Gerlinde reached for a huge pair of glasses on her bedside table. He was amazed she didn’t need both hands to put them on her nose. The lenses were tinted pale pink and as thick as the bottom of a whisky tumbler, which made the alert eyes behind them assume owl-like proportions. Indeed it required little imagination to see Gerlinde’s overall resemblance to a bird. She had claw-like fingers, and her long, crooked nose stuck out like a beak from the old woman’s narrow, corvid face that was nothing but skin and bones.

‘I hope it’s not that sandpaper stuff again. Just put it beside the organic waste bin and then nighty night.’

She waved in Martin’s direction as if trying to swat away a bothersome fly.

‘I fear you’ve got me mixed up with someone else,’ he said, putting down his duffle bag.

Gerlinde raised her eyebrows in bewilderment.

‘Aren’t you the man with the loo paper?’ she asked, astonished.

Martin, who’d gradually realised what organic waste bin, brownies, sandpaper and White House meant, wondered how he could have been so foolish as to come here. What madness had induced him to rub salt into those wounds of his that would never heal? It must have been the hope of finally bringing closure to the tragedy. And hope, that treacherous serpent, had lead him down a blind alley, at the end of which a grandmother in bed was waiting for him.

Martin followed Gerlinde’s puzzled look to her butler.

‘Who the devil is this, Gregor?’

Gregor, who’d sat at the bureau in front of a typewriter which would have drawn in the crowds to the Berlin Museum of Technology, peered cluelessly over the top of a sheet of paper he’d inserted. ‘I regret to say I’m at as much of a loss as—’

‘Who are you?’ Gerlinde interrupted the genteel stammering.

‘My name is Martin Schwartz, we spoke yesterday on the phone.’

She hit her forehead with a loud slap of the hand.

‘Oh, yes, of course, goodness me!’

Gerlinde pushed a pile of papers to one side and threw back the duvet, beneath which she’d been lying in her snow-white trainers.

‘I’m delighted you’ve come. I know how difficult it must be for you…’

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. Gerlinde was wearing a pink tracksuit she could have fitted into twice.

‘… seeing as how it was here on the Sultan that your wife and son—’

‘Excuse my impatience,’ Martin interrupted. He had neither the time nor energy for pleasantries. He wasn’t even bothered by the presence of the butler. ‘You said on the phone you had proof that my wife didn’t jump to her death of her own accord.’