Tonight, both Anna and Paul felt edgy. Fabel was more than a boss. He had been mentor to both of them and had, by selecting them for his Mordkommission team, set the sights higher for their future careers. To both, Fabel had seemed invulnerable. Now he was lying in a hospital bed in the Krankenhaus St Georg. They would have given anything to have been out searching for Fabel’s attacker, rather than keeping tabs on some British yuppie.

There was a newspaper and tobacco stall on the corner of MacSwain’s street. A coffee machine sat behind the counter and outside there was the usual brushed aluminium elbow-high tables for customers to stand and drink their coffee. Anna stood at one of the four tables, from which she had a clear view of the crossroads and MacSwain’s apartment block as well as the exit from the Tiefgarage underneath. If anyone came out, on foot or by car, Anna would be able to track the direction they took and radio to Paul, who was parked further down the block with a view from the other direction. It was dark now and Anna was on her third coffee, which she was trying to make last. Any more would mean a jittery, sleepless night. The sullen, overweight stallholder barely acknowledged her existence, but when three skinheads in their uniform of field-green jerkins came up to buy some cigarettes, he muttered something to them and nodded in her direction. The fat stallholder and the skinheads burst into crude laughter. Anna kept her gaze firmly on the apartment building. The three skinheads came up to Anna’s table, one on one side and two on the other. One of the skins, a tall, bull-necked youth with bad skin, leaned into Anna.

‘What’s up darlin’, you been stood up?’

Anna neither answered nor looked in their direction.

The bull-necked skinhead leered at his comrades and laughed. ‘I’d get all stood up for you, babe …’

‘What, all ten centimetres of you?’ said Anna with a sigh and still without looking in the skinhead’s direction.

Bull-Neck’s two companions exploded into laughter, pointing at him derisively. His face clouded and he pulled close to Anna, slipping his hand under her leather jacket and closing it around her breast.

‘Maybe we’ll see how much of me you can take …’

It all happened too fast for Bull-Neck to register. Anna spun around away from the skinhead and then back to face him, throwing his hand away as if with centrifugal force. As she came around to face him again, her hands moved in two swift movements. Her left hand reached down and grabbed the skinhead’s groin while her right elbow slammed into his cheek and then, in a seamless movement, her right hand slipped under her jacket, bringing her SIG-Sauer automatic up and into his face. Hard. She pushed him back, not allowing him to get purchase with his scrabbling feet until he slammed into the stall’s counter. She bent his nose out of shape with the muzzle of the gun, twisting it as she spoke.