‘Are you giving me the up and down, Eddie? Christ, this fellow is a millionaire. He owns half the Ruhr. If he stuck his finger up his arse he’d find oil. Somebody must have got a look through his keyhole at some time.’

‘There was a reporter a while back who did quite a bit of spadework on all of those big boys on the Ruhr: Krupp, Voegler, Wolff, Thyssen. She lost her job when the Government solved the unemployment problem. ‘I’ll see if I can find out where she’s living.’

‘Thanks, Eddie. What about the Pfarrs? Anything?’

‘She was really into spas. Nauheim, Wiesbaden, Bad Homburg, you name it, she’d splashed some there. She even wrote an article about it for Die Frau. And she was keen on quack medicine. There’s nothing about him, I’m afraid.’

‘Thanks for the gossip, Eddie. Next time I’ll read the society page and save you the trouble.’

‘Not worth a hundred, huh?’

‘Not worth fifty. Find this lady reporter for me and then I’ll see what I can do.’

After that I closed the office and returned to the key shop to collect my new set of keys and my tin of clay. I’ll admit it sounds a bit theatrical; but honestly, I’ve carried that tin for several years, and short of stealing the actual key itself, I don’t know of a better way of opening locked doors. A delicate mechanism of fine steel with which you can open any kind of lock, I don’t have. The truth is that with the best modern locks, you can forget picking: there are no slick, fancy little wonder tools. That stuff is for the film-boys at UFA. More often than not a burglar simply saws off the bolt-head, or drills around it and removes a piece of the goddam door. And that reminded me: sooner or later I was going to have to check out just who there was in the fraternity of nutcrackers with the talent to have opened the Pfarrs’ safe. If that was how it was done. Which meant that there was a certain scrofulous little tenor who was long overdue for a singing lesson.

I didn’t expect to find Neumann at the dump where he lived in Admiralstrasse, in the Kottbusser Tor district, but I tried there anyway. Kottbusser Tor was the kind of area that had worn about as well as a music-hall poster, and Admiralstrasse, Number 43 was the kind of place where the rats wore ear-plugs and the cockroaches had nasty coughs. Neumann’s room was in the basement at the back. It was damp. It was dirty. It was foul. And Neumann wasn’t there.