There was little or no growl that I could recall, and I hardly heard the sound of the dogs’ paws as they galloped across the fallen leaves. At the last second I heard a heavy, panting breath which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end. The dog was already leaping at my throat as I fired. The shot sounded small beneath the trees, almost too small to kill something as fierce as the Dobermann. Even as it fell dead at my feet the wind was already bearing the noise away, and in the opposite direction from the house. I let out the breath that unconsciously I had held while firing, and with my heart beating like a fork in a bowlful of egg-white, I turned instinctively, remembering that there had been not one, but two dogs. For a second or two, the leaves rustling in the trees overhead camouflaged the other’s low growl. The dog came forward uncertainly, appearing in the clearing between the trees and keeping its distance from me. I stepped back as slowly it approached its dead brother, and when it dipped its head to sniff at the other’s open wound, I raised my gun once more. In a sudden gust of wind, I fired. The dog yelped as the bullet kicked it off its feet. For a moment or two it continued breathing, and then it lay still.

Pocketing the gun, I moved into the trees and walked down the long slope in the direction of the house. Somewhere the peacock was calling, and I had half a mind to shoot that too if it were unlucky enough to be stumbled upon. Killing was very much on my mind. It is quite common in a homicide for the murderer to get warmed up for the main event by disposing of a few innocent victims, such as the family pets, along the way.

Detection is all about chain-making, manufacturing links: with Paul Pfarr, Von Greis, Bock, Mutschmann, Red Dieter Helfferich and Hermann Six, I had a length of something strong enough to put my weight on. Paul Pfarr, Eva, Haupthändler and Jeschonnek was shorter, and altogether different.

It wasn’t that I intended killing Six. It was just that if I was unsuccessful in obtaining a few straight answers then I hadn’t ruled it out as a possibility. So it was with some embarrassment then that, with these thoughts passing through my mind, I came across the millionaire himself, standing under a great fir tree, smoking a cigar and humming quietly.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, quite unperturbed to see me turn up on his property with a gun in my hand. ‘I thought it was the groundsman. You’ll want some money, I suppose.’

For a brief moment I didn’t know what to say to him. Then I said: ‘I shot the dogs.’ I put the gun back into my pocket.