‘I knew he would come,’ she said, suddenly halting her scream. ‘We’ve waited for him to come for so long. But I knew he’d want to say goodbye to you.’

Vitrenko walked around to where Maria was sitting. He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Fabel wanted to get up to protest, to defend Maria, but found that he had lost the power of movement. He watched helplessly as Vitrenko led Maria into a shadowy part of the hall. The woman next to Ursula Kastner was bending down and searching for something beneath the table. She sat up, frowning.

‘Lost something?’ asked Fabel. He recognised her as Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist who had been killed by a bomb the year before. She laughed and made a ‘silly me’ face.

‘My foot …’ she said. ‘I had it here a minute ago …’

Fabel woke up.

He lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He shifted his legs beneath the covers, just to prove that he could move. He heard Susanne breathing, slow and regular in her dreamless sleep. He heard the late-night sounds of Pöseldorf. The occasional car. A group of people exchanging noisy farewells. He swung his legs round and sat up on the edge of the bed, moving slowly so as not to disturb Susanne. His feet brushed against something. He looked down and saw another pair of feet. Black-booted. Massive. He looked up and saw Vasyl Vitrenko standing before him, his emerald eyes sparkling in the dark.

‘Look what I found,’ said Vitrenko, and held out a woman’s dismembered foot.

Fabel woke up. He sat bolt upright, his face, chest and shoulders cold-damp with sweat. His heart pounded. It took him a moment to satisfy himself that this time he was truly awake. Susanne moaned and turned in the bed but did not waken.

He sat still for a long time but found that, when he laid his head back on the pillow, he couldn’t sleep. So many things now buzzed around his head that he could not pin down what was pushing sleep away from his tired brain. He left Susanne in bed, went through to the kitchen and made himself a cup of Friesian tea. He took his cup through to the living room and sat on the sofa.

He had known as soon as he had got out of bed that he was going to read the file. He had known it all evening but had pretended to himself that he could leave it alone. He picked it up. He started to read.

8.

Oliver loved this time of night. The quiet isolation. Cologne glittering against his picture window. He listened to the slightly melancholic jazz that oozed expensively from his Bang & Olufsen system. He leaned back into the soft Italian leather of his chair and sipped at his Scotch and soda, ice tinkling against crystal. It was at this time of night that he could fully contemplate his life: a successful life; a life worth the envy of others; a life expressed through the designer furniture and original art, the twenty-year-old malt and the expensive architecture encasing him. Oliver felt good in his own skin: he had no problems with who he was or what he was.