Petra Becker was rising in Tony’s estimation all the time. She’d rung him at 9.17 to tell him that a car was on its way to take him to Tempelhof for the short flight to Bremen, where he would be met by one of the detectives on the Schilling inquiry. ‘How the hell did you swing that?’ he said, still groggy from lack of sleep.

‘I lied,’ she said calmly. ‘I said you were a leading British Home Office profiler who just happened to be doing some work with Europol and that we would be very much obliged if they would extend every courtesy to you.’

‘You’re an amazing woman, Petra,’ he said.

‘It’s been said before, but not usually by men,’ she’d responded dryly.

‘Am I right in thinking that nobody in Bremen has made the connection with the earlier murder in Heidelberg yet?’

‘The Heidelberg boys were so eager to hand off their unsolved murder to us, they sold it to the local press as a seedy drug-related murder rather than a ritual killing, so it didn’t make headlines outside the region. I’d be very surprised if anyone in Bremen had even read a news report about the case.’

‘Doesn’t it feel weird, being the only cop in the country who’s made the connection?’ He couldn’t resist the chance to probe. He’d never been able to.

‘You want the honest truth?’

‘Of course.’

‘I get a buzz from it. Oh, I know I have to come back inside the rules with these cases, I can’t go on acting like somebody in a movie. For now, though, I’m enjoying it. But I don’t think we have time for this. You have a plane to catch.’

Tony smiled. It was an obvious evasion, but he didn’t mind. ‘Thanks for sorting it out.’

‘My pleasure. Have a good day. We’ll talk soon, yes?’

‘I should have something for you before too long, but don’t expect a miracle,’ he said, guarded.

She laughed. ‘I don’t believe in miracles.’

The detective who met him at Bremen was a stumpy blond in his early thirties with bad skin and excellent English who announced himself as, ‘Berndt Haefs, call me Berndt.’ He had the slightly blasé air of someone who is incapable of being shocked. Tony had seen it in cops before. What worried him was that it was generally neither a pose nor a defence mechanism, but rather indicative of a blunting of the sensibilities that destroyed any capacity for empathy.

Certainly Berndt showed no signs of caring much about the woman whose death he was supposed to be resolving, referring to her throughout their drive to Bremen as ‘Schilling’. Tony, perversely, made a point of always giving Margarethe her title of Doctor.