Fabel paused again. It felt strange to give voice to it all; like he was externalising what had been, until now, a purely internal process. His audience sat almost motionless and totally quiet. There were no questions, so Fabel continued.

‘As for the murders, Ursula Kastner, as a property lawyer working for the city, must have stumbled on irregularities in property deals relating to the Neuer Horizont partnership. My guess is she uncovered some kind of high-level involvement and decided to go to the press, instead of the authorities. And the press, in this case, was Angelika Blüm. Tina Kramer, the BAO-BND operative, was killed because she was identified as a front-line contact for Klugmann, whose cover had been blown by two officers from this force. Officers who were on the take and who murdered Klugmann in the Schwimmhalle and left a Ukrainian security-services firearm behind to confuse the issue. Three victims; one killer. John MacSwain. The apprentice.’ Fabel gestured to the images of the three murdered women. He then moved across to the photographs taken in Afghanistan.

‘These, on the other hand, are the work of the master. And I have seen his handiwork with my own eyes. The murder earlier today of Vitrenko’s father and his assistant was a signature piece, and Vitrenko is egotistical enough to have wanted me to see that before he destroyed the evidence. This was his own father and the sister of one of the Kiev victims. Vitrenko would not entrust this to MacSwain. This was a masterpiece.’

‘But other than this most recent killing, you claim MacSwain is the murderer?’ Van Heiden asked.

‘Yes. Vitrenko knew how to press all the right buttons with MacSwain. MacSwain is clearly sociopathic. Vitrenko realised that. It takes one to know one, I suppose. Anyway, John MacSwain had a very poor relationship with his own father. My guess is that Vitrenko has stepped into the paternal role, and wrapped the whole thing up in some kind of Viking mumbo-jumbo. MacSwain was probably first enlisted to find women for the rituals Vitrenko organised … which were, in reality, nothing more than disguised gang rapes. Vitrenko must have seen how deep MacSwain’s psychopathy went. It was then that Vitrenko gave MacSwain his sacred missions to carry out. My guess is that MacSwain sent the e-mails but the wording was supplied by Vitrenko.’

‘But why do you suspect MacSwain?’ asked Maria. ‘Now – after all this time?’

‘It’s his name. It’s been in front of us all along.’ Fabel flipped open the book on the table before him. ‘The origins of the name “MacSwain”. It is an Anglicised form of an Irish and Scots Gaelic name. The prefix Mac is patronymic … it stands for “son of”. The Swain part comes from the Viking invaders who settled on the western isles of Scotland. It is a Gaelicised and then Anglicised form of the Old Norse name Svein, meaning boy.’

Fabel paused. He could sense the electricity in the air. They all knew what he was going to say next, but they had to hear him say it.