Maria guessed she had been bundled into the trunk of a car. Or a van. But even that idea had seemed to drift away from her. The fact was that they had tied her wrists and ankles, gagged and blindfolded her, then put some kind of bag over her head. Finally, they had placed what she reckoned to be a set of industrial ear-defenders over her ears. It was all classic special forces stuff: total sensory deprivation to befuddle the victim. Time ceased to exist. Maria was aware that her mind had been cut adrift from her body; she was losing the concept of arms, of legs, of being connected to her nervous system. She wriggled and strained against the bonds so that the rope would burn at the skin of her ankles and wrists. It worked for an instant and the connection to her flesh was reestablished, then faded and the pain became a vague ache lingering on the periphery of her being.
Maria had had no idea how long she’d been in the trunk, or even that the car had stopped moving, until she felt hands on her body, lifting her from the van. She was placed on a hard chair and left for a few minutes, a new bond tight around her
chest and binding her to the chair. The tightness of the rope around her wrists had numbed her hands and the ear-defenders and the blindfold and hood deprived her of any sense of whether she was indoors or outdoors. She thought of how people were executed like this. Deprived of sight and hearing, she wouldn’t even hear the cocking of the gun or sense the presence of her executioner. It would be sudden and immediate: her existence snuffed out in an instant. Probably not the worst way to go, she had thought, but still her heart pounded. Only a few days ago Maria had been surprised at how little she feared death. But she had learned to live again by being someone else; her life had regained some value for her. She wondered if they would ever find her body. She imagined Fabel frowning as he looked down on her corpse, her hair bizarrely dyed.
The ear-defenders were suddenly gone. The hood was snatched from her head. Someone behind her untied the gag. Maria’s pulse quickened even more. Maybe torture would come before death. The blindfold was removed. The sudden restoration of her senses disoriented her and she sat, her head tilted down, blinking in the harsh light.
Her eyes adjusted. A man and a woman sat opposite her.
She appeared to be in a small empty warehouse or industrial unit. The whitewashed walls were naked and broken by a double door at the far end and a large thick sliding metal door to Maria’s right. There was a track system suspended from the ceiling, punctuated by pendant metal hooks. She guessed it was some kind of disused meat-packing factory.
The woman stood up and snapped a glass vial under Maria’s nose. Something powerful hit her system and she was suddenly and painfully alert.
‘I want you to listen to me.’ The man spoke first. His German was thick with a Ukrainian accent. ‘I need you to concentrate. Do you understand?’
Maria nodded.
‘We know who you are, Frau Klee. We also know why you’re here – and that you are acting on your own and without the knowledge, support or sanction of your superiors. You’re completely isolated.’
Maria said nothing.
‘You may be an accomplished police officer, Frau Klee, but when it comes to this line of work you’re a complete amateur. It takes more than a cheap hair-colour job to turn you into a surveillance expert.’
Maria looked at the woman. She was young and remarkably beautiful with bright, pale blue eyes. She wasn’t someone who could merge easily into a crowd. The man frightened Maria. He had the same kind of green eyes as Vitrenko, with that strange, penetrating brightness that so many Ukrainians seemed to have. His hair was almost black, and his pale skin was drawn particularly tight over the Slavic architecture of his face. He had an efficient, lean-muscled look, but Maria got the impression that he was tired.
‘So what happens to me now?’ said Maria. ‘Why have you brought me here instead of just dumping my body in the woods somewhere? Nothing I know is of any use to you.’
The Ukrainian exchanged a smile with the woman next to him.
‘Frau Klee, we have absolutely no intention of doing you any harm whatsoever. As a matter of fact
we
intervened
, to put it mildly, because you were going to get yourself killed. And very soon. Did you really think that Kushnier didn’t know you were on his tail within minutes of him leaving the bar?’
‘Kushnier,’ said the Ukrainian woman. ‘Maxim Kushnier. Former Ukrainian paratrooper. Low-level operative in Vitrenko’s organisation. That was as far as you got … a street-level captain who has probably never met Vitrenko face to face. How the hell did you expect to have Kushnier lead you to Vitrenko?’
‘I didn’t. I thought it was a start.’
‘And it was very nearly the end,’ said the man. He stood up and nodded to the woman who came round behind Maria and cut through her bonds. ‘We were tailing you. Not that you or Kushnier would have noticed. You were both two busy performing that waltz on the Delhoven road.’
‘If we were dancing,’ said Maria massaging her now-free wrists, ‘then I was leading.’
