Sabine Jordanski seemed to be a typical Cologner: exuberant, friendly, fun-loving. She was twenty-six and had been working at the salon for four years. There was no boyfriend at the time of her death, or at least no permanent boyfriend who could be traced, but it would have appeared that this was a strictly temporary situation. Sabine had enjoyed the attentions of several young men. On the night of her death she had been seen talking earlier to three men, all of whom had been traced and eliminated from the police’s inquiries. The group of six girls had visited four bars that night. All had been drinking but none was drunk. The girls had walked together to Sabine’s apartment in Gereonswall at about two in the morning and had said goodnight to her outside. There had been several people milling around, but no one whom the girls particularly noticed. No one had seen Sabine go into her apartment, but all had assumed that was what she had done.

She was found the next morning in an alley only two hundred metres from her apartment building. She had been strangled with a red tie which had been left at the scene, partially stripped and 0.468 kilos of flesh had been removed from her right buttock. Time of death had been estimated at around the time her friends had said goodnight to her. Someone had been waiting for her, or had been following the group around the city, stalking them like a lion waiting for a straggler to become separated from the herd.

Sabine Jordanski had been a cheerful, uncomplicated girl who had not demanded much from life. Fabel bit into the salami roll and looked at the scene-of-crime photographs again. Sabine’s heavy, white buttocks lay exposed. The excised trench in the right buttock stood out with violent vividness against the paleness of the skin. Scholz had been right: the killer had executed his butchery with a swift precision. There was no raggedness, no tentative first cuts. This guy had known what he was doing. Fabel suddenly realised that he was chewing a mouthful of salami while looking at images of a mutilated corpse. In that moment the reasons he had sought escape from the Murder Commission crystallised. What had he become?

Fabel closed the file, finished his hurried lunch and headed back out onto the autobahn towards Cologne.

5.

Ansgar’s expression was one of anguish. He sat, knowing what he was going to do but trying to persuade himself that he was not going to do it. He knew he had times of weakness. Times like this, when he had half an hour to spare before he started his shift at the restaurant.