around him or flirtatious. And when he didn’t respond to the flirting, they became resentful too. But he had responded. Often.
It was true, of course, that his appearance had been helpfuclass="underline" he had supplemented his income while an accountancy student by working as a photographic model. He had been offered every job he’d ever been interviewed for. And, of course, even if he hadn’t made a lot of money he had become involved with a trendy set from Blankenese. And Blankenese girls usually had money to burn. Peter Claasens had learned that fortune truly favours the fair.
But his looks had also insulated him from real emotion. Isolated him.
And now he stood on the top floor of the nearly complete ScanMedia building and contemplated a career of seduction and adultery. He looked out over Hamburg’s darkening skyline and thought about all of the women he had been with when he should have been with his wife. And, at that moment, he felt genuinely, completely remorseful. The reason he stood and contemplated all of the women he had known and felt sympathy for his wife was that all of that was now behind him. Something unexpected had happened to Peter Claasens: he had, at forty-two, fallen in love. From the start it had not been like his other affairs: Emily had not responded to his usual set of manoeuvres and tricks; she had not fallen into bed with him. She had talked to him. She had listened to him. It was as if Emily was blind to how he looked and this gift allowed her to truly see him. And now Claasens found the periods in between seeing her were like being forced to hold your breath until your lungs screamed for air.