‘Herr Six,’ said Schemm with more obsequy than a sultan’s concubine, ‘may I introduce Herr Bernhard Gunther.’ He turned to me, his voice changing to suit my depressed bank balance. ‘This is Herr Doktor Hermann Six.’ It was funny, I thought, how it was that in more elevated circles everyone was a damned doctor. I shook his hand and found it held for an uncomfortably long time as my new client’s eyes looked into my face. You get a lot of clients who do that: they reckon themselves as judges of a man’s character, and after all they’re not going to reveal their embarrassing little problems to a man who looks shifty and dishonest: so it’s fortunate that I’ve got the look of someone who is steady and dependable. Anyway, about the new client’s eyes: they were blue, large and prominent, and with an odd sort of watery brightness in them, as if he had just stepped out of a cloud of mustard gas. It was with some shock that it dawned on me that the man had been crying.

Six released my hand and picked up the photograph I’d just been looking at. He stared at it for several seconds and then sighed profoundly.

‘She was my daughter,’ he said, with his heart in his throat. I nodded patiently. He replaced the photograph face down on the desk, and pushed his monkishly-styled grey hair across his brow. ‘Was, because she is dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said gravely.

‘You shouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘Because if she were alive you wouldn’t be here with the chance to make a lot of money.’ I listened: he was talking my language. ‘You see, she was murdered.’ He paused for dramatic effect: clients do a lot of that, but this one was good.

‘Murdered,’ I repeated dumbly.