It was about twenty past noon when Viktor pulled up. Maria was in no doubt that this was Viktor. He had ‘organised crime, lower echelons’ written all over him – his clothes, his car. It sometimes felt as if Vasyl Vitrenko and his lieutenants were spectres, without form. It had only been at the very end of a long and detailed investigation that Fabel and Maria had actually come face to face with Vitrenko, and then only for a few deadly minutes. It was through people like Viktor that the Vitrenko organisation had form and visibility. Conspicuous visibility as far as Viktor was concerned. He was a large man, over two metres in height. He wore a long black leather coat that strained to contain his massive shoulders and his hair was dyed bright blond. The vehicle he double-parked outside the apartment block was a vast 1960s American ocean liner of a car. Maria took several photographs and made her notes. She guessed that Viktor would not be in the apartment building long, so she turned the key in the ignition of her own car and readied herself.

As it happened, Viktor was in the building for nearly half an hour. A delivery van came along the street and could not pass Viktor’s Chrysler and the driver blasted his horn several times impatiently. When Viktor did eventually emerge, carrying a package bound in black plastic, the driver leaned from his cab window and berated the Ukrainian loudly. Viktor ignored him completely, walked round the Chrysler, opened the cavernous trunk and dropped the package in. Then, in the same unhurried manner, he walked over to the delivery van, wrenched the door open, pulled the driver from his cabin and head-butted him with such force that the back of the man’s head slammed into the side of the van and he slid unconscious onto the road. Viktor calmly took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood that had splashed on his face, walked back to the car and drove off to where the narrow residential street joined the main road, the Weichselring, that looped around Chorweiler like a restraining lasso.

‘That’s my boy,’ Maria said to herself. ‘You’re definitely Viktor.’ She pulled out and realised that she now had the same problem that the van driver had had: the van now prevented her from following Viktor’s car. She looked at the van driver lying crumpled on the ground. In the same situation in Hamburg she would have given up the pursuit and made sure that the driver was okay. But this wasn’t Hamburg. Slamming the Saxo into reverse, Maria cut up a side street. On the way in she had driven up Mercatorstrasse, the main route into Chorweiler and guessed that Viktor would be heading along Weichselring in its direction.