After the sirens the doorbell seems distant, ringing somewhere in the depths of what is an enormous property. Kush decides to mark one of the box balls planted either side of the entrance. He lifts his leg and squirts out a long jet of pee, most of it missing the bush and hitting the wall behind just as someone who clearly isn’t ex-Judge Muller opens the door.

‘Yes?’ she says in an accent heavy with decades of Soviet repression.

I tell her I have to see Judge Muller. She eyes me suspiciously, then throws a look over my shoulder to the car. Finally she looks at Kush, who for some reason is being well behaved for once, sitting by my side like a fully trained dog.

‘Judge Muller doesn’t like dogs.’

I tell her that Kush isn’t a dog – he’s an officer of the law.

She gives me a hard look, then shrugs. ‘Follow.’

We do, through a hallway with chessboard tiles, a large living room with Dutch masters hanging on the walls and a musty air, another hallway smelling of wax, and finally a wooden door at what must be, by now, the back of the house. She knocks, then goes in, closing it behind her. A minute later I’m ushered into the room.

At the far end a figure sits in a wheelchair, silhouetted against one of the three large windows looking onto a formal Italianate garden beyond. Bookcases line the walls, right up to ornate plasterwork, and a Persian carpet lies on wooden floorboards, dark and shiny with age. In the space above a gaudy chandelier hangs, and a clock on one of the shelves ticks a dry metronomic beat. I notice on a separate set of shelves a series of framed photos of Lucie Muller, starting with her as a baby and sequencing right up to her early twenties.

The figure in the wheelchair turns laboriously, inching one wheel forward and one back, and I see he’s hooked up to a grey metal canister, the clear tube snaking up to his thin nostrils held in place by straps stretching behind his ears. He’s dressed in mustard cords, a checked shirt, and has some kind of tweed jacket complete with elbow patches. To go with that he’s also wearing a blank expression, making me think he doesn’t recognize me. Maybe something to do with the clothing. And thinking about it my hair’s a bit longer than it was when we last spoke. His own hair’s cut the same as I remember, but the blond has lightened to almost complete white now.

‘Was that you making all that racket?’

‘The dog knocked the siren on when he was getting out of the car.’

Muller peers over his glasses at Kush but doesn’t say anything.

‘You are? The stupid maid didn’t catch your name.’

‘Inspector Rykel. Amsterdam Police.’

‘Undercover division I see. Right, take a seat.’