‘This definitely look like our guy?’ asked Fabel.

‘From what the guy from Davidwache KriPo said, yep … looks like our guy.’

‘Shit.’ Fabel used the English word. ‘So he’s definitely a serial. Did you call forensics?’

‘Yep.’ Werner shrugged his vast shoulders, ‘I’m afraid it’s that asshole Möller. He’ll already be there. Maria’s at the scene as well and Paul and Anna are waiting for us at Davidwache.’

‘What about an e-mail? Anything through yet?’

‘Not yet.’

Fabel took the Ost-West-Strasse into St Pauli and turned into the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s Sündige Meile – sinful mile – which still glittered joylessly in the five a.m. rain. The downpour dulled to a heavy drizzle as Fabel swung the car into the Grosse Freiheit. Traditional indecency and imported middlebrow banality were waging war, and this was the front line. Porn shops and stripclubs were fighting a rearguard action against the invasion of trendy wine bars and musicals imported from Broadway or London’s West End. Bright promises of ‘Live Sex’, ‘Peep Show’ and ‘Hardcore Movies’ competed with even brighter signs for Cats, The Lion King and Mamma Mia. Somehow Fabel found the sleaze less offensive.

‘Did you get the message that a Professor Dorn has been trying to get in touch?’ asked Werner. ‘He said he needed to talk to you about the Kastner case …’

‘Mathias Dorn?’ Fabel kept his gaze on the road, as if the act of concentration would keep at bay the ghosts that stirred, somewhere deep and dark in his memory.

‘Don’t know. He just said he was Professor Dorn and you knew him at the Universität Hamburg. He’s very keen to talk to you.’

‘What the hell has Mathias Dorn got to do with the Kastner case?’ Fabel’s question was to himself. He turned into Davidstrasse. They passed the narrow opening of Herbertstrasse, concealed by a baffle of screens. Fabel had worked this district years ago and knew that beyond the screens prostitutes sat bleakly illuminated in their windows while the shadowy forms of browsing customers floated insubstantially in the lamplit drizzle. Love in the twenty-first century. Fabel drove on, passing through the pulse of dance music that bled into the night from the Weisse Maus in Taubenstrasse, and he pulled up outside the red brick ship’s-prow front of the Davidwache police station. A couple sheltered in the doorway: the man was tall and lanky with sandy hair; the girl was petite and pretty, with spiky black hair and fire-truck-red lips. She wore an oversized black leather jacket. Seeing them in this context, Fabel couldn’t help thinking just how young they both looked.

‘Hi Chef,’ Kriminalkommissarin Anna Wolff dropped into the rear seat and slid over, allowing her partner, Paul Lindemann, to climb in and slam the door after him. ‘I got directions from the Davidwache KriPo. I’ll tell you where to go …’

They drove out of Davidstrasse. St Pauli’s sham glamour now degraded into sheer seediness. The garish neon promises of libidinousness had the night to themselves and reflected bleakly on the rain-soaked pavements. The occasional pedestrian shambled along, shoulders hunched against the rain, resisting or accepting beckoned invitations from the spiritlessly enthusiastic stripclub doormen. Another turn: the descent continued. Doorways were now occupied either by gaunt and cheerless-looking prostitutes, some frighteningly young, others unfeasibly old, or by drunken down-and-outs. From one doorway an animated bundle of rags slurped from a bottle and yelled obscenities at the passing cars, at the prostitutes, at everybody and at nobody. And behind the doors, behind these blank, blind windows, the trade of flesh was conducted. This was Hamburg’s eternal twilight: a place where human beings could be bought for any purpose and at any price; a place of dark sexual anarchy where people came to explore the murkiest corners of their souls.