‘Just the place to meet your friendly neighbourhood body-snatcher. Don’t you see enough of death during the day that you have to come to drink in a charnel-house like this?’

He shrugged unabashedly. ‘It is only with death around me that I am constantly reminded that I am alive.’

‘There’s a lot to be said for necrophilia.’ Illmann smiled, as if agreeing with me.

‘So you want to know about the poor Hauptsturmführer and his little wife, eh?’ I nodded. ‘This is an interesting case, and, I don’t mind telling you, the interesting ones are becoming increasingly rare. With all the people who wind up dead in this city you would think I was busy. But of course, there is usually little or no mystery about how most of them got that way. Half the time I find myself presenting the forensic evidence of a homicide to the very people who committed it. It’s an upside down world that we live in.’ He opened his briefcase and took out a blue ring-file. ‘I brought the photographs. I thought you would want to see the happy couple. I’m afraid they’re a pair of real stokers. I was only able to make the identification from their wedding rings, his and hers.’

I flicked through the file. The camera angles changed but the subject remained the same: two gun-metal grey corpses, bald like Egyptian pharaohs, lay on the exposed and blackened springs of what had once been a bed, like sausages left too long under the grill.

‘Nice album. What were they doing, having a punch-up?’ I said, noticing the way in which each corpse had its fists raised like a bare-knuckle fighter.

‘A common enough observation in a death like this.’

‘What about those cuts in the skin? They look like knife wounds.’

‘Again, what one would expect,’ said Illmann. ‘The heat in a conflagration causes the skin to split open like a ripe banana. That is, if you can remember what a banana looks like.’

‘Where did you find the petrol cans?’

He raised his eyebrows quizzically. ‘Oh, you know about those, do you? Yes, we found two empty cans in the garden. I don’t think they’d been there very long. They weren’t rusted and there was still a small amount of petrol which remained unevaporated in the bottom of one of them. And according to the fire officer there was a strong smell of petrol about the place.’

‘Arson, then.’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘So what made you look for bullets?’