For Fabel, the focus of his mistrust was the hidden machinery of the state: the deep, internal organs of a new democracy that had been transplanted from a dying dictatorship. And right at the centre of that focus, in the spotlight of Fabel’s distrust, was the BND.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst had been set up in 1956. It was part of the machinery of the Cold War, the counter to the East German Stasi, or Staatssicherheitsdienst. The first director of the BND had been General Gehlen. The truth was that the BND had been operating since the end of the Second World War as the Organisation Gehlen. Gehlen had been a general in the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence service, which had planted spies in the United Kingdom, the United States and around the world. The Abwehr had also operated as a counter-espionage unit, tracking down resistance agents and allied spies in occupied Europe. In its duties it had displayed a slightly smaller appetite for torture than the Gestapo or the SS. After the war, the Americans faced a new threat, Soviet Communism, and found themselves naked of any meaningful east-facing intelligence network. But they knew people who had such a network: the Germans. So the ‘South German Economic Development Agency’ was set up in Pullach, near Munich, and Gehlen was put in charge and told by the Allies he could have access to any personnel he needed.

Gehlen toured the internment camps and liberated dozens of SS men to join the new intelligence network. And he did so with the full cooperation and consent of the Allies. Now was not the time, apparently, to get sentimental over a few million Jews.

The Organisation Gehlen, and the BND that succeeded it, had been far from successful. The East German Stasi had infiltrated the organisation from the earliest days and there had been a number of spectacular and very public failures. After the reunification of Germany, the BND found itself without its original raison d’être, and started to seek a new role. The fight against terrorism, in which it had been engaged since the late 1960s, became a more central function. But now there were emergent Rechtsradikale neo-Nazi groups as well as the established left-wing brands like the Rote-Armee-Fraktion to contend with. In the mid-nineties it had been decided that the BND should become involved in the fight against organised crime, something that Fabel and other career policemen had viewed with profound scepticism. Fabel was aware that the evil machineries of state that the Nazis had emplaced cast long and dark shadows. And for Fabel, the BND lay half hidden in those shadows. Fabel did not trust the BND. Volker was BND.

A few clouds scudded across an otherwise bright sky. Fabel’s gaze through the window and across the city remained unfixed, as if he were looking beyond the visible. From Volker to Klugmann. From the BND to GSG₉.

Fabel had Klugmann’s adulterated personnel file on his desk. He turned from the window and looked again at the photograph. Klugmann’s position within the investigation had shifted. The face in the file was the same face, but now Fabel saw it anew, read the features differently. He was pretty certain that Klugmann was an agent of GSG9, which, technically, kept his status as a policeman. GSG9 – Grenzschutzgruppe Neun – was officially part of the Federal German Border Police, but its agents had nothing to do with checking passports or looking under fruit trucks for asylum seekers. GSG9 was, ironically, born out of Germany’s mistrust of itself.