The wine had just been an afterthought it seems, a little tipple just to round things off after he’d downed the Jenever and tried to wreck his own home.

Vermeer walks over and Kleine holds his hand out unsteadily to reach for the glass. She throws the liquid in his face. He groans again. She gets another glass and this time hands it to him.

Whilst he’s sipping I take a quick look round. It’s even bigger once you’re inside it, the double-height ceilings reminding me of airports or warehouses more than somewhere you’d want to live. I roughly calculate I could fit four of my houseboats in here and still have enough left over for a small circus top.

Over the next few minutes he gradually comes round, to the point where he looks well enough to answer a few simple questions. He’s mid-fifties, lean, and if you gave him a black polo neck and some round glasses he could pass for a Steve Jobs lookalike. As it is he’s wearing jeans and a dirty orange sweat top, the arms of which are a little too short. His face is so pale he looks like someone’s siphoned off a few litres of blood. On the table are a variety of coffee-table books – a large volume on contemporary architecture in Chile, one on the steep-sloped vineyards of the Rhine – and a large conch shell, mainly white but with apricot tinges here and there.

I ask him about DH Biotech.

‘Why?’ he says, his voice croaky.

‘Just background really.’

He’s still feeling the effect of the alcohol, but is it just me or do his eyes narrow as he looks at me?

‘What do you want to know?’

What I really want to know is what his connection with Muller might be. But given his delicate state I decide I need to warm him up a little before getting to the important question.

‘Tell me about the company. It seems they’d been working on a cure for MS but it didn’t work?’

He winces and rubs his left temple as if it’s hurting bad. Which it probably is. He picks up the shell.