Shotgun looked at his partner, who nodded and walked away towards the inn. He said: ‘We’ll wait here while we check it out.’

Wringing his hands nervously, Six called out after him: ‘Please hurry. It’s a matter of life or death.’

Shotgun grinned at that. I guessed he was used to matters of life and death where his boss was concerned. Six produced a cigarette and fed it nervously into his mouth. He snatched it out again without lighting it.

‘Please,’ he said to Shotgun. ‘Are you holding a couple on the island, a man and a woman? The - the — ’

‘The Teichmüllers,’ I said.

Shotgun’s grin disappeared under a whole pantomine of dumb. ‘I don’t know nothing,’ he said dully.

We kept looking anxiously at the inn. It was a two-storey affair, white-painted with neat, black shutters, a windowbox full of geraniums and a high mansard roof. As we watched, smoke started to come out of the chimney, and when the door finally opened I half expected an old woman to come out carrying a tray of gingerbread. Shotgun’s pitman beckoned us forward.

We moved Indian-file through the door, with Shotgun bringing up the rear. The two stumpy barrels gave me an itch in the back of my neck: if you have ever seen someone shot with a sawn-off at close range, you would know why. There was a small hallway with a couple of hatstands, only nobody had bothered to check his hat. Beyond that was a small room, where somebody was playing the piano like he had a couple of fingers missing. At the far end there was a round bar and some stools. Behind it were lots of sports trophies and I wondered who had won them and why. The Most Murders in One Year perhaps, or The Cleanest Knockout With an India Rubber - I had a nominee for that award myself if I could find him. But probably they had just bought them to make the place look more like what it was supposed to be - the headquarters of an ex-convicts’ welfare association.

Shotgun’s partner grunted. ‘This way,’ he said, and led us towards a door beside the bar.

Through the door the room was like an office. A brass lamp hung from one of the beams on the ceiling. There was a long walnut chaise-longue in the corner by the window, and next to it, a big bronze of a naked girl, the sort that looks as though the model must have had a bad accident with a circular saw. There was more art on the panelled walls, but of the sort that normally you only find in the pages of midwives’ textbooks.