‘All I know is that he was killed in an air-raid on Madrid. One of his comrades came to tell me. From the Reich I received a one-line message which read: “Your husband died for Germany’s honour.” In a pig’s eye, I thought.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Then I had to go and see someone at the Air Ministry, and sign a promise that I wouldn’t talk about what had happened, and that I wouldn’t wear mourning. Can you imagine that, Bernie? I couldn’t even wear black for my own husband. It was the only way I could get a pension.’ She smiled bitterly, and added: “You are Nothing, Your Nation is Everything.” Well, they certainly mean it.’ She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose.

‘Never underestimate the National Socialists when it comes to the pantheistic,’ I said. ‘Individuals are an irrelevance. These days your own mother takes your disappearance for granted. Nobody cares.’

Nobody except me, I thought. For several weeks after my release from Dachau, the disappearance of Inge Lorenz was my only case. But sometimes even Bernie Gunther draws a blank

Looking for someone in Germany in the late autumn of 1936 was like trying to find something in a great desk drawer that had crashed to the floor, the contents spilled and then replaced according to a new order so that things no longer came easily to hand, or even seemed to belong in there. Gradually my sense of urgency was worn away by the indifference of others. Inge’s former colleagues on the newspaper shrugged and said that really, they hadn’t known her all that well. Neighbours shook their heads and suggested that one needed to be philosophical about such things. Otto, her admirer at the DAF, thought she’d probably turn up before very long. I couldn’t blame any of them. To lose another hair from a head that’s already lost so many seems merely inconvenient.

Sharing quiet, lonely evenings with a friendly bottle, I often tried to imagine what might have become of her: a car accident; some kind of amnesia perhaps; an emotional or mental breakdown; a crime she had committed which necessitated an immediate and permanent disappearance. But always I was led back to abduction and murder and the idea that whatever had happened had been related to the case I had been working on.

Even after two months had passed, when you might normally have expected the Gestapo to have admitted to something, Bruno Stahlecker, lately transferred out of the city to a little Kripo station of no account in Spreewald, failed to come up with any record of Inge having been executed or sent to a KZ. And no matter how many times I returned to Haupthändler’s house in Wannsee, in the hope that I might find something that would provide me with a clue to what had happened, there never was anything.