Buchholz pointedly handed it on to Kolski. ‘We’ll keep in touch, Herr Fabel. And, naturally, we would appreciate being notified before you carry out any enquiries directly with anyone in the Ulugbay organisation.’

‘That’s why I’m here, Herr Hauptkommissar.’

‘And I appreciate it,’ said Buchholz. ‘Naturally we can’t ask to be directly involved with your inquiry, but we can avoid stepping on each other’s toes.’

‘I would hope that we could be of help to each other, Herr Buchholz.’

Wednesday 4 June, 4.30 p.m. Pöseldorf, Hamburg.

It was mid-afternoon before Fabel turned the key of the door to his apartment. He picked up his mail and sifted through it, using his elbow to slam the door behind him. Fabel tossed the mail and the files he had brought home with him down onto the coffee table and walked through to the kitchen area, a bright alcove of steel and marble off the main living space. He filled the coffee machine and switched it on, then went into the bathroom and stripped, stuffing his shirt and underwear into the washing machine that sat in a recess next to the bathroom. Fabel shaved before stepping into the shower. He stood motionless, simply tilting his head back to allow the high-pressure spray to dig into the flesh of his face and letting the water run in rivulets down his body. The water was slightly too hot, but he didn’t adjust it, letting it sting away the pollution of the night.

Fabel thought over the last eleven hours. He tried to focus on the facts, on the picture he was piecing together in his mind, but he couldn’t erase the image that seared through his brain every few seconds: the image of the girl’s body. Christ, he had ripped out her lungs … what kind of monster would do that? If it was a sexual thing, what unspeakable mutation of human sexuality could derive gratification from such an act? Fabel thought about Klugmann, about how someone so corrupted by greed, drugs and violence had distanced himself with such clarity and ease from such an unspeakable deed. Fabel and Klugmann each represented everything the other was not. They were two extremes of humanity who had become united in the face of a barbarity that denied humanity in any form.

Standing naked in the shower, enveloped in a sheath of too-hot water, Fabel still felt a chill deep in his being: a permafrost that bound his guts in an icy grasp. It was a chill that radiated out from a single fact he had locked deep inside: as sure as the sun would rise tomorrow, this killer would strike again.

After his shower Fabel pulled on a black cashmere roll-neck, clipped his automatic to the black leather belt he had looped through his pale chinos, and slipped into his Jaeger sports jacket. He poured himself a black coffee and carried it over to the picture windows. Fabel’s apartment was in Pöseldorf, in the Rotherbaum district of the city. It was on the attic floor of a substantial turn-of-the-century building that sat in assured but austere confidence, as did its neighbours, one block from the Milchstrasse. The conversion of the building into apartments had included, in Fabel’s flat, the installation of almost floor-to-ceiling picture windows that looked over the roofs of Magdalenenstrasse and out onto the park-fringed Aussenalster. From his windows Fabel could watch the red and white ferries zigzag their way across the Alster, picking up passengers – tourists, commuters, lovers – from one shore and dropping them on the other; picking up, dropping, picking up, dropping, with a cheerful regularity that gave a rhythm to the city’s life. When the sun was at a certain angle, he could see the faint turquoise glitter of the Iranian mosque on the Schöne Aussicht across on the distant shore of the Alster. Every time Fabel devoured the view he blessed the unknown architect who had specified these windows.