Richard Prince slept fitfully that night. The heating was on constantly and the window only opened an inch or two at the top, making the room quite unbearably stuffy. Despite the curfew, there was a surprising amount of traffic on Saarland Strasse, mostly, as far as he could tell, army trucks. The bathroom was further down the corridor, but he did have a small sink in his room, and every hour or so he got up to run cold water over his face. The carpet was uncomfortable to walk on in his bare feet; it had an almost wiry texture to it.

But it was not just the noise and discomfort that kept him awake. As he lay in bed, he reflected incredulously on the developments of the past few weeks. As a police officer in Lincolnshire, his work had been interesting enough; not without some degree of excitement and certainly professionally fulfilling. He had an impressive degree of seniority for his age, and his strong reputation enabled him to be the master of his own fate. He could choose what cases to work on and he decided how to run them and who worked with him.

On the few occasions he allowed himself to indulge in fleeting personal reflection, he would think with satisfaction about how he was managing to bring his son up so well. If anyone had asked, which they didn’t, he’d have assured them he’d recovered well enough from the death of his wife and daughter and both he and Henry were doing fine, thank you.

In Copenhagen, though, he’d had plenty of time to reflect, and it had become obvious that neither of them was doing quite as well as he’d liked to imagine. The reason he so rarely indulged in thinking about how he felt was because he missed Jane and Grace so much that anything more than a passing thought was far too painful. The fact that Henry was so young didn’t mean he was immune from grief either: life would be a constant reminder to him of what had happened.

But as much as Prince loved and missed his son, he had to admit that his secondment to Copenhagen, and now this trip to Berlin, had brought him a surprisingly enjoyable degree of excitement. It was a familiar excitement, the kind he experienced at the start of a serious case and at the moment of solving it. It was the thrill of the chase and the personal challenge involved. And he had come to realise that despite the uncertainty and the constant threat of discovery, he wouldn’t swap it for the world.

There was another unexpected emotion too: the way he found himself thinking about Hanne. It was a feeling of fondness; he realised he was missing her. He wished he was sitting next to her on the sofa, edging closer to her.