I saw a long rack on which were laid several eight-oar boats, and tied to it was a man stripped to the waist. His head hung down, and there were numerous burns on his neck and shoulders. I guessed that it was Haupthändler, although as I came closer I could see that his face was so badly contused as to be unrecognizable. Two men stood idly by, paying no attention to their captive. They were both smoking cigarettes, and one of them wore a set of brass knuckles.

‘Where’s the fucking girl?’ screamed Red. One of Haupthandler’s torturers jabbed a thumb across his shoulder.

‘Next door, with my brother.’

‘Hey, boss,’ said the other man. ‘This coat still won’t talk. Do you want us to work on him some more?’

‘Leave the poor bastard alone,’ he growled. ‘He knows nothing.’

It was almost dark in the adjoining boathouse, and it took several seconds for our eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.

‘Franz. Where the fuck are you?’ We heard a soft groan, and the slap of flesh against flesh. Then we saw them: an enormous figure of a man, his trousers round his ankles, bent over the silent and naked body of Hermann Six’s daughter, tied face down over an upturned boat.

‘Get away from her, you big ugly bastard,’ yelled Red.

The man, who was the size of a luggage locker, made no move to obey the order, not even when it was repeated at greater volume and at closer range. Eyes shut, his shoe-box of a head lying back on the parapet that was his shoulders, his enormous penis squeezing in and out of Grete Pfarr’s anus almost convulsively, his knees bent like a man whose horse had escaped from underneath him, Franz stood his ground.

Red punched him hard on the side of the head. He might as well have been hitting a locomotive. The very next second he pulled out a gun and almost casually blew his man’s brains out.

Franz dropped cross-legged to the ground, a collapsing chimney of a man, his head spurting a smoke-plume of burgundy, his still erect penis leaning to one side like the mainmast of a ship that has crashed onto the rocks.

Red pushed the body to one side with the toe of his shoe as I started to untie Grete. Several times he glanced awkwardly at the stripes that had been cut deep onto her buttocks and thighs with a short whip. Her skin was cold, and she smelt strongly of semen. There was no telling how many times she had been raped.

‘Fuck, look at the state of her,’ groaned Red, shaking his head. ‘How can I let Six see her like this?’

‘Let’s hope she’s alive,’ I said, taking off my coat, and spreading it on the ground.