JF05 - The Valkyrie Song (18 page)

‘I remember,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s funny how people like Vuja
i
ć
start off with some kind of ethnic or political agenda and then embrace the criminal free market with enthusiasm. He was a bad bastard from all accounts. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘I’ll get to that, but yes, he died four years ago. Vuja
i
ć
was as slimy as he was a vicious piece of work. He had been a member of a Bosnian Serb police unit and was directly involved in some of the atrocities that went on during the Bosnian War. He was never tried at the Hague. Not enough evidence. But the bastard was there at the massacres and the rape camps. Anyway, Jens Jespersen set up a sting and we took Vuja
i
ć
down. A few months before we had managed to trip up a Danish businessman called Peter Knudsen who had been dabbling in drug exporting. Jens did a deal with him and Knudsen collaborated with us in setting up Vuja
i
ć
. We used Knudsen’s yacht and Jens played the part of Knudsen. We staged three meetings on the yacht and one in Copenhagen. Vuja
i
ć
went along with it all. The last meeting on the yacht was where the money changed hands, electronically. It was a very expensive op for us to put on but it seemed very successful.’

‘So how come Vuja
i
ć
went free?’ asked Fabel.

‘Unfortunately, Jens hadn’t dotted all the i’s or crossed all the t’s and Vuja
i
ć
’s legal team started to argue entrapment. It wouldn’t have got him off, but his legal team managed to get him bailed between hearings. His passport was impounded, though, and he was restricted from travelling outside Denmark. It was all a bit of a mess and, to be frank, it wasn’t just that my career overtook Jens’s, it was the fact that his
came to a standstill. He was blamed for leaving open a potential loophole through which Goran Vuja
i
ć
could walk free. Anyway, it was when Vuja
i
ć
was on bail pending trial that someone decided to relieve the state of the burden of court proceedings. We found him in Tivoli Gardens just sitting in the rain on a bench. Someone had used a small, thin file or knife to stab him in the heart. It was a truly professional job: there was hardly any blood and it took us ages to find the entry wound beneath his sternum.’

‘I guess you make a lot of enemies in his line of business.’

‘And some strange partners,’ said Vestergaard. She paused while a waiter came in and took their cups away. ‘You see, that was the start of Jens’s obsession with the Valkyrie.’

‘The Valkyrie?’

Vestergaard held up her hand as if to slow Fabel down. ‘We had set up this luxury yacht for the sting. Fitted it out with bugs and hidden cameras to record the whole operation. One of the things we got on tape was Vuja
i
ć
talking about the third partner in the deal. A sleeping partner who had financed the whole drug deal and was looking for the lion’s share of the profit. It was this anonymous third partner we had really wanted to uncover.’

‘So you think it was this partner that had Vuja
i
ć
killed?’

‘Almost definitely. Vuja
i
ć
was nothing if he wasn’t a negotiator. All through his questioning he had kept shtum about the identity of the moneyman. He knew that if his defence of entrapment didn’t work, he could do a deal by giving up the name of his backer. But anyway, if we go back to the conversation we recorded on the boat … Vuja
i
ć
had mentioned that the moneyman had a contract killer who was the best in the business. Vuja
i
ć
claimed that this contract killer had cleaned up the competition for him at the behest of this sleeping partner. He also claimed this killer went by the name of the Valkyrie, that she was a woman. And he claimed that if the circumstances called
for it, this killer was an expert at making the deaths look like accidents or natural causes. Oh, and by the way, the crooked businessman we used to set Vuja
i
ć
up also died prematurely.’