‘I expect it was his idea to burn the bodies and make it look like it was your daughter who had died in bed with her husband, and not his mistress. He took Grete’s wedding-ring and put it on the other woman’s finger. Then he had the bright idea of taking the diamonds out of the safe and making it look like a burglary. That’s why he left the door open. The diamonds were to stake their new life somewhere. New lives and new identities. But what Haupthandler didn’t know was that somebody had already been in the safe that evening and removed certain papers that were compromising to you. This fellow was a real expert, a puzzler not long out of prison. A neat worker too. Not the sort to use explosives or do anything untidy like leave a safe door open. As drunk as they were, I’ll bet that Paul and Eva never even heard him. One of Red’s boys, of course. Red used to carry out all your dodgy little schemes, didn’t he? While Goering’s man Von Greis had these documents, things were merely inconvenient. The Prime Minister is a pragmatist. He could use the evidence of your previous criminality to ensure that you were useful to him, and make you toe the Party’s economic line. But when Paul and the Black Angels got hold of them, that was altogether more uncomfortable. You knew that Paul wanted to destroy you. Backed into a corner you had to do something. So, as usual, you got Red Dieter to take care of it.

‘But later on, with Paul and the girl dead, and the diamonds gone from the safe, it looked to you as though Red’s man had been greedy, and that he’d taken more than he was supposed to. Not unreasonably you concluded that it was he who had killed your daughter, and so you told Red to put things right. Red managed to kill one of the two burglars, the man who had driven the car; but he missed the other, the one who had opened the safe, who therefore still had the papers and, you assumed, the diamonds. That’s where I came in. Because you couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t Red himself who had double-crossed you, and so you probably didn’t tell him about the diamonds, just as you didn’t tell the police.’

Six took the dead cigar from out of the corner of his mouth and laid it, unsmoked, on the ashtray. He was starting to look very old.