3.00 p.m., Monday, 22 March: Polizeipräsidium, Hamburg The conference room of the Mordkommission would have had the look of a library reading room had it not been for the scene-of-crime photographs that were taped to the incident board, alongside the blown-up images of the notes left in the hands of all three victims. The cherrywood table was completely covered with books of all sizes. Some had the glossy sheen of the freshly published, while others were handworn and a couple were clearly antiquarian volumes. Fabel’s contribution had been the books he had bought from the Jensen Buchhandlung – three copies of Gerhard Weiss’s thriller, a copy of Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, a volume of Hans Christian Andersen and one of Charles Perrault. Anna Wolff had gathered the others from the Hamburg Zentralbibliothek library. Anna Wolff, Maria Klee and Werner Meyer were already there when Fabel arrived. Kommissar Klatt, from the Schleswig-Holstein KriPo also sat with them but, although the team chatted animatedly with Klatt, there was something about their body language that set the newcomer apart.
