‘You fuck …’ said Fabel in a slow, quiet voice. He looked across at Werner and Sülberg, both of whom said nothing. Fabel looked down on MacSwain. He eased and then re-tightened his grip on his pistol, his face twisted in a sneer. In a single second, a dozen images sped through his mind. Michaela Palmer’s scared, hunted look. Four innocent women, ripped apart, prepared for death the same way. Paul Lindemann’s dead eyes. But this was the apprentice, not the master. MacSwain’s was a sick mind manipulated by a greater, even more twisted intellect. It had been Vitrenko who had killed the Ukrainian girl and the old man. His own father. Not work to be given out to an apprentice. A signature piece. Fabel snapped his gun away from MacSwain’s head.

‘Watch him!’ he snapped at Sülberg, who nodded grimly and moved over to MacSwain. ‘Werner, you look after Anna.’

‘What about Vitrenko?’

‘I’ll deal with him,’ Fabel said and sprinted towards the door.

Fabel burst out into the night. He stopped and scanned the low, wide fields. He snatched his radio to his mouth.

‘Maria?’

Silence.

‘Maria? Answer me.’ Still no reply.

Sülberg, back in the barn, must have heard. His voice came on the radio asking each of the four Cuxhaven units if they had seen either Vitrenko or Oberkommissarin Klee. Three responded negatively. The fourth, like Maria, did not respond. Fabel narrowed his eyes and scoured the night for any movement against the green-black fringes of trees and scrub at the far end of the fields. He saw something. Indistinct, not even identifiable as a person. He burst into a sprint in its direction.

‘He’s heading towards the water! Away from the boat!’ Fabel screamed into his radio between breaths. ‘I’m going to lose him in the trees!’

Fabel’s lungs began to sear. His heart hammered in his chest.

He found the Cuxhaven SchuPo first. The policeman lay on his side, his SIG pistol still in his hand, caressed by the long grass in the depression made by his own falling, dying body. The posture of the dead uniformed policeman reminded Fabel of the mummified bodies of ancient sacrificial victims that archaeologists would occasionally reclaim from the peaty earth of this part of Germany. From just below the ear, sweeping across his throat immediately beneath the jawline, a wide, sweeping gash sparkled in the dim moonlight and blood glistened black on the grass. Silence and death had come to the young SchuPo simultaneously, and he had been robbed of his right to cry out as his life left him.

‘Maria!’ Fabel bellowed into the darkness. Silence. Then something like a sigh. Fabel turned sixty degrees to his right. Maria lay, about ten metres away, half hidden in the grass. Fabel ran across to her and dropped to his knees beside her. She lay on her back, her face towards the dark sky, in a posture that looked almost relaxed, as if she had sought solitude to gaze up at the moon and stars. She moved her eyes to look at Fabel without turning her head. Her lips were drawn tight and she was breathing through her mouth in short, shallow breaths. The hilt of the broad ceremonial knife jutted hideously from her abdomen, just below the sternum. The entire blade had been driven into her body, deliberately missing the heart and an instant kill, but causing enough internal damage to throw Maria’s survival into a perilous balance.