‘I started to scream and he stopped, but only to hit me. I pushed him away and screamed more. He had locked the door but I got it open and ran down the hall. Then the Polish girl and others from the hotel came to help. When we go back to the room he was already gone.’

‘Why didn’t you tell the police any of this when they were called to the hotel?’ asked Fabel.

‘The manager in the hotel said he didn’t want no trouble. And the agency phoned me and said I was to say nothing. They didn’t want you, I mean the police, making trouble for them.’

‘So you went along with it,’ said Scholz.

‘I had to. But I didn’t want to.’ Mila looked out of the window across the Rhine to Cologne Cathedral, dark against the sky. When she turned back there was an earnestness in her expression. ‘Everyone thought it was nothing. That he just got – how do you say it? – that he got a little carried away. But they didn’t see him. They didn’t see his face or his eyes after he bite me. He was not human no more. He was become a … I don’t know what you say in German. We call such beasts vovkuláka in Ukrainian. You know … a man who become a wolf.’

‘A werewolf,’ said Fabel and looked at Scholz.

3.

Ansgar knew where she worked. He had followed her back from the wholesalers on Monday.

He had sat in his car in the car park and waited for her. It hadn’t been as if he had had a plan: pure instinct had impelled him along a destinationless course. Maybe he really could have a normal relationship with Ekatherina. Maybe he could keep order in his daily life by allowing himself this little piece of chaos. After all, he had done that with this woman before. It was like a sign that he had happened across her again, after all this time. She obviously worked in the restaurant or hotel trade. It was a thought that had never occurred to him, that he might at some time encounter this woman again because she was in the same business as him. Ansgar had shadowed her as she pushed her low bed-cart stacked with purchases across the tarmac to where her small van was parked. Then he had followed her through the city to her café on the north-west fringe of the Altstadt.

And today he had come back. The café had the anonymously trendy look of almost every coffee shop and the name AMAZONIA CYBER-CAFÉ was emblazoned above the large picture window. Ansgar smiled at the choice of name. He thought about going into the café: the chances were that she would not recognise him, but he couldn’t take the risk. Instead he watched from across the street.

Ansgar looked at his watch. His shift started in two hours.