Still, he thought, it wouldn’t hurt to check it out on the web. He loaded his search engine and typed in, ‘Bremen + murder + psychology + lecturer’, going for the most recent one first. Seconds later, he was looking at a German newspaper report. Luckily, he’d learned German at school and had kept it up so he could read scientific papers. But even if he hadn’t been able to understand it, one thing would have leapt out like a firework in the night sky.

Tony stared at the screen, scarcely able to believe his eyes. There had to be a mistake. His hands clenched into fists and his face closed in a frown. He rubbed his temples with his knuckles, trying to make sense of what he was reading.

There was, however, no room for doubt. There couldn’t be two Margarethe Schillings who were psychologists attached to Bremen University. That was beyond the bounds of credibility. But equally impossible was the idea that Margarethe Schilling was dead at the hands of a serial killer.

He could see her face now. Wide mouth grinning at something someone had said, laughter lines scored in the corners of her eyes. Hard to believe any psychologist could have found enough in the world to laugh at to etch them so deep. Blonde hair loose, impatiently pushed back behind her ears when she was making a point in debate. Lively, intelligent, argumentative to the point of being infuriating.

They had met at a symposium in Hamburg three years before. Tony had been interested in the relationship between religious belief and certain types of serial offender, and Margarethe’s experimental work had intrigued him. He’d listened to her paper and found several points he wanted to discuss with her. So they’d gone off to a bar with a few others and missed the official banquet, so wrapped up had they been in their discussion.

They’d found a lot of common ground, him and Margarethe. So much so that she’d persuaded him to change his flight and come back to Bremen with her for a couple of days so he could see her research results at first hand. It had been a fascinating experience, and the vigorous exchange of information and ideas had exhilarated him. She’d even put him up in the spare room of the charming nineteenth-century barn conversion she shared with her husband Kurt and their son Hartmut in a small village near an artists’ colony a dozen miles from the city.