‘We wait for another note. I’ll handle the next cash delivery. But until then I think it might be a good idea if I were to check into Kindermann’s clinic for a few days. I’d like to know a little more about your son’s friend.’

‘I suppose that’s what you mean by expenses, is it?’

‘I’ll try to make it a short stay.’

‘See that you do,’ she said, affecting a schoolmistressy sort of tone. ‘The Kindermann Clinic is a hundred marks a day.’

I whistled. ‘Very respectable.’

‘And now I must excuse myself, Herr Gunther,’ she said. ‘I have a meeting to prepare for.’ I pocketed my cash and then we shook hands, after which I picked up the folder she had given me and pointed my suit at the door.

I walked back along the dusty corridor and through the hall. A voice barked: ‘You just hang on there. I got to let you out. Frau Lange don’t like it if I don’t see her guests out myself.’

I put my hand on the doorknob and found something sticky there. ‘Your warm personality, no doubt.’ I jerked the door open irritatedly as the black cauldron waddled across the hall. ‘Don’t trouble,’ I said inspecting my hand. ‘You just get on back to whatever it is that you do around this dustbowl.’

‘Been a long time with Frau Lange,’ she growled. ‘She never had no complaints.’

I wondered if blackmail came into it at all. After all, you have to have a good reason to keep a guard-dog that doesn’t bark. I couldn’t see where affection might possibly fit into it either — not with this woman. It was more probable that you could grow attached to a river crocodile. We stared at each other for a moment, after which I said, ‘Does the lady always smoke that much?’

The black thought for a moment, wondering whether or not it was a trick question. Eventually she decided that it wasn’t. ‘She always has a nail in her mouth, and that’s a fact.’

‘Well, that must be the explanation,’ I said. ‘With all that cigarette smoke around her, I bet she doesn’t even know you’re there.’ She swore under her searing breath and slammed the door in my face.

I had lots to think about as I drove back along Kurfürsten-damm towards the city centre. I thought about Frau Lange’s case and then her thousand marks in my pocket. I thought about a short break in a nice comfortable sanitarium at her expense, and the opportunity it offered me, temporarily at least, to escape Bruno and his pipe; not to mention Arthur Nebe and Heydrich. Maybe I’d even sort out my insomnia and my depression.