‘Yes …’ said the Ukrainian, with a conciliatory nod. ‘That was impressive. But while you were wandering about lost in the Rhineland countryside, we tidied up your mess.’
‘Dead?’
‘You got him with three shots. Shoulder, neck and one through the kidney. The kidney shot would have caused him agony. Fortunately for him he bled to death from the neck wound.’
Maria felt suddenly sick. She knew she must have hit him, but not finding the car had meant, until now, not confronting the fact that she had taken another human being’s life.
‘So, you see,’ the Ukrainian said, ‘you’re now officially working outside the law. As are we.’
‘Who are you?’ Maria took the glass of water offered by the woman.
‘We are your new partners.’
‘Ukrainian intelligence?’
‘No. We’re not SBU. Technically, we’re police officers. I am Captain Taras Buslenko of the
Sokil
. It means “Falcon” … we are an anti-organised-crime Spetsnaz. And this is Captain Olga Sarapenko of the Kiev city militia, similar to your
Schutzpolizei
. Captain Sarapenko is part of the Kiev police’s anti-mafia unit.’
‘You’re after Vitrenko?’ asked Maria.
‘Yes. And he’s after us. What you see here are the remains of a seven-strong special unit put together to come here and …
deal
with Vitrenko.’
‘You’re planning to carry out an illegal assassination on German soil?’
‘Isn’t that exactly what you had planned to do yourself, if you got the chance?’
Maria ignored the question. ‘You said there were seven of you. Where are the others?’
‘Three dead. There were two traitors in the group. We met at an isolated hunting lodge in Ukraine. No one knew about it. By the time we worked out it was two of our own and not an attacking force, we were already exposed. Only three of us made it out of the woods, then Belotserkovsky took it in the back.’
‘My fault …’ The pain showed on Olga Sarapenko’s face. ‘I was injured and he was helping to get me out.’
‘I was supposed to be providing cover,’ said Buslenko. A silence fell between them and Maria could see that they were somewhere and sometime else. She knew what it was like to live and relive an experience like that.
‘So why didn’t you re-form a complete unit?’ she asked.
‘No time and no point,’ said Buslenko. ‘Time’s on Vitrenko’s side. We have to get to him before he gets to us. Hopefully, Vitrenko will have assumed that we have aborted the mission … that Captain Sarapenko and I are running scared. We couldn’t be sure that if we did rebuild a unit that we wouldn’t have infiltrators again. But we know we can trust each other. There’s only one other person we can rely on …’
‘Who?’
‘You,’ Buslenko said, handing Maria back her handgun.
The crowd went wild. Andrea stood before them, her body dark and sleek with fake tan and body oil, her hatred and anger hidden behind a searchlight-white smile that beamed across the expanse of the hall. The music Andrea had chosen thudded hard and harsh in the hall and all the time she thought about the stupid, soft little tart she had once been. This, now, for all to see, was the real Andrea Sandow. Andrea the Amazon. Each pose drew a roar of appreciation from the crowd. She improvised a final optional pose at the end of her routine: Overhead Victory. Her biceps, which were bigger than those of any of the other competitors, bunched high with a rippling topography of vein and sinew. The crowd cheered and many rose to their feet. She stood down to Relaxed Front and bowed low to the audience. She turned sideways with a bounce and moved quickly to the side of the stage where the other
competitors waited. Maxine smiled a broad smile and nodded respectfully through her applause. And with that Andrea knew she had won. All the pain, all the anguish and sacrifice had led to this point. What no one in the auditorium knew was that it wasn’t just her competitors she had defeated.
Maxine hugged her warmly and genuinely as soon as the judges announced their decision. Andrea felt like crying but, of course, the tears wouldn’t come. The other contestants congratulated her, but she could see that only Maxine was genuinely pleased for her. Andrea felt bad, knowing that if things had been the other way around she would not have been so generous.
‘We’ll get pissed tonight,’ Maxine said in English. ‘Competition’s over … a week of indulgence before getting back to the grind?’
‘The champagne is definitely on me,’ said Andrea and they entered the dressing room. Three people waited for them, one of whom she recognised as Herr Waldheim, a member of the competition’s organising committee.
‘This is Herr Dr Gabriel and his nurse, Frau Bosbach.’ Waldheim introduced the other two. ‘They are here on behalf of the bodybuilding association to do a random blood test, if you have no objections.’
‘Of course not,’ Andrea said and felt her jaws ache from the effort of keeping her smile in place.
At Fabel’s suggestion they left the car parked and he and Scholz walked to St Ursula’s. The church sat in a small square, hemmed in by neighbouring
buildings. There was a bar-restaurant at one end of the square and a parochial house jammed against the flank of the church.
‘Where was Sabine Jordanski found?’ Fabel asked.
‘Over there, behind the church.’
Fabel and the others followed Scholz round the side of the church. As with the scene of Melissa Schenker’s murder, it was concealed from view. Another hidden death trap.
‘Where did she live?’
‘Her apartment was around the corner and over on Gereonswall.’ Scholz indicated the street that swept away from them.
‘Something doesn’t make sense …’ Fabel looked back in the direction of the city.
‘What?’ asked Scholz.
‘I’m convinced that the killer lies in wait for his victims. But the church is on the wrong side. She wouldn’t have passed by here.’
Scholz smiled grimly and shook his head. ‘She was with friends when she came home. They split up here and headed off. Even if she had come this way, the killer couldn’t have grabbed her. She was with witnesses.’
‘Then he must have either persuaded or forced her to come up here.’
‘Must have.’
‘That could mean that this specific church
does
have a significance. There was no sign of sexual contact?’ Fabel asked although he knew the answer.
‘None,’ answered Tansu. ‘No semen, no evidence of sexual assault.’
The four detectives stood looking at the ghost of a murder scene. The second they’d examined that
day. Fabel was beginning to understand the dynamic of this small team: Scholz acted as if he wasn’t the boss, Kris and Tansu called him Benni and never
Chef
, but the truth was that he steered his team probably more strictly than Fabel did his. Kris was the apprentice: quietly gathering the gems of wisdom from Scholz’s feet. Tansu was strong-willed and intelligent, but still unsure of her feet and unwilling to challenge Scholz. It was clear that he had closed his mind to Tansu’s theory about the rape victim in ’ninety-nine. Fabel, on the other hand, could see her reasoning.
‘There’s something you’ve got to see.’ Scholz hunched up his shoulders against the cold and led Fabel towards the vast dark doors of St Ursula’s. Fabel followed him into the church, gazing up at the vaulted ceilings and the stained glass that burned dully against the winter light beyond.
‘Very nice.’
‘That’s not what I wanted to show you.’ Scholz guided Fabel to a vast reinforced door immediately to the right of the main entrance.
‘We’ll stay here,’ said Tansu. ‘It gives me the creeps down there.’
Fabel and Scholz went down stone steps into the crypt of the church.
‘This is open to the public during the day, but it’s monitored constantly by CCTV. And that massive door you saw is shut tight and time-locked at night.’
Fabel stopped in his tracks. The vaulted ceiling was whitewashed, with gilded details. Apart from that, it was as if the whole space had been lined with gold. But it was what the gold covered that fascinated Fabel.
‘The Golden Chamber …’ explained Scholz.
‘St Ursula’s is the second-oldest Romanesque church in Cologne. As you saw, the city has kind of encroached on its space, but there used to be an extensive graveyard outside dating back to Roman times.’
Fabel stared all around the chamber. The details on the walls were of bones and skulls. Real bones and skulls, pressed into the mortar of the walls and arranged in geometric patterns. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All gilded. The art of death. There were small alcoves pressed into the walls of the vault. Each contained a plaster bust.
‘Do you know the legend of St Ursula?’ asked Scholz.
Fabel shook his head. He was still taking in the detail of the chamber. So many dead. Gilded human remains used as ornament. It was awe-inspiring. And gross.
‘Ursula was a British princess who travelled here with eleven thousand virgins. Unfortunately, when they arrived Cologne was besieged by a horde of horny Huns from the East. Ursula and her virgins all died rather than lose their honour, or something like that.’ Scholz laughed. ‘You’d be pushed to find eleven thousand virgins in Cologne these days. Anyway, the story started out that there were eleven virgins with St Ursula, but you know what we’re like here in Cologne … we started off by bumping it up it up to eleven hundred, then eleven thousand. Anyway, there’s every reason to believe that there was some kind of martyrdom involving virgins around the fifth century. Story goes that they were buried in the graveyard here. When the graveyard was dug up, the Golden Chamber was built to house and display the remains. The truth is more likely to
be that these bones date from across a couple of centuries. There are also dozens of ossuaries, and these plaster busts contain the remains of those wealthy enough to have a special place put aside for them.