‘I’m not interested in your irregular bowel movements,’ Clemens Wagner replied with an audible grin. For an informer he took quite a lot of liberties, but the eccentric with his dyed, platinum-blond hair and flame tattoos on both forearms could allow himself these. When it came to getting background information there was scarcely anyone better than Diesel. A nickname the nutter owed to his pyromaniac tendencies.

‘Found anything out for me yet?’ Martin asked. Surprised, he looked up. The lifts were stuck between decks 5 and 7, so he opted for the stairs.

‘No, I’m calling you because I miss your voice so much.’

Diesel’s main job was as editor-in-chief of 101Punkt5, a private radio station in Berlin. Martin had got to know him through a colleague he was vaguely acquainted with. Her name was Ira Samin, an outstanding police psychologist, who’d saved a number of lives by negotiating after hostages were taken in a spectacular operation at Diesel’s radio station. The editor-in-chief, as gutsy a man as he was crazy, had been a great help to her with his unorthodox methods, and after some hesitation, had accepted Martin’s offer to earn a little extra cash as a private researcher.

Most people think that police investigations consist mainly of office work, and they’re basically right. In times of scant resources and staff shortages, however, work is increasingly farmed out to private individuals. Diesel was put on a list of unofficial employees as a researcher, and just prior to his meeting with Dr Beck, Martin had emailed him with the confidential request to supply him with information about Anouk Lamar and her family.

‘I haven’t got much,’ Diesel said. ‘Cruise companies aren’t exactly WikiLeaks informants. All I know so far is that Anouk is a single child. Highly intelligent, went to a school for gifted pupils. The result of her IQ test she took in year 5 was 135. She learns languages quicker than a computer; apparently she’s fluent in five others apart from English. And she came second in a national memory championship. Intelligence is in her genes. When she was only seventeen, her mother developed a computer programme that allowed share prices to be predicted by observing fish schooling. Before her death Naomi Lamar worked as a professor of evolutionary biology at a private university.’

Martin approached the left side of a huge marble staircase which, together with its sister flight, rose from the lobby to a floor with luxury boutiques. A considerable number of passengers who passed through the foyer, or had sat down in one of its classy leather armchairs for an early drink, were holding a mobile phone or camera. With the golden handrail, the antique vases on the pillars and a tastefully illuminated fountain in the middle, the steps of the Grand Lobby were a popular subject for photographs.

‘What do we know about the father?’