‘No, of course not,’ I said, quietly appreciating the way in which modesty giving way to impatience made her the more attractive. Beneath the terracotta-coloured raincoat she was unbuttoning at the neck, she wore a dress of dark blue cotton, with a neckline that allowed me a view of the first few centimetres of a deep and well-sunburnt cleavage. She started to fumble inside her capacious brown-leather handbag.

‘So then,’ she said nervously. ‘About Paul. After his death I had to answer a great many questions, you know.’

‘What about?’ It was a stupid question, but she didn’t say so.

‘Everything. I think that at one stage they even got round to suggesting that I might be his mistress.’ From out of the bag she produced a dark-green desk diary and handed it to me. ‘But this I kept back. It’s Paul’s desk diary, or, rather, the one he kept himself, his private one, and not the official one that I kept for him: the one that I gave to the Gestapo.’ I turned the diary over in my hands, not presuming to open it. Six, and now Marlene, it was odd the way people held things back from the police. Or maybe it wasn’t. It all depended on how well you knew the police.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘To protect Eva.’

‘Then why didn’t you simply destroy it? Safer for her and for you too I would have thought.’

She frowned as she struggled to explain something she perhaps only half understood herself. ‘I suppose I thought that in the proper hands, there might be something in it that would identify the murderer.’

‘And what if it should turn out that your friend Eva had something to do with it?’

Her eyes flashed and she spoke angrily. ‘I don’t believe it for a second,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t capable of harming anyone.’

Pursing my lips, I nodded circumspectly. ‘Tell me about her.’

‘All in good time, Herr Gunther,’ she said, her mouth becoming compressed. I didn’t think Marlene Sahm was the type ever to be carried away by her passion or her tastes, and I wondered whether the Gestapo preferred to recruit this kind of woman, or simply affected them that way.

‘First of all, I’d like to make something clear to you.’

‘Be my guest.’

‘After Paul’s death I myself made a few discreet inquiries as to Eva’s whereabouts, but without success. But I shall come to that too. Before I tell you anything I want your word that if you manage to find her you will try to persuade her to give herself up. If she is arrested by the Gestapo it will go very badly for her. This isn’t a favour I’m asking, you understand. This is my price for providing you with the information to help your own investigation.’