‘Just to let you know that, as far as I am concerned, you are free to go when these gentlemen are finished with you.’

Wolfgang Eitel’s face lit up with a cold, malicious triumph. Fabel started to leave, then checked himself and leaned back in, as if some incidental detail had suddenly occurred to him.

‘Oh, by the way, your son Norbert has been charged with rape, attempted murder and suspicion of being an accessory to murder.’

Fabel closed the door and allowed his smile to return as he heard the explosion of voices in the interview room.

Fabel was halfway down the hall when Paul Lindemann came running up to him. ‘Chef, I’ve just had Werner on the phone. He wants you to go over to Harburg. He’s found Hansi Kraus. Dead.’

Saturday 21 June, 3.30 p.m. Harburg, Hamburg.

In his twenty years as a policeman, most of which had been with the Mordkommission, Fabel had visited dozens of death scenes. It was something you either got used to or you didn’t. Fabel had never become accustomed to intimacy with death. Each new scene left its own tiny scar somewhere deep within him. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had never been able to separate the humanity from the corpse; the spirit from the meat.

Death is nothing if not imaginative in the variety of its guises. Each had its especial unpleasantness and Fabel had seen most of them. There was the horrific: the body fished from the Elbe after a month with the eels, or the gory tableaux laid out for him by this latest killer. There was the bizarre: the sex games gone wrong, or the unusual choice of murder weapon. There was the surreal, like the drugs trafficker who had been shot in the back of the head while he sat eating at the kitchen table, and who, post-mortem, had remained seated upright, fork still in the hand that rested on the table, as if pausing between scooping mouthfuls, while the plate before him had been spattered with fragments of bone, brain and blood. Then there was the pathetic, where the victims had sought escape from inevitable death behind a curtain or under a bed in a desperate attempt to conceal themselves from their killers; the body coiled into a foetal position, hugging into itself and making itself small.

Hansi Kraus’s demise fell somewhere between the pathetic and the sordid. The small, filthy room in which he had taken his leave of the world was as unpleasant as it could have been. The paintwork, the walls, every surface in the room, even the single naked light bulb that hung desolately from the ceiling, was coated in a greasy dust. Despite Werner having opened the room’s only window wide, a stale odour hung in the air like a malevolent spirit defying exorcism.

Hansi, who was now beyond feeling cold or hot, lay with his heavy greatcoat partially covering his legs. His eyes were open, sunken balls in the sockets of his skull-like face. Decomposition, thought Fabel bitterly, had had a head start, thanks to Hansi’s active participation in wasting his own body to a skeleton. One sleeve of a shirt that had once known a pattern was pulled up to the halfway point on Hansi’s meagre left bicep. A rubber-tubing tourniquet remained wrapped but loosened just above the elbow joint and there was a fresh puncture mark in his forearm, just discernible among the hideous track marks, the road map of a decade’s journey through hard addiction. A syringe lay empty in the limp grip of Hansi’s right hand.