When Fabel looked over to the bed, he saw why. Somewhere behind him Werner muttered, ‘Scheisse!’

There was an explosion of red. A sunburst of blood had encrimsoned the bed and splashed across the carpet and up the wall. The bed itself was sodden with dark, sticky blood and even the air seemed heavy with its rich, copper odour. At the heart of the bloody eruption, Fabel saw the body of a woman. It was difficult to make out how old, but probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. She was spread-eagled on the bed, her outstretched wrists and ankles bound to the posts, her abdomen grotesquely deformed. She had been sliced open through the chest and the ribs pulled apart and outwards until they looked like the superstructure of a boat. The bony whiteness of the sheared ribs shone through the prised-open mess of raw flesh and glistening dark viscera. Two dark, bloody masses of tissue – her lungs – speckled with frothy, bright blood, lay thrown out over her shoulders.

It was as if she had been blown apart from the inside.

Fabel’s heart pounded so fiercely that he felt as if his chest, too, were going to burst. He knew his face had blanched white. When Werner made his way over to him, squeezing past the police photographer, Fabel saw the same pallor on his face.

‘It’s him again. This is bad, Chef. This is really bad. We’ve got the mother of all psychos on the loose here.’

For a moment Fabel found he couldn’t direct his gaze away from the corpse. Then, taking a breath, he turned to Paul.

‘Witnesses?’

‘None. Don’t ask me how this much mayhem could be created without someone hearing, but this is the way she was found. All we’ve got is the guy who found her. No one saw or heard anything.’

‘Any signs of forced entry?’

Paul shook his head. ‘The guy who found her said the door was ajar, but no, no signs of forced entry.’

Fabel moved towards the body. It seemed so cruel that such a violent and terrifying leaving of her life should go unnoticed. Her terror had been a lonely terror. Her death – a death he could not imagine, no matter how graphically it was laid out before him – had been desolate, solitary, in a universe filled with only the cold violence of her killer. He looked beyond the devastation of her body to the face. It was spattered with blood; the mouth gaped slightly and the eyes were open. There was no look of terror: no fear nor hate nor even peace. It was an expressionless mask that gave no concept of the personality that had once lived behind it. Möller, the pathologist, masked and bunny-suited in his white forensic kit, was examining the sliced-open abdomen. He gestured impatiently for Fabel to move back.

Fabel pulled his attention away from the body. The corpse wasn’t just a physical object, it was a temporal entity: a point in time, an event. It represented the moment that the murder had been committed and, in the sealed scene of crime, everything around it belonged either to the time before or to the time after that moment. He scanned the room, trying to imagine it without the swirl of police and forensic technicians. It was small but uncluttered. There was a lack of personality about it, as if it were a functional space rather than a home. A small, faded photograph sat on the dressing table by the door, propped against the lamp; the photograph was conspicuous as the only truly ‘personal’ personal effect in the room. There was a print on the wall, a female nude reclining, eyes half closed in an attitude of erotic ecstasy: not something a woman would usually pick for her own enjoyment. A wide, full-length mirror, fixed to the wall which divided the room from the room beyond, which Fabel surmised would have to be the kitchen, reflected the bed. He noticed a small wicker bowl on the bedside table: it was filled with condoms of various colours. He turned to Anna Wolff.