She was still looking around for another taxi when she answered. ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said, as if I had cornered her at a cocktail party and she had been glancing over my shoulder to see if there might be someone more interesting coming along. There wasn’t, so she remembered to smile, briefly, and then added: ‘Well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’

I jumped out to help her load the shopping. Millinery stores, shoe shops, a perfumers, a fancy Friedrichstrasse dress-designer, and Ka-De-We’s famous food hall: I figured she was the type for whom a cheque-book provided the best kind of panacea for what was troubling her. But then, there are lots of women like that.

‘It’s no trouble at all,’ I said, my eyes following her legs as they swung into the car, briefly enjoying a view of her stocking tops and garters. Forget it, I told myself. This one was too pricey. Besides, she had other things on her mind. Like whether the shoes matched the handbag, and what had happened to her missing daughter.

‘Where to?’ I said. ‘Home?’

She sighed like I’d suggested the Palme doss-house on Frobelstrasse, and then, smiling a brave little smile, she nodded. We drove east towards Bülowstrasse.

‘I’m afraid that I don’t have any news for you,’ I said, fixing a serious expression to my features and trying to concentrate on the road rather than the memory of her thighs.

‘No, I didn’t think you did,’ she said dully. ‘It’s been almost four weeks now, hasn’t it?’

‘Don’t give up hope.’

Another sigh, rather more impatient. ‘You’re not going to find her. She’s dead, isn’t she? Why doesn’t somebody just admit it?’

‘She’s alive until I find out different, Frau Steininger.’ I turned south down Potsdamerstrasse and for a while we were both silent. Then I became aware of her shaking her head and breathing like she had walked up a flight of stairs.

‘Whatever must you think of me, Kommissar?’ she said. ‘My daughter missing, probably murdered, and here I am spending money as if I hadn’t a care in the world. You must think me a heartless sort of woman.’

‘I don’t think anything of the kind,’ I said, and started telling her how people dealt with these things in different ways, and that if a bit of shopping helped to take her mind off her daughter’s disappearance for a couple of hours then that was perfectly all right, and that nobody would blame her. I thought I made a convincing case, but by the time we reached her apartment in Steglitz, Hildegard Steininger was in tears.

I took hold of her shoulder and just squeezed it, letting her go a bit before I said, ‘I’d offer you my handkerchief if I hadn’t wrapped my sandwiches in it.’