As I’ve not yet signed the papers Vermeer gave me I don’t have any ID which would ordinarily be required to sign out a car. I’d rather take the Stang, but it’s back at the houseboat and I don’t really fancy the walk. So I try going down to the car pool anyway and am rewarded for my positive thinking, because who should I meet but Mark Sattler. We go through the long-time-no-see routine, then he asks me about the car.

‘Yeah, I bought it.’

‘Let me guess, still in pieces.’

‘You’re such a downer, you know that? I actually got it working just yesterday. Been driving it quite a bit since then.’

‘Really? Good on you.’ He slaps me on the arm. I think the wound opens up again. ‘Like to see it sometime.’

I tell him any time, but that I need something from the pool just now. He sorts it out, overriding the sergeant’s objections and signing for it himself, then tossing me the keys. I press the button and the car that beeps turns out to be a cruiser with POLICE DOGS written on the side and a cage in the boot space. Kush is hesitant, but I finally get him in. The look he gives me as I lock it shut is the worst kind of emotional blackmail, but as there’s been little in the way of contrition over the Eating of the Shoe I ignore it.

Amsterdam’s Silicon Valley is what the press call it. Which says something about the standard of journalism these days, because when I pull up in the valley I find it’s nothing more than a fairly average street where a few old houses have been converted into spaces with blondwood floors, glass walls and huge whiteboards, and then rented out to a range of hopefuls, none of whom look like they’ve even left school yet.

I’m here to meet the chief operating officer, Patrick Wust. But he doesn’t appear to be anywhere around when I reach the front of the building. A young intern, dressed in what I guess is geek chic, is working his phone hard, eyes glued to the screen, thumbs a blur. I look up at the building: typical merchant house, five storeys of red brick with a stepped gable and pulley system jutting out of it. I was once called to an address on Herengracht where a naked man had been found hanging from one almost identical. I met Tanya for the first time during that case, an investigation which ended up with both of us kneeling on the deck of a container ship with a bent cop called De Waart about to blow our brains out. No wonder I got sick.

‘You okay?’

I look up to find the geek has momentarily suspended his thumbs and is looking across at me, concerned or puzzled it’s hard to say.