‘You’ve left me with barely a millimetre of tooth to work with, far too little to put a crown on,’ Marlies kept grumbling. ‘We could try an extrusion, that’s to say pull out the root that’s still in the jaw. But better would be a surgical crown-lengthening, then we might get away without an implant. But first the root canal needs to be thoroughly cleansed. After what you did, I imagine you don’t need any anaesthetic if I grind the bone a little…’

‘Twelve!’ Martin said, interrupting her verbal torrent.

‘What do you mean twelve?’

‘That’s how old the boy was they’d chained into a swing. He was wearing a clamp to keep his mouth open so he couldn’t refuse oral sex. I was supposed to infect him with HIV.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ The dentist’s face lost several shades of its holiday tan. Schwartz wondered where she’d been. In the middle of October you needed to go a fair distance to lie in the sun. Or you were just lucky. As he and Nadja once had been, six years ago. Their last trip to Mallorca. They’d been able to celebrate Timmy’s tenth birthday on the beach, and he’d got sunburn. A year later his wife and son were dead and he hadn’t gone on holiday since.

‘The perpetrator was expecting a bald man with a missing incisor. What can I say…?’ He rubbed his hairless scalp. ‘My barber is in just as bad a mood as you.’

The dentist forced a nervous smile. Schwartz could tell that she didn’t know if he was joking.

‘Did he, the boy, I mean, was he…?’

‘He’s fine,’ he replied. Or at least as fine as a foster child could possibly be, back in a home right after having been freed from the clutches of perverted lunatics. Schwartz had waited until he’d recorded Pryga’s order to ‘give it to the boy in every hole’. The camera in the studs of his leather jacket captured the expectant grins of all the guests, to whom he’d turned before saying ‘toaster’, the agreed signal for the SWAT team to attack. Together with the seemingly positive HIV test and the video from Pryga’s tripod camera, they had enough evidence to put the bastards away for a very, very long time.

‘Maybe even two and a half years, with a bit of luck,’ Kramer had said gloomily as he drove Schwartz to the hospital where they gave him his PEP medicine: three pills a day for five weeks. Kramer had to sort out all the paperwork, which is why Martin was obliged to make his own way to the dental clinic, where now, after another two hours’ waiting, he was finally being seen.

‘I’m sorry,’ the dentist apologised. She had a small face with ears that were slightly too big, and cute freckles on her nose. In another life Schwartz might have considered asking for her telephone number, only to think twice because he was married. The timing was never right. Either you met a pretty woman and had a ring on your finger. Or the ring was off and every pretty woman reminded you of what you’d lost.