A sound. Somewhere in the black chasm something made a noise so small and so indistinct that Fabel could not identify it. He froze and extended the Walther out before him in the vague direction of the sound. He strained his ears. Nothing. He took his fix on the insubstantial glow in the window and edged towards it. By occasionally shifting his position sideways he could identify where the pillars stood and as he reached one he would run his left hand around and up it to check for a light switch.

He heard it again. A moan. Or a voice muffled.

‘Vitrenko?’ He called out again, this time with a tentative tone in his voice, as if unsure which Vitrenko, father or son, might answer him. The answer came in a low, stifled cry, as if from someone gagged. Fabel snapped his head round in the direction of the sound. His ears strained hard, but the silence of the warehouse was already filling with the jack-hammer thudding of his own pulse. He tightened his grip on the Walther, aware that his palms, like his face, were now sleeked with sweat.

He was now close to the office cabin. Fabel guessed that the steps were just a few feet from him. He had reached another pillar and laid his free hand flat against it. He felt the ridge of a cable conduit running vertically down the pillar. He swiftly ran his hand down and found the square switch box. Fabel took a long, slow, silent breath and moved himself back and out from the pillar, stretching his arm out straight with the fingers of his left hand resting on the switch. He again loosened and then tightened his grip on his pistol, and readied to fire at whatever awaited him when he hit the lights.

Fabel pressed the light switch and a bank of about a dozen striplights, spanning the mid-section of the warehouse, flickered reluctantly into life and illuminated a scene from hell.

The girl with the golden hair, the girl who had seemed so full of youth and lithe vigour, was pinned, dead, against the side of the Portakabin. Her naked, butchered body, the lungs ripped from the body cavity, had been nailed in the same manner as the victims in the photographs taken two decades ago in a distant land. Blood and viscera glittered like wet paint splashed across the wall of the elevated office cabin. In losing her life she had lost her humanity: Fabel struggled to see the person she once was, instead irresistibly drawn to the feeling that he was looking at the twisted carcass of some grotesque, human-headed bird. He cursed the thought, for it was exactly what the killer had wanted to create. Fabel fought for his next breath and staggered back, coming to rest against a pillar. He so desperately wanted to look away, but found he could not tear his eyes from the tableau of horror before him.

Again, Fabel heard a low, muffled groan. Like a sleepwalker suddenly awoken he spun, gun poised, in the direction of the sound. The old Ukrainian was standing upright against the pillar that faced the horror on the cabin wall. He was bound tight with wire, a loop of which had been fixed above and behind his head, then drawn down and tight under his jawline. The wire had cut deep into the old man’s flesh and the front of his shirt was soaked black-red with his blood. His mouth had been sealed with a broad swathe of tape. Fabel could see that the Slav was still alive, his eyes wild and staring. The realisation hit Fabel low in the gut: Vitrenko had made his own father watch. He had repeated his own history and made the poor bastard bear witness as he ripped the breathing lungs from the girl’s body. Fabel lunged forward and placed his hands on either side of the old man’s head, and the green eyes locked Fabel’s in a wild, intense gaze. He was trying to say something.