Fabel nodded. ‘But there must be something that brought these girls to his attention. Not just the fact that they had his particular taste in body shape. He’s seen them before the night he killed them. Somehow and somewhere there is a commonality.’

Fabel stared at one of the ossuary wall panels. It stared back at him from the dark sockets of a gilded skull. He turned from its hollow gaze and made his way to the steps out of the Golden Chamber. ‘When we get back to your office, I’d like to go over the files again. I know we’re missing it.’

8.

‘What we are talking about is committing murder.’ Buslenko leaned on the table and held Maria in a searchlight gaze. She hated his eyes. Bright and hard like diamond-cut emeralds. So like Vitrenko’s eyes. ‘Let’s be clear on that. We’re here to break the very law that it is your duty to uphold. You are a Murder Commission detective, Maria … you should know more than anyone that there is nothing that legally justifies the homicide of Vasyl Vitrenko.’

‘It’s morally justifiable …’ she said.

‘That’s not the issue. If we’re caught, you’ll go to prison. I just want to make that clear. If you want to walk away from this, then you can do so now. But go back to Hamburg … I don’t want you getting in our way here.’

‘I know the stakes,’ said Maria. ‘I’ll do anything to nail that bastard. He finished me as a police officer so I don’t see why I should act like one when it comes to bringing him down.’

‘Okay …’ Buslenko rolled out a street map of Cologne. It was no ordinary driver’s city guide and Maria guessed it was the kind of map that every intelligence agency in the world would have of cities in every other country. There were a number of small red squares glued to the map. ‘These are the centres – or at least the ones we know about – from which the Vitrenko outfit operates. We have good intelligence on these, but we know these aren’t the key locations. We know nothing about those. And we can be pretty sure that Vitrenko has changed his appearance significantly. He could be right under our noses and we wouldn’t know it. But we do have intelligence on this piece of shit …’ Buslenko laid a photograph on the table. ‘This is Valeri Molokov, the Russian. In fact, in many ways Molokov is a Russian version of Vitrenko. The main difference is that Molokov is not quite as smart, not quite as deadly. And where Vitrenko sees himself as something other, something better, than a common criminal and still thinks he’s running a military operation, Molokov, despite having a police Spetsnaz background, is quite comfortable with his role as a common or garden mafia boss.’

‘Molokov was a police officer?’ asked Maria.