‘Good evening, Frau Kreuz …’ Anna started as she opened the door. It seemed as if her heart stopped at the same time as her voice, as she looked into the cold, green fire of John MacSwain’s eyes.

‘Hello, Anna,’ said MacSwain.

Anna looked confused. As if in answer, MacSwain held up his index finger and dangled her door keys from it. Anna spun around. The movement of her head made her senses swirl and fog. She searched for her service SIG-Sauer nine-millimetre, which she had dumped, in its holster, on the hall table next to the door. It was gone. In that second she put it all together: the sounds in the kitchen, the water, Mausi being jumpy. She turned back to MacSwain, her head having to move from side to side momentarily to allow her to focus on his face, and she couldn’t help drawing a comparison between his cold green stare and the frosty disinterest with which Mausi habitually regarded her. That’s it, she registered dully, he’s something other than human. That was what she’d tried to explain to Fabel: that some unseen, conclusive element essential to humanity was missing. She staggered and made to grab for the edge of the kitchen cabinet. Instead MacSwain stepped forward and scooped his hands under her arms.

‘Careful now,’ he said, without a trace of solicitousness. ‘I think you need another drink of water …’

As the drug cocktail that MacSwain had hidden in her drinking water began to close the curtains around Anna’s consciousness, she somehow felt compelled to speak.

‘I … I don’t feel too well …’ she said for only MacSwain to hear, and couldn’t remember why it was she had to say it.

Saturday 21 June, 9.40 p.m. Polizeipräsidium, Hamburg.

Maria, Werner, Paul and Van Heiden were all there when Fabel arrived. Maria had also called in the two officers from the expanded task team who were still on shift. Fabel, the book gifted to him by Otto tucked under his arm, strode purposefully into the incident room and stood before the inquiry board.

‘Let me get straight to the point,’ said Fabel. ‘We have a new prime suspect. Or at least another prime suspect: John MacSwain, twenty-nine, a British national resident in Germany.’

‘What about Vitrenko?’ asked Van Heiden.

‘Vasyl Vitrenko is still very much part of this. I believe what we are dealing with here is a master and his apprentice. Or high priest and acolyte. Vitrenko is a consummate manipulator of people. His men follow him with a slavish devotion that is founded on a half-assed re-spinning of old Norse myths and beliefs. But it’s not just his men he controls: he uses all types of people to achieve his ends. And that includes the psychologically damaged. John MacSwain is an example, just like the guy in the Ukraine who was executed for a series of similar crimes in the mid-nineties.’

Fabel paused. There was a total silence in the room.

‘Vitrenko has had access to material that I have written on a serial-murder case in Hamburg. He has also studied at one of the world’s leading criminology institutes … a Ukrainian institute, and, as we know, the Ukraine has one of the highest incidences of serial murderers in the world. That is why everything we have dealt with so far has seemed like a textbook case. Because it is a textbook case. Vitrenko probably met MacSwain through the Eitels, for whom MacSwain works. The Eitels are involved with Vitrenko in a property scam that also involves the Odessa Mafia and Norbert Eitel has been directly involved in the drugging, abduction and rape of young women in some kind of ritual. He has a very distinctive scar on his left hand that matches the description given by one of the victims. I believe that Vitrenko is using these rituals as some kind of binding thing. And I believe we will discover other powerful individuals caught up in all of this.’