I smiled and nodded politely. He bowed his head, and as Hildegard passed out of the door in front of me I caught him glancing down at her legs. You couldn’t blame him. In her beige wool bolero, dotted foulard blouse and burgundy wool skirt, she looked like a year’s worth of war reparations. It felt good just pretending to be married to her.

I shook Vogelmann’s hand and followed Hildegard outside, thinking to myself that if I were really her husband I would be driving her home to undress her and take her to bed.

It was an elegantly erotic daydream of silk and lace that I was conjuring up for myself as we left Vogelmann’s offices and went out into the street. Hildegard’s sexual appeal was something altogether more streamlined than steamy imaginings of bouncing breasts and buttocks. All the same, I knew that my little husband fantasy was short on probability since, in all likelihood, the real Herr Steininger, had he been alive, would almost certainly have driven his beautiful young wife home for nothing more stimulating than a cup of fresh coffee before returning to the bank where he worked. The simple fact of the matter is that a man who wakes alone will think of having a woman just as surely as a man who wakes with a wife will think of having breakfast.

‘So what did you make of him?’ she said when we were in the car driving back to Steglitz. ‘I thought he wasn’t as bad as he looked. In fact, he was quite sympathetic, really. Certainly no worse than your own men, Kommissar. I can’t imagine why we bothered.’

I let her go on like that for a minute or two.

‘It struck you as perfectly normal that there were so many obvious questions that he didn’t ask?’

She sighed. ‘Like what?’

‘He never mentioned his fee.’

‘I dare say that if he thought we couldn’t have afforded it, then he would have brought it up. And by the way, don’t expect me to take care of the account for this little experiment of yours.’

I told her that Kripo would pay for everything.

Seeing the distinctive dark-yellow of a cigarette-vending van, I pulled up and got out of the car. I bought a couple of packs and threw one in the glove-box. I tapped one out for her, then myself and lit us both.

‘It didn’t seem strange that he also neglected to ask how old Emmeline was, which school she attended, what the name of her dancing teacher was, where I worked, that sort of thing?’