There was an eternity of silence and then a female voice answered.

‘Do you have our operative in custody?’

Fabel looked at those gathered around the table with an expression approaching triumph. ‘No. He’s still at large. We’re looking for him. To whom am I speaking?’

She ignored the question. ‘We have lost contact with our operative. Please let us know if you locate him. On this number. Someone will call you back shortly, Kriminalhauptkommissar.’ The phone went dead. Fabel gave a bitter laugh.

‘I always thought Klugmann was all wrong. I just never thought he’d be wrong in the right way, if you know what I mean.’

‘He’s still in the job, isn’t he?’ asked Werner.

‘Yep. I don’t know for sure for whom, but I’ve got a pretty damned good idea. Anyway, we’ll find out soon enough …’

Nobody spoke. No one seemed to notice how bizarre the situation was: a room full of police officers sitting and standing in silence, the tension almost palpable in the air, and every pair of eyes focused on the missing undercover agent’s cell phone. Several minutes passed. Then the room seemed to fill with the urgent electronic trilling of the phone. Everybody gave a small jump when it rang.

It was Fabel’s turn to remain silent when he picked up the phone and clicked the answer button with his thumb.

‘Hauptkommissar Fabel?’

Fabel instantly recognised the tentative voice at the other end, but he was too pissed off for pleasantries. ‘Be in my office within the hour, Herr Oberst Volker.’

Fabel hung up.

It had taken Fabel only twenty minutes to wind up the briefing in the conference room, allocating investigative and follow-up tasks to his team. Fabel waited in his office. He put his phone on voice mail and told Werner and Maria he needed a few minutes to gather himself before Volker arrived. He needed to muster the windblown thoughts, facts and theories that had been scattered by the impact on the case of the second victim’s revealed identity. He gazed out of his window and looked out across Winterhuder Stadtpark and the city beyond. But he didn’t take anything in. Fabel’s mind was in the darklands: that grey half world Yilmaz had described, where the space occupied by law enforcers lies somewhere between the legal and the expedient and is shadowed and clouded.

It is not easy to be German. You carry the excess baggage of recent history while other Europeans travel comparatively light. Ten centuries of culture and achievement had been eclipsed by twelve years in the mid-twentieth century, twelve years in which the most exceptional evil had become the commonplace. Those twelve years had defined for the world what it was to be German; they had defined for most Germans what it was to be German. Now, they were not trusted. And they could never again trust themselves.

For each German, this distrust had its own focus, an aspect of German life that had a discordant, unsettling resonance. For some, it was geographical: northern Germans mistrusting southerners for their fascistic parochialism; or West Germans, the Wessis, mistrusting the Ossis, the East Germans, fearing that Nazism had been cryogenically preserved in the deep freeze of Communism and was now beginning to thaw out. For others it was generational: the protestors of 1968 and ’69 who rebelled against the war generation and traditional German conservativeness; the new generation who addressed each other with Du instead of Sie, de-formalising and liberalising the German language itself.