Angelika Blüm was the first name he wrote down. Next to her name he wrote that of Ursula Kastner. Then Tina Kramer. He drew a vertical line and divided the page in two, with the three victims’ names on one side. On the other he wrote the names of Hans Klugmann and John MacSwain. Another vertical line. Then he wrote the name Mahmoot had mentioned to him, Vasyl Vitrenko.

Half an hour later Fabel had six vertical columns of names, dates and key facts. Each column was headed by one of the six names he had begun with. The column headed with the name of Vasyl Vitrenko was the sparsest. Fabel had plotted out all of the possible connections, coincidences and commonalities. The result was a tighter summary of what was already on the incident board. But there was no redundancy in redrafting the information. For Fabel the activity itself was the goal: refocusing and reordering his thoughts; a chance to map out the journey he had made. One name appeared regularly in half of the columns: Eitel. The first victim, Ursula Kastner was involved, albeit tangentially, with Neuer Horizont, the major shareholder for which was the Eitel Group; there was no known connection with the second victim, Tina Kramer; the third victim, Angelika Blüm, knew Eitel junior and had interviewed Eitel senior and, according to her friend, Erika Kessler, was working on a negative story about one or both of the Eitels; John MacSwain worked for the Eitel Group. Vitrenko’s outfit seemed to cast a shadow behind the rows of names and facts. Klugmann had been trying to infiltrate the Ukrainians and a Ukrainian-manufactured handgun had been retrieved from the murder scene. But the shooters had not been Ukrainian. Kraus was absolutely certain about that. Angelika Blüm had been working on a story relating to the actions of former Soviet police and security battalions, probably drawing comparisons with the experiences of Hamburg’s BATT101 during the Second World War.

And, of course, Fabel had suffered the ignominy of having his ass kicked by some kind of Slavic senior citizen. To say his attacker had known how to handle himself would be an immense understatement: he was obviously a highly trained professional. Fabel circled Vitrenko’s name. He had no idea how old Vitrenko was. Could the older guy have been Vitrenko himself?

Hans Schreiber, Erste Bürgermeister of the Free and Hanseatic City and State of Hamburg, was also a conspicuous presence. He had known two of the victims, one of them intimately. And he had been the last person to see Angelika Blüm alive – except for her killer.

Fabel leaned back in his chair, placed his hands behind his head and looked down onto the page, as if surveying the landscape of his investigation from high ground. He needed to talk to both Eitels, father and son. He wanted to see his hunch about MacSwain played out. Fabel was not convinced that MacSwain was their man, but there was something that didn’t smell right about him. He looked at Anna Wolff’s proposal for the Friday-night ‘date’ operation. It was well worked out, but Fabel was still uneasy about placing Anna so close to a possible suspect; and they would have to be very careful to avoid accusations of entrapment.