The day passed between gazing out of the window, flicking through the daytime TV stations in the vain search for anything worth watching, and sleeping. As the day went on, Fabel became aware of a growing stiffness in his neck and a tenderness below the angle of his jaw, where the Slav’s thumb had squeezed off the blood supply to his brain.

Susanne breezed in mid-afternoon and immediately started to examine Fabel, holding his eyelids back with her thumb and checking each of his eyes in turn and rotating his head with her hands to assess the mobility of his neck.

‘If this is your idea of foreplay,’ grinned Fabel, ‘I have to tell you it isn’t doing it for me.’

Susanne was not in the mood for jokes. Fabel saw that she was genuinely upset and it touched him. She sat on the bed and held his hand for a couple of hours, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence, while Fabel dozed. When a nurse came in to usher her out, Fabel was amazed at the fierce authority with which Susanne dismissed her. Susanne stayed until after six and then came back for an hour in the evening. By nine-thirty, Fabel had abandoned himself to a deep, impenetrable, dreamless sleep.

Tuesday 17 June, 8.30 p.m. Harvestehude, Hamburg.

Anna Wolff could have been a secretary, a hairdresser, a kindergarten teacher. She was petite and vibrant, with a pretty round face that was continually full of energy and habitually made up with dark eye-shadow, mascara and fire-truck-red lipstick. Her short hair was raven black and either sleeked flat or waxed spiky. One of the things that threw observers off any track that would lead them to conclude that she was, in fact, a Kriminalkommissarin, was her youthfulness. Anna was twenty-seven but could have passed for someone in her late teens.

Paul Lindemann, on the other hand, couldn’t have been anything other than a policeman. Lindemann’s father, like Werner Meyer’s father, had been a Wasserschutz policeman, patrolling by boat Hamburg’s circulatory system of waterways, canals, harbours and quaysides. Paul was one of those northern Germans whom Fabel described as ‘scrubbed Lutherans’, clean, groomed, austere people who often found it difficult to bend to change. Paul Lindemann looked today pretty much as he would have done if he had been the same age in the 1950s or ’60s.

Fabel habitually teamed up Anna and Paul. They were chalk and cheese, and Fabel had always believed in putting together teams of individuals who viewed things totally differently: if you came at the same object from opposing angles, you were likely to see more of the whole. Anna and Paul made an odd couple and for months the imposed partnership had sat ill with both of them. Now they worked together with deep mutual respect and regard for their respective, different but complementary talents. It was the kind of success Fabel had hoped to achieve with Maria and Werner, whose potential as a team had yet to be realised.