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this one.’
    ‘Maybe it wasn’t The Matrix I saw him in. I used to watch a lot of Westerns when I was a kid,’ said Werner. ‘You know … when the cavalry are in hostile Red Indian territory but they have to rely on a native tracker from the same tribe to get them through. Why do I get the feeling Kroeger is as likely to take scalps as the bad guys?’
    ‘He’s an odd one, that’s all, Werner. As far as I can remember I’ve never seen Kroeger wear feathers in his hair.’
    ‘Suppose not.’ Werner rasped a shovel of hand across his stubble-cut scalp. ‘But I have to admit to being out of my depth with all of this electronic stuff, Jan. I have never been able to understand these social networking sites. Why do people need to use computers to connect with each other, piling all of their personal stuff out there on the internet? Yet if you sit next to one of them on the S-Bahn, you can’t have a conversation with them because they’re plugged into their mp3 players.’
    ‘That’s the technological society for you,’ said Fabel. ‘All technology and no society.’

    Most of the officers working in the Presidium took lunch in its huge canteen. Fabel frequently used it himself but often preferred to take three-quarters of an hour in the middle of the day to get out of the Commission. Thinking time, he liked to call it. He was just about to leave the building when a bleep from his cellphone alerted him that he had received a text message.
    Arrived safely Wiesbaden. Weather crap. Hotel soulless. Phone tonight. Sx
    He sighed. Fabel could never understand why Susanne sent him texts: she knew he wouldn’t reply to them. It took him too long to fiddle around with the phone keys and even then it was all wrong or he would accidentally delete the two-sentence reply it had taken him fifteen minutes to compose. Why didn’t people simply talk to each other any more? The thought hit him and he remembered Werner saying pretty much the same. Fabel resigned himself to Old Farthood.
    One of the places Fabel favoured for lunch was a café on one of the dozens of canals that criss-crossed the city. This particular café was on the Alsterstreek canal, next to the Winterhuder Fährhaus, where tourists and locals would catch the red and white water buses that criss-crossed the Alster. Sitting below the city that surrounded it and tucked in tight to the bridge, the café gave Fabel an odd sense of safety. Its location made it handy for the Presidium and if the weather was half decent he could sit out at one of the tables by the railings that ran along the side of the Alsterstreek and watch the swans patrol the waterway. Being beside the water, too, comforted Fabel, calmed him; which was strange, because, as a boy growing up in Norddeich, Fabel had been just a little afraid of the water; specifically of the sea. He had always put it down to the fear of flooding that was instinctive in East Frisians and their neighbours, the Dutch. Fabel’s boyhood home had been behind a dyke and there had been nights in his childhood – not many, but a few – when he would lie awake thinking about the dark mass of sea held back by a simple man-made earthwork.
    A waiter came over to wipe down the table before taking Fabel’s order. He greeted him with a smile and asked him how he was. It was a ritual of recognition: Fabel was a known face here, but he knew that none of the staff would have any idea what it was that he did for a living, and that somehow added to his sense of comfort. It was something he had often wondered about: what people assumed about him, not knowing that his daily business was all about violence and death. Did he look like an academic, which is what he would prefer them to think, or did they take him for some kind of businessman? The latter thought depressed him.
    Fabel had given a lot of thought to how people perceived him, and how they perceived each other; mainly because it was something that came up so frequently when