Fabel gestured towards the bed and made an expression that asked permission. Michaela nodded and moved across the bed slightly. Her white towelling bathrobe slipped to expose a bronzed plain of thigh. She re-covered it with a swift movement. Her actions, particularly the way she moved her eyes, seemed fox-like, hunted; as if she were on the edge of flight. Fabel smiled as reassuring a smile as he could muster.

‘I’m a Kriminalhauptkommissar of the Hamburg Polizei.’ Fabel was careful to omit that he was from the Mord-kommission for fear of blowing Michaela’s already fragile defences to pieces. He had to handle this questioning carefully, or his witness would simply implode. ‘And this is Dr Eckhardt. She is a psychologist who knows a lot about the type of drug you were given. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Is that okay?’

Michaela nodded. ‘What do you want to know? I can’t remember much. That’s the thing …’ Her brow furrowed. ‘I can’t remember anything much at all. And it’s not just the kidnapping I can’t remember – there are chunks missing from the days before.’ She looked searchingly at Fabel and her bottom lip quivered. ‘Why is that? That was before I was drugged. Why can’t I remember what happened before?’

Fabel turned to Susanne.

‘The type of drug you were given damages the memory centre of your brain,’ she explained. ‘You’ll find that there are a few things from before the drugging that seem to have been erased from your memory. Those things will generally come back to you, at least in part. But the things you can’t remember about what happened to you while you were drugged … they won’t come back. Which is probably a good thing.’ Susanne drew closer. ‘Listen, Michaela, I have to warn you that, unfortunately, you will get extremely vivid flashbacks of the things you do remember about the attack.’

Michaela sucked back a sob. ‘I don’t want to remember anything.’ She looked directly into Fabel’s eyes. ‘Please don’t make me remember.’

‘No one can make you remember, Michaela,’ said Susanne, pushing back a stray tendril of Michaela’s blonde hair, as if comforting a child who had awoken from a nightmare. ‘What isn’t there isn’t there. But what you can remember may help us catch this monster.’

‘There was more than one.’ Michaela lowered her eyes and plucked at her towelling bathrobe. ‘There was more than one of them who did it to me. I thought at first there was just one, because the face was the same. But the bodies were different.’

‘I’m sorry, Michaela, I don’t understand,’ Fabel said. ‘What do you mean they had the same face but different bodies?’

‘Just that. I’m sorry, I know it doesn’t make sense, but I know that one of them was fat and older and one was young and slim. But they all had the same horrible face.’

Shit, thought Fabel. Sorry as he felt for the girl, this had been a wasted trip: they would get nothing useful from her. ‘Can you describe the face you saw? The face you say they all had?’