him, unmistakable with her mane of thick dark hair now completely uncovered and the preposterous red and green rucksack on her back, was Nazreem climbing into the back of a black taxi.
For a moment Marcus stared in sheer disbelief. He wanted to call down to her, not that he would have been heard, but he realised he had no idea what he would have said. He was literally speechless. The cab pulled out into the crawling traffic, moving at little more than walking pace at best. He could run down the stairs and be out in the street in less time than it would take the cab driver to reach the next corner, barely twenty yards away. But what would be the point? If she wanted to slip away without telling him, there was nothing he could do about it. And despite the rising lump in his throat, he didn’t believe that. If she had not wanted to see him again, there had been no need even to mention that she was coming to the country, let alone ask him to meet her at the airport. No, she would be back and she would explain. If she wanted to.
It was then that he noticed the bearded man with dark glasses on the other side of the street folding up a copy of a newspaper and climbing into a black Mercedes with tinted windows. There was something that for a second seemed disconcertingly familiar. Notabout the car; black Mercedes were common enough, particularly as chauffeured cars, the sort you routinely saw waiting to pick up guests at the airport or outside hotels. Not hotels like this, though.
11
Munich
Lieutenant Karl Weinert of the Bavarian Kriminalpolizei paced up and down in the corridor outside the forensic laboratory of the Landeskriminalamt in Munich’s Maillinger Strasse. He had been there for twenty minutes already and he was not a man accustomed to being kept waiting, especially when he had been told the results were ready.
It was not as if he was expecting much. The odds on getting any sort of identification were slim, but under the circumstances they had not much else to go on. In all his years in the force he had seen more than his share of gruesome sights: girls imported by people traffickers and kept as prostitutes in conditions that would have had animal rights campaigners up in arms, horrific facial scars and physical mutilations inflicted on victims in Turkish gang wars, and more recently the cynically brutal, almost wanton slayings that were the mark of encroachment by Russian Mafiosi. But he had never seen anything quite as grotesque as this.
The bumpkin provincial officers in the little town of Altötting, used to little more than crowd control and the occasional outbreak of pickpocketing during pilgrimages to the local shrine, had been overwhelmed . The town police chief had breathed a visible sigh of relief at being able to hand over to the big boys from the state criminal police.
Weinert and Richard Hulpe, his regular collaborator, however, had not been 100 per cent sure they weren’t the victims of some sort of practical joke, until they had got there and seen the evidence themselves. He was still straining even to imagine what sort of warped and seriously sick mentality could conceive of having such a vile parcel delivered – by an apparently anonymous courier service (they were working on that) – to a nun in the chapel of one of the holiest shrines in the country. Unsurprisingly, the good sister was still in a state of shock.
They had found it difficult even to start an investigation on the spot; there seemed little point in conducting interviews at random amongst an extensive religious community or even the local lay people employed, but it would have to be done. Under the circumstances he found it more than incredible that the perpetrator could be local, but it was the first rule of police procedure that the murderer usually knew his (or her) victim.
The trouble in this case was establishing the identity of the victim. There were no reports of any missing persons in the Altötting area, and certainly
For a moment Marcus stared in sheer disbelief. He wanted to call down to her, not that he would have been heard, but he realised he had no idea what he would have said. He was literally speechless. The cab pulled out into the crawling traffic, moving at little more than walking pace at best. He could run down the stairs and be out in the street in less time than it would take the cab driver to reach the next corner, barely twenty yards away. But what would be the point? If she wanted to slip away without telling him, there was nothing he could do about it. And despite the rising lump in his throat, he didn’t believe that. If she had not wanted to see him again, there had been no need even to mention that she was coming to the country, let alone ask him to meet her at the airport. No, she would be back and she would explain. If she wanted to.
It was then that he noticed the bearded man with dark glasses on the other side of the street folding up a copy of a newspaper and climbing into a black Mercedes with tinted windows. There was something that for a second seemed disconcertingly familiar. Notabout the car; black Mercedes were common enough, particularly as chauffeured cars, the sort you routinely saw waiting to pick up guests at the airport or outside hotels. Not hotels like this, though.
11
Munich
Lieutenant Karl Weinert of the Bavarian Kriminalpolizei paced up and down in the corridor outside the forensic laboratory of the Landeskriminalamt in Munich’s Maillinger Strasse. He had been there for twenty minutes already and he was not a man accustomed to being kept waiting, especially when he had been told the results were ready.
It was not as if he was expecting much. The odds on getting any sort of identification were slim, but under the circumstances they had not much else to go on. In all his years in the force he had seen more than his share of gruesome sights: girls imported by people traffickers and kept as prostitutes in conditions that would have had animal rights campaigners up in arms, horrific facial scars and physical mutilations inflicted on victims in Turkish gang wars, and more recently the cynically brutal, almost wanton slayings that were the mark of encroachment by Russian Mafiosi. But he had never seen anything quite as grotesque as this.
The bumpkin provincial officers in the little town of Altötting, used to little more than crowd control and the occasional outbreak of pickpocketing during pilgrimages to the local shrine, had been overwhelmed . The town police chief had breathed a visible sigh of relief at being able to hand over to the big boys from the state criminal police.
Weinert and Richard Hulpe, his regular collaborator, however, had not been 100 per cent sure they weren’t the victims of some sort of practical joke, until they had got there and seen the evidence themselves. He was still straining even to imagine what sort of warped and seriously sick mentality could conceive of having such a vile parcel delivered – by an apparently anonymous courier service (they were working on that) – to a nun in the chapel of one of the holiest shrines in the country. Unsurprisingly, the good sister was still in a state of shock.
They had found it difficult even to start an investigation on the spot; there seemed little point in conducting interviews at random amongst an extensive religious community or even the local lay people employed, but it would have to be done. Under the circumstances he found it more than incredible that the perpetrator could be local, but it was the first rule of police procedure that the murderer usually knew his (or her) victim.
The trouble in this case was establishing the identity of the victim. There were no reports of any missing persons in the Altötting area, and certainly
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