Preoccupation submitted to puzzlement as I tried to fathom why it was that Jost had let me go on the strength of an interrogation lasting hardly as much as one hour. Nobody could have persuaded me that he believed everything that I had told him, despite his pretence to being something of a criminologist. I knew his reputation, and it wasn’t that of a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. From what I had heard of him Jost had the imagination of a gelded carthorse. It went against everything he believed in to release me on such a desultory piece of cross-checking as a phone call to the Lufthansa desk at Tempelhof.

I dried myself and went to bed. For a while I lay awake, rummaging through the ill-fitting drawers in the dilapidated cabinet of my head, hoping that I might find something that would make things appear clearer to me. I didn’t find it, and I didn’t think I was going to. But if Inge had been lying next to me, I might have told her that my guess was that I was free because Jost had superiors who wanted Von Greis’s papers at any cost, even if that meant using a suspected double-murderer to do it.

I would also have told her that I was in love with her.

Chapter 17

17

I awoke feeling hollower than a dug-out canoe, and disappointed that I didn’t have a bad hangover to occupy my day.

‘How do you like that?’ I muttered to myself as I stood by my bed, and squeezed my skull in search of a headache. ‘I suck the stuff up like a hole in the ground and I can’t even get a decent tomcat.’

In the kitchen I made myself a pot of coffee that you could have eaten with a knife and fork, and then I had a wash. I made a bad job of shaving; slapping on some cologne, I nearly passed out.