Nadja and he had looked at just such a house at the time when Timmy was starting school. Four rooms, two bathrooms, a fireplace. With cream-coloured plasterwork and green shutters. Not far from here, on the boundary between Westend and Spandau, and a mere five-minute bike ride to the primary school where Nadja was teaching at the time. A stone’s throw from the sports ground where his son could have played football. Or tennis. Or whatever.

They hadn’t been able to afford it.

Now there was nobody to move house with. Nadja and Timmy were both dead.

And the twelve-year-old boy in the house they were monitoring, which belonged to a man called Detlev Pryga, would be dead soon too if they wasted any more time out here in the black van.

‘I’m going in,’ Martin Schwartz announced. He was sitting inside the windowless rear of the panel van. Having injected himself with a milky fluid, he tossed the used syringe into a plastic bin. Then he stood up from the monitoring console, on its screen the external view of the building. His face was reflected in the vehicle’s tinted panes. I look like a junkie in withdrawal, Martin thought. That was an insult. To every junkie.

He’d lost weight in the past few years, more than you could call healthy. Only his nose was as plump as it had ever been. The Schwartz conk, which for generations all male descendants of the family had been endowed with, and which his late wife had found sexy – the ultimate proof, he thought, that love does make you blind. If anything, his hooter gave him a kindly, trustworthy look. From time to time strangers would nod at him in the street; babies smiled when he bent over a pram (probably because they mistook him for a clown) and women flirted with him quite openly, sometimes even in the presence of their partners.

Well, they certainly wouldn’t be doing that today, not while he was in these clothes. The tight-fitting leather jacket he’d squeezed himself into made unpleasant creaking noises even when he breathed. As he moved to get out it sounded as if he was trying to tie up a huge balloon.

‘Stop, wait!’ said Armin Kramer, who was in charge of the operation and had been sitting opposite him at the computer table for hours.

‘What for?’

‘For—’

Kramer’s mobile rang, preventing him from finishing his sentence.

The rather overweight inspector greeted the caller with an eloquent, ‘Hmm?’ and during the course of the conversation said little more than ‘What?’, ‘No!’, ‘You’re bullshitting me!’ and ‘Tell the arsehole who fucked up to get dressed nice and warm. Why? Because in October it might get fucking cold if he’s lying unconscious outside the station for a few hours once I’m finished with him.’ Kramer hung up.

‘Fuck.’