‘Stand,’ she ordered. He obeyed. ‘You can touch me.’

The client ran trembling fingers over her body. Not her breasts or her pudenda, but her arms, her stomach, her thighs. She stood solid, firm and unresponding. The truth was that Andrea enjoyed her work; she enjoyed the feeling of power, of control, that it gave her. She knew that Cologne was full of dominatrixes, but this was something else. Her clients didn’t get off by being ordered around to clean toilets and polish shoes. This was less psychological and more physical. Her clients lusted after her body; wanted to touch her. Sometimes it would end in penetrative sex. Other times, like this, the client had asked for something very particular.

The client removed his hands but his eyes still ranged over her bulk.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked. He nodded.

‘But not the face …’ he said and his voice trembled.

‘Not the face,’ she repeated. ‘I know.’

There was a short pause. Andrea filled her mind with the image of the acne-faced youth who had created a scene in her café and then she slammed her fist into the client’s naked belly. He gave a gasp and buckled slightly. Andrea realised that she hadn’t hit him hard enough; that he wasn’t getting his money’s worth. She placed another image in her mind: a much older image. She hit her client again and he doubled over, suppressing a cry of pain.

Andrea pushed him onto the bed, straddled him and hit him again. And again.

9.

It took nearly four hours for Fabel to drive from Hamburg to Norddeich, slightly longer than usual. It was not a journey that he liked to make much in the winter, unless he took the train. But his mother’s recent heart attack and advancing age meant he felt the need to make the trip more often; and the idea of six hours of solitude in the car there and back had appealed to him. Time to think. However, as the skies grew darker, that appeal started to fade. Friesland is flat; it is hill-less and lies defenceless against the temperaments of the North Sea. As Fabel crossed the landscape he had grown up in, a wind from the west, unopposed by anything resembling a hill, tugged at his steering wheel and the rods of rain against his windscreen became beaded with sleet.

Fabel drove without the radio or the CD-player on, frowning through the rain at the grey ribbon of the A28. He needed the thinking time. He had decided to spend the journey imagining two futures for himself: the one that Bartz had offered, where Fabel’s expensive tastes could more easily be met and where he would be free from a world of horror and violence; but the other offer, made by van Heiden and the BKA, was a lot more attractive than he liked to admit. It was flattering, no matter how much he tried to deny it, to be considered the leading expert in his professional field. Fabel tried hard to view each future objectively. As he did so, he fought to keep something else from his mind: the Cologne file. A distraction he didn’t need. But it kept creeping back into his thoughts.