‘He didn’t. They got in touch with him after seeing his newspaper advertisement.’

‘Doesn’t that show that if he is a common factor, then it’s not been through his own making?’

‘Perhaps he just wants it to look that way. I don’t know. All the same I’d like to find out more, even if it’s just to rule him out.’

She crossed her long legs and lit a cigarette.

‘Will you do it?’

‘Just answer this question first, Kommissar. And I want an honest answer. I’m tired of all the evasions. Do you think that Emmeline can still be alive?’

I sighed and then shook my head. ‘I think she’s dead.’

‘Thank you.’ There was silence for a moment. ‘Is it dangerous, what you’re asking me to do?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Then I agree.’

Now, as we sat in Vogelmann’s waiting-room in his offices on Nürnburgerstrasse, under the eye of his matronly secretary, Hildegard Steininger played the part of the worried wife to perfection, holding my hand, and occasionally smiling at me smiles of the kind that are normally reserved for a loved one. She was even wearing her wedding-ring. So was I. It felt strange, and tight, on my finger after so many years. I’d needed soap to slide it on.

Through the wall could be heard the sound of a piano being played.

‘There’s a music school next door,’ explained Vogelmann’s secretary. She smiled kindly and added: ‘He won’t keep you waiting for very long.’ Five minutes later we were ushered into his office.

In my experience the private investigator is prone to several common ailments: flat feet, varicose veins, a bad back, alcoholism and, God forbid, venereal disease; but none of them, with the possible exception of the clap, is likely to influence adversely the impression he makes on a potential client. However, there is one disability, albeit a minor one, which if found in a sniffer must give the client pause for thought, and that is short-sightedness. If you are going to pay a man fifty marks a day to trace your missing grandmother, at the very least you want to feel confident that the man you are engaging to do the job is sufficiently eagle-eyed to find his own cuff-links. Spectacles of bottle-glass thickness such as those worn by Rolf Vogelmann must therefore be considered bad for business.

Ugliness, on the other hand, where it stops short of some particular and gross physical deformity, need be no professional disadvantage, and so Vogelmann, whose unpleasant aspect was something more general, was probably able to peck at some sort of a living. I say peck, and I choose my words carefully, because with his unruly comb of curly red hair, his broad beak of a nose and his great breast-plate of a chest, Vogelmann resembled a breed of prehistoric cockerel, and one that had positively begged for extinction.