They got nowhere. Sonja started to sob again, apologising for not being able to help. Fabel suggested they leave it there and crossed the living area to the kitchen and made a cup of green tea from a pack he found on the counter top. He placed the cup in Sonja’s hands.

‘Just one more question, Sonja. Did Hans own a video camera?’

Sonja frowned above the red-rimmed eyes and shook her head.

‘Did he ever bring one home? Or did you ever see a tape cartridge from a video camera?’

Again a puzzled look, a shrug and a shake of the head.

They left Sonja alone in the apartment she had shared with a man she thought she had known, but who had really been a Bulle living a lie with her as a stage prop. There was no one to sit with her: no relatives, no friends. She was just a pretty girl left on an empty stage. A girl who just a couple of days before had swung her shopping bags as she strolled back to her flat and her lover, her head filled with dreams of a new life in a new place. Now she would no doubt sink back into the life of prostitution and porno films. Fabel had no idea if Klugmann had really loved Sonja or had ever intended to marry her, but he knew that he had cared enough to seek to liberate her from a degrading way of life.

As he closed the apartment door behind him, Fabel made a silent promise to a dead policeman.

Monday 16 June, 10.50 p.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg.

It was nearly eleven by the time Fabel got home. He had re-gathered the team to go through everything that had happened. They now knew that ‘Monique’ was Tina Kramer, a BAO operative. Klugmann was dead. Volker claimed no connection between his investigation and the ritualistic murder of Tina Kramer. MacSwain was now officially under surveillance. Fabel had negotiated with Van Heiden and agreed on a team of six, which had to include two team leaders from the Mordkommission. Van Heiden didn’t like hunches. More specifically he didn’t like committing a Polizei Hamburg budget on a hunch, but he let Fabel have his way. Fabel had put Paul and Anna in charge of the surveillance, knowing that they needed a display of confidence from Fabel after they had lost Klugmann only for him to turn up dead.

They had also gone over Angelika Blüm’s murder again. Brauner, the forensic team leader, had reported back that no physical evidence had been found on Blüm’s laptop. According to Technical Section, whoever had wiped the files from the computer’s hard drive had done so thoroughly, probably using an external device to do so. It was the work of an expert with sophisticated kit at his disposal. Möller’s preliminary autopsy report confirmed his initial observations. Maria Klee had produced something new but, she admitted, pretty tangential. She had placed an exhibition programme on the table. It was for an exhibition of works, in Bremen, by Marlies Menzel. It was not so much that the name was familiar to Fabel as that it stabbed into the memory centre of his brain. Marlies Menzel had only recently been released from Stuttgart-Stammheim Prison. She was a former member of Svensson’s Radikale Aktionsgruppe and had taken part in the robbery in which Fabel had been wounded. The day he put two bullets into the face of a seventeen-year-old girl.