I caught his fist and twisted his arm behind him.

‘You snivelling little coward. Damn you, Lange, you’ll wear it and like it or so help me we’ll hang you upside down and cut your throat, like all those girls your friends have murdered. And then maybe we’ll just dump your carcass in a beer-barrel, or an old trunk, and see how your mother feels about identifying you after six weeks.’ I handcuffed him and Becker started with the make-up. When he’d finished, Oscar Wilde by comparison would have seemed as unassuming and conservative as a draper’s assistant from Hanover.

‘Come on,’ I growled. ‘Let’s get this Kit-Kat showgirl back to her hotel.’

We had not exaggerated about the night tank at the Alex. It’s probably the same in every big city police station. But since the Alex is a very big city police station indeed, it followed that the tank there is also very big. In fact it is huge, as big as an average cinema theatre, except that there are no seats. Nor are there any bunks, or windows, or ventilation. There’s just the dirty floor, the dirty latrine buckets, the dirty bars, the dirty people and the lice. The Gestapo kept a lot of detainees there for whom there was no room at Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Orpo put the night’s drunks in there to fight, puke, and sleep it off. Kripo used the place like the Gestapo used the canal: as a toilet for its human refuse. A terrible place for a human being. Even one like Reinhard Lange. I had to keep reminding myself of what it was that he and his friends had done, of Emmeline Steininger, sitting in that barrel like so many rotten potatoes. Some of the prisoners whistled and blew kisses when they saw us bring him down, and Lange turned pale with fright.

‘My God, you’re not going to leave me here,’ he said, clutching at my arm.

‘Then unpack it,’ I said. ‘Weisthor, Rahn, Kindermann. A signed statement, and you can get a nice cell to yourself.’

‘I can’t, I can’t. You don’t know what they’ll do to me.’

‘No,’ I said, and nodded at the men behind the bars, ‘but I know what they’ll do to you.’

The lock-up sergeant opened the enormous heavy cage and stood back as Becker pushed him into the tank.

His cries were still ringing in my ears by the time I got back to Steglitz.