Fabel’s footsteps in the echoing hall of the stairwell had hardly faded when the phone rang. After two rings the answering machine clicked on, delivering Fabel’s recorded instructions to leave a message after the tone. The voice was that of a woman who said ‘Scheisse!’ in genuine frustration and hung up.

Wednesday 4 June, 4.30 p.m. Hotel Altona Krone, Hamburg.

His arrival in the hotel reception was almost presidential. Centred in an envelope of burly, black-leather-jacketed bodyguards, a tall, lean man in his late seventies, dressed in a pale grey raincoat and darker grey business suit. His posture and movements were those of a man twenty years younger and his angular features, hooked nose and a plume of thick, ivory-coloured hair gave him an aristocratic, arrogant look.

His entry into the reception hall had been heralded by a fusillade of camera flashes. Some photographers, seeking a closer vantage, had been bounced off the picket of muscle and leather; one had been sent sprawling on the marble floor.

As it reached the reception desk, the envelope opened, allowing the tall older man to approach the counter. The hotel desk clerk, who had seen it all before – rock groups, politicians, film stars, billionaires with egos to match their bank balances – did not look up from his desk until the group was immediately before the counter. Then, with a polite yet tired smile he asked:

‘Yes, mein Herr. May I help you?’

‘I have a reservation here …’ The tall man’s voice was resonant and authoritative. The desk clerk continued to project a monumental apathy.

‘And your name, sir?’ he asked, although he knew very well.

The tall man jutted his jaw, tilting his head back and imperiously peering down his aquiline nose at the clerk, as if he were a morsel of prey.

‘Eitel,’ he answered, ‘Wolfgang Eitel.’

A journalist pushed forward, an untidy man of about forty whose scalp gleamed through a web of carelessly combed strands of blond hair. ‘Herr Eitel, do you really thing that your son has any chance of becoming Bürgermeister? After all, Hamburg has a tradition of liberalism and social democracy …’

Eitel’s eyes projected a laser of disdain and contempt.

‘It is what the people of Hamburg really think that matters – not what people like you tell them they should think.’ Eitel bent his face close to the reporter’s with a predatory swoop. ‘The people of Hamburg buy my son’s magazine … SCHAU MAL! has become the voice of the ordinary man on the street. The people of Hamburg want to be heard – they deserve to be heard. My son will make sure they are heard – through the pages of SCHAU MAL! and through him, as their Senator and ultimately their Erste Bürgermeister.’

‘And what message, exactly, will he bear on their behalf?’ A second journalist spoke: an attractive woman of about forty-five with short, styled auburn hair, expensively dressed in a black Chanel suit, the skirt of which was short enough to show off her still-firm and shapely legs. Extending an arm which held a Dictaphone, she leaned in past a bodyguard who placed a beefy restraining hand on her shoulder.