Fabel shaved, showered and dressed in an English sea-island cotton shirt and a pale grey single-breasted suit. He had an hour before he was due to meet Susanne, so he went through the file he had brought back from Cuxhaven. Fabel saw himself as anything but a social conservative, and he did his best to embrace the new; but sometimes he wondered what the hell was happening to the world. Of course, rape was nothing new, but now there were young men out there who routinely set out to stupefy women with drugs that could permanently damage the brain, in order to have sex with them. The thought left Fabel bemused, and filled with dread for the future. But this guy was different. He was part of a group. And the acts they carried out clearly had some ritualistic meaning or purpose. He was using a drug cocktail to obtain victims for others as well as himself. Perhaps not for himself at all. He slipped out the piece of paper onto which he had traced the outline from the photograph of the inflamed mark on Michaela’s forehead. Was he putting too much importance on it? It could, after all, be some random sequence of lines rather than a rendering of a runic mark. But that didn’t make sense. They had marked her, branded her, with something of symbolic significance. Fabel was pretty certain it was the rune Gebu which was the Viking equivalent of the letter G, but he also knew that Futhark runes had more than a phonetic meaning, that each one had a symbolism that related to the Norse gods or myths. Fabel went over to his bookcase and pulled out a couple of heavy reference books, one of which was the same as the book MacSwain had bought; Otto had let him borrow it. He scanned through it, and finally he found what he was looking for. Fabel frowned as he read the entry, writing the key points down on the same piece of paper. Gebu was a rune that related to sacrifices to and gifts from the gods. Sacrifice. It also was the seventh rune. The number seven: Fabel remembered Dorn talking about the significance of numbers in the Viking belief system. Gebu was the rune most associated with the Blot or ritual of sacrifice.

Could there be a connection between these attacks and the two murders? Not only was Michaela Palmer marked with a ritualistic sign, it was a rune associated with sacrifice. But if she and the other girl were intended to be sacrificed, then why did they let them go? A real effort had been made to remove traces of the mark, and both girls had been heavily drugged so that they would remember next to nothing about their attackers. At the first briefing after the murder in St Pauli, Susanne had suggested that there may have been dry runs for the main event; but somehow that no longer seemed to fit with the kind of killer Fabel instinctively felt he was pursuing. Anyway, these attacks weren’t dry runs. There was no escalation here: both girls had been attacked after the murders. Fabel dropped the book onto the couch beside him and looked out of the window of his apartment across the Alster. He checked his watch: 7.30. He had better head off: he didn’t want Susanne to be there first and have to wait for him.