She glanced at her watch. She had a couple of hours to spare before she met the journalist from the new e-zine. It sounded like an interesting venture, and it never hurt to find another outlet for one’s work in these days when professional prowess was no longer measured by how well one taught one’s students. Margarethe walked through the Schnoor and cut down one of the alleys leading to the swollen Weser, whose mud-coloured waters were flowing fast in spring spate. She walked along the river for a few minutes, then turned into the city’s most bizarre street, the Böttcherstrasse, which combined disparate elements of Gothic, Art Nouveau and pure fantasy, a product of the imagination of local artists and architects in the 1920s, funded by the inventor of decaffeinated coffee. It always amused Margarethe to think that such richness of style had come from so bloodless a product.

She turned left at the end of the street and made for her favourite city-centre bar, the Kleiner Ratskeller. A couple of glasses of Bremer Weisse and a steaming plate of their hearty knipe and she’d have recovered her strength, ready for whatever her interviewer had to throw at her.

Those of her fellow diners who noticed her could have had no idea that by morning they’d be witnesses in a murder investigation.

Chapter 17

17

His hands moved deftly over the controls of the small crane that lifted his Volkswagen from the rear deck of the Wilhelmina Rosen. This was the moment when he shifted from one life into the other, when he stopped being the respected skipper of a fine-looking Rhineship and turned into a walking death warrant. Tonight, he would be lit up once more, celebrating his latest triumph between the thighs of some Bremen bitch.

He stretched his arms across his broad chest and hugged himself. If they only knew what they were taking into themselves when they spread their legs for him. He was the one who made light grow out of darkness. He’d transformed his own blackness into something that glowed like a jewel inside him and now he was turning that brightness on the shadowy secrets of the past, making them obvious to the world.

Later rather than sooner, he suspected, someone in law enforcement would realize that all his victims had turned humans into lab rats for their own selfish ends. Once the connection was established, the next step would be inevitable. Police departments were notoriously leaky. It would be all over the media. As soon as people realized the crimes that were being committed in the name of science, the mind fucks would have to stop. There would be a public outcry, things would have to change. He’d be able to stop then.