Until that night they felt they had been pursuing a ghost. The team had succeeded in cornering Vitrenko and a couple of his key henchmen. Vitrenko had escaped by throwing himself through a window and into the night. Maria had been in the field with two local Cuxhaven officers. Spread out. Vitrenko had probably not even broken step as he had sliced open the first officer’s throat. Maria remembered Fabel screaming warnings to her down his radio. She had seen nothing. Heard nothing. But Vasyl Vitrenko had been brought up since boyhood to be a soldier of stealth. There had been a sound behind her and she had spun around but still had seen nothing. Then Vitrenko had suddenly loomed up from the long grass less than a metre away from her. She had swung her gun round but he had caught her hand with insolent ease and held her wrist in a crushing grip. It had been then that she felt him punch her in the solar plexus. But when she looked down she realised that he hadn’t punched her. The handle of a broad-bladed ritual knife had jutted from her body, just below her ribcage. She had looked into Vitrenko’s face. Into his cold, glittering, too-bright green eyes. He had smiled. Then he was gone.

The night had been cloudless and she had lain gazing at the stars. The pain had subsided, although she was aware of the knife as an alien object in her body. She had found she could only breathe in rapid, shallow gasps and had felt that terrible, gradual chill fill her being. It had seemed an eternity before she heard Fabel’s voice calling her name. It could only have been a couple of minutes, but to Maria it had seemed so long that she had actually begun to wonder if she was dead: if this was what death was like, your final moment stretched out infinitely. But then Fabel had been there, bending over her, touching her, talking to her. He had been her link to the living. Fabel her boss. Fabel the father of his team.

But Fabel was not here now, in Cologne. And anyway, he was giving up his career as a policeman. Maria knew that she would never go back to duty. She would resign too. Or she would die here. It was not a thought that troubled her too much. Maria knew that Vitrenko had really already killed her, three years ago in that field. All he would be doing now would be to exorcise Maria’s tortured ghost from the world. Maybe it would have been better if Fabel hadn’t found her. Death would have been better than the hell she’d endured.

And then there had been Frank. Maria knew it was as close to love as she could have come. He had helped her through the worst times. He had been gentle, loving, kind. He had been a killer.