‘That he liked to bite?’
‘That he liked big bottoms. Like mine.’
‘What happened? I mean at the hotel.’
‘We went up to the room and he asked me to take off my clothes. Then he started to touch my bottom.’ Mila talked as if she was describing an everyday occurrence, without the slightest hint of embarrassment. ‘Then he took his clothes off and I thought that would be it, that we would have normal sex. But then he pushed me onto the bed, very rough. I started to get worried, but he talked all calm and asked if he could bite me on the bottom. I thought he meant pretend bites. But then he attacked me, like he was an animal. He bit me really hard. I swear he was trying to take a chunk out of me…’
Fabel and Scholz exchanged a look. ‘Go on, Mila,’ said Fabel.
‘I started to scream and he stopped, but only to hit me. I pushed him away and screamed more. He had locked the door but I got it open and ran down the hall. Then the Polish girl and others from the hotel came to help. When we go back to the room he was already gone.’
‘Why didn’t you tell the police any of this when they were called to the hotel?’ asked Fabel.
‘The manager in the hotel said he didn’t want no trouble. And the agency phoned me and said I was to say nothing. They didn’t want you, I mean the police, making trouble for them.’
‘So you went along with it,’ said Scholz.
‘I had to. But I didn’t want to.’ Mila looked out of the window across the Rhine to Cologne Cathedral, dark against the sky. When she turned back there was an earnestness in her expression. ‘Everyone thought it was nothing. That he just got – how do you say it? – that he got a little carried away. But they didn’t see him. They didn’t see his face or his eyes after he bite me. He was not human no more. He was become a… I don’t know what you say in German. We call such beasts vovkulaka in Ukrainian. You know… a man who become a wolf.’
‘A werewolf,’ said Fabel and looked at Scholz.
3.
Ansgar knew where she worked. He had followed her back from the wholesalers on Monday.
He had sat in his car in the car park and waited for her. It hadn’t been as if he had had a plan: pure instinct had impelled him along a destinationless course. Maybe he really could have a normal relationship with Ekatherina. Maybe he could keep order in his daily life by allowing himself this little piece of chaos. After all, he had done that with this woman before. It was like a sign that he had happened across her again, after all this time. She obviously worked in the restaurant or hotel trade. It was a thought that had never occurred to him, that he might at some time encounter this woman again because she was in the same business as him. Ansgar had shadowed her as she pushed her low bed-cart stacked with purchases across the tarmac to where her small van was parked. Then he had followed her through the city to her cafe on the north-west fringe of the Altstadt.
And today he had come back. The cafe had the anonymously trendy look of almost every coffee shop and the name AMAZONIA CYBER-CAFE was emblazoned above the large picture window. Ansgar smiled at the choice of name. He thought about going into the cafe: the chances were that she would not recognise him, but he couldn’t take the risk. Instead he watched from across the street.
Ansgar looked at his watch. His shift started in two hours.
He had until then.
4.
‘Those papers looked pretty genuine,’ said Scholz as they drove across the bridge to Cologne’s Left Bank. ‘But I’d bet you anything you like that they’re fakes.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fabel. Mila had insisted that she was in Germany of her own free will and that she chose to do what she did for a living. She certainly hadn’t looked oppressed, but of course it was difficult to tell. Prostitution, legal or otherwise, was seldom a profession of completely free choice. And Mila’s reluctance to be seen talking to two policemen had to do with something more than the business she was in. Scholz had treated her with nothing less than contempt. Fabel liked Scholz, his laid-back manner and his friendliness, but the Cologne officer’s attitude towards women troubled him. Fabel had always had female officers in his team, but he had never had to make a conscious effort to do so. Everyone was picked on their merits. It bothered Fabel to see how Scholz was almost dismissive of Tansu, who was clearly a capable officer. And there was something about his manner with Mila that bothered him.
The MediaPark on the northern fringe of the Neustadt area was a reasonably new element in Cologne’s landscape.
‘The Cologne Tower has only been open for about four years. There’s still quite a bit of office space to fill,’ explained Scholz as they circled through the streets looking for somewhere to park. Eventually they used an underground car park and walked through the chill drizzle to the bright glass and steel of the Cologne Tower. InterSperse Media was on the fifth floor.
There was no reception as such and most of the people milling about the open-plan office space or working at workstations were in their twenties or early thirties. Everyone was dressed in casual sweat-tops or T-shirts and jeans. In environments like this, Fabel always felt he belonged to another era. Despite considering himself to be liberal-minded, he often found such situations provoked the reactionary in him: the northern Lutheran who believed that people should still dress smartly for work; that the only men who should wear earrings were pirates; that tattoos on women were uncomely.
‘Cool place…’ said Scholz, clearly untouched by the same conservatism. A fat young woman came over to them. Despite her near-obesity, she wore jeans and a top that left her too-ample midriff exposed. Predictably she had a piercing, a ring through her nostril.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked in a tone that suggested she would rather do anything else but help. Scholz showed her his police ID and her cloudy expression dimmed further.
‘We want to see David Littger.’
‘You’ll have to wait – he’s in a meeting.’
Scholz smiled indulgently, as if she were a child who had said something cutely naive. ‘No, no… you see, we don’t have to wait. This is a murder inquiry so get him now or we’ll walk into his meeting. Clear?’
The young woman stormed off, presenting the policemen with her bustling rotund figure from the rear.
‘She should be more willing to help,’ said Scholz. ‘Christ knows what our guy would do if he ever saw that arse. That would keep him in stew for six months.’
Fabel laughed despite himself. The girl returned after a minute and sulkily showed them into the only meeting room, a glass box in the centre of the office. There was a large conference table with an impossibly thin computer-display screen in the centre, a cordless keyboard and mouse. Three media types stood up and left as Fabel and Scholz entered. Scholz spoke to the remaining man.
‘You David Littger?’ Scholz asked and sat down at the table uninvited. Fabel remained standing by the door. Littger nodded, eyeing both policemen suspiciously. He was in his early thirties, with cropped-short sand-coloured hair and stubble grown to disguise a weak jaw. ‘I’m Commissar Scholz, this is Principal Chief Commissar Fabel. We’re here to talk about one of the websites you host and did the design for.’
‘I’m afraid I will not divulge any such information. InterSperse Media is bound by strict commercial-confidentiality rules-’
‘Listen, pencil-dick,’ said Scholz, still smiling as if conducting a perfectly pleasant conversation with an acquaintance. ‘I am not here to fuck about. This is a multiple-murder inquiry and in my pocket I have a warrant from the Staatsanwalt’s office. If you force me to exercise this warrant, your offices will be closed to your staff, all of your files seized and your operation will be shut down for as long as it takes us to find the information we need. Now, you don’t want that and I don’t want that, because if I have to do that it will take me much longer to find the sick pervs who run the site. I will also take it as read that you have obstructed us for some reason. Maybe you’re into this scene as well and are more “hands-on” than you want to admit. In which case you and I will be seeing a great deal of each other over the next twenty-four hours. And it’ll be at my place, not yours.’