‘May I be frank with you?’ he said. ‘In confidence?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘A maniac is loose on the streets of Berlin, Herr Gunther.’

I shrugged. ‘Not so as you would notice,’ I said.

Heydrich shook his head impatiently.

‘No, I don’t mean a stormtrooper beating up some old Jew. I mean a murderer. He’s raped and killed and mutilated four young German girls in as many months.’

‘I haven’t seen anything in the newspapers about it.’

Heydrich laughed. ‘The newspapers print what we tell them to print, and there’s an embargo on this particular story.’

‘Thanks to Streicher and his anti-Semitic rag, it would only get blamed on the Jews,’ said Nebe.

‘Precisely so,’ said Heydrich. ‘The last thing I want is an anti-Jewish riot in this city. That sort of thing offends my sense of public order. It offends me as a policeman. When we do decide to clear out the Jews it will be in a proper way, not with a rabble to do it. There are the commercial implications too. A couple of weeks ago some idiots in Nuremberg decided to tear down a synagogue. One that just happened to be well-insured with a German insurance company. It cost them thousands of marks to settle the claim. So you see, race riots are very bad for business.’

‘So why tell me?’

‘I want this lunatic caught, and caught soon, Gunther.’ He looked drily at Nebe. ‘In the best traditions of Kripo a man, a Jew, has already confessed to the murders. However, since he was almost certainly in custody at the time of the last murder, it seems that he might actually be innocent, and that