Fabel looked past the woman’s head and took in the collection of old black-and-white photographs on the dresser behind her: her as a child and as a young woman, even then with owl eyes; her with a man with a shock of black hair; another photograph of the same man wearing what Fabel thought at first was a Wehrmacht uniform, then he recognised it as that of a wartime Police Reserve Battalion. No children. No photographs less than fifty years old.

‘Did you see her much?’

‘No. In fact I only spoke to her once. I was brushing the landing when she passed on her way up.’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘Not really. She said hello and something about the weather and went on up. I would have asked her in for a cup of coffee, but she seemed in a hurry. She looked like a businesswoman or something … very smartly dressed. Expensive shoes, as I remember. Beautiful shoes. Foreign. Other than that day, I only heard her on the stairs occasionally. I thought she probably went away on business a lot or something.’

‘Did she have lots of visitors. Men, specifically?’

Her face creased in concentration again. ‘No … no, I can’t say that I saw much of anybody.’

‘I know this is a very unpleasant matter, but I have to ask you, Frau Steiner – was there anything that made you think she may have been a prostitute?’

Impossibly, the owl eyes widened. ‘No. Certainly not. Is that what she was?’

‘We don’t know. If she were, I would have expected you to see more men coming and going.’

‘No, I can honestly say I was only aware of two or three visitors to the flat. But now you mention it they were all men, I never saw another woman.’

‘Can you describe them?’

‘No, not really,’ she shook her head again, slowly. ‘I can’t even be sure if there were more than, say, two men visiting. I maybe saw the same person more than once.’ She pointed past Fabel, down the hall, to the semiopaque bronze-glass panel in her apartment door. ‘I just saw shapes through the door – figures more than anything.’

‘So you wouldn’t be able to recognise any of them?’

‘Only the young man who sub-let the apartment to her …’

‘That would be Klugmann, sir,’ interjected Beller. ‘He was the one who discovered the body and called us.’

‘Did he come around often?’ Fabel asked.

The old woman gave a shrug of her insubstantial shoulders. ‘I only saw him a couple of times. Like I say, he could have been one of the figures I saw go up and down, or he was maybe only here the couple of times I saw him.’ She looked towards the glass panel in the door at the end of the short hall. ‘That’s what it means to become old, young man. Your world shrinks and shrinks until it’s reduced to just shadows passing your door.’