‘Sometimes, sir, when I think I might need it.’

Goering beamed like an excited schoolboy. ‘Are you carrying it now?’

I shook my head. ‘Rienacker here thought it might scare the cat.’

‘A pity,’ said Goering. ‘I should like to have seen the gun of a real shamus.’ He leaned back in his chair, which looked as though it might once have belonged to a bumper-sized Medici pope, and waved his hand.

‘Well then, to business,’ he said. One of the aides brought forward a file and laid it before his master. Goering opened it and studied the contents for several seconds. I figured that it was about me. There were so many files on me around these days that I was beginning to feel like a medical case-history.

‘It says here that you used to be a policeman,’ he said. ‘Quite an impressive record, too. You’d have been a kommissar by now. Why did you leave?’ He removed a small lacquered pillbox from his jacket and shook a couple of pink pills onto his fat palm as he waited for me to reply. He took them with a glass of water.

‘I didn’t much care for the police canteen, sir.’ He laughed loudly. ‘But with respect, Herr Prime Minister, I’m sure you are well aware of why I left, since at that time you were yourself in command of the police. I don’t recall making a secret of my opposition to the purging of so-called unreliable police officers. Many of those men were my friends. Many of them lost their pensions. A couple even lost their heads.’

Goering smiled slowly. With his broad forehead, cold eyes, low growling voice, predatory grin and lazy belly, he reminded me of nothing so much as a big, fat, man-eating tiger; and as if telepathically conscious of the impression he was making on me, he leaned forwards in his chair, scooped up the lion cub from off the rug and cradled it on his sofa-sized lap. The cub blinked sleepily, hardly stirring as its owner stroked its head and thumbed its ears. He looked like he was admiring his own child.

‘You see,’ he said. ‘He is not in anyone’s shadow. And he’s not afraid to speak his mind. That is the great virtue of independence. There’s no reason on earth why this man should do me a service. He’s got the guts to remind me of that when another man would have stayed silent. I can trust a man like that.’

I nodded at the file on his desk. ‘I’d lay a bet that it was Diels who put that little lot together.’

‘And you’d be right. I inherited this file, your file, with a great many others, when he lost his position as Gestapo chief to that little shit of a chicken farmer. It was the last great service that he was to do for me.’