‘Frau Blüm?’ Fabel’s call was answered by silence. He scanned what he could see of the apartment. Next to the door was a chair and an occasional table. An expensive-looking woman’s coat was thrown carelessly onto the chair and an Italian leather handbag had been discarded on the table. Fabel’s grip eased on his Walther. He knew there was no one in the apartment. No one alive, at any rate.

The walls of the entrance hallway were a very pale blue and punctuated with large, original canvases: abstract studies in deep, tonal violets and reds that smouldered against the coolness of the walls.

As Fabel made his way down the hall he glanced to the left through the open, glazed double doors that led into the large living area. The room was empty. Again a tasteful coolness set the background for expensive furnishings and the occasional original work of art. In his quick survey of the room, Fabel thought he saw the stretched lines of a Giacometti sculpture. A small one, but it looked like an original. He walked on. To the right the bathroom. Empty. Next right the bedroom. Empty. The last door in the hall was closed and when he swung it open the room was in darkness. He reached in and slid a hand down the wall next to the door until he found the switch. The room flooded with light from a series of angled wall lights.

Horror.

Fabel couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been prepared for it. He had known she would be lying, dead, inside the apartment, and instinct had told him, when he saw this door closed and this room in darkness, that this is where she would be. But he still felt as if a truck had slammed into him.

‘Oh Jesus …’ It was as if the breath had been sucked out of Fabel’s chest. Nausea surged upwards. ‘Sweet Jesus …’

The room had been intended as a bedroom but had been redesigned as an office. There was shelving, stacked with books and files, on three of the walls. The fourth wall accommodated the window that ran almost the full length of the room and which was now concealed by closed vertical blinds. A wide beech desk with a laptop computer faced the window. As with the rest of the apartment the decor was restrained, tasteful and elegant.

In the centre of the room was an explosion of flesh, blood and bone. A woman’s body. Face down. The back had been sliced open by slashes that ran parallel to the spine. The ribs had been prised apart, exposing the raw interior of the abdomen, and the lungs excavated and thrown outwards.

She was naked apart from a pair of towelling slippers with corded soles. A towelling bathrobe, which matched the slippers, had been thrown into one corner of the room. Other than these items there were no clothes in the room.

Fabel noticed that as well as the devastation to the torso, there was a large plume of blood, issuing from the head, that spread across the pine flooring. The back of her skull was a matted mass of blood and auburn hair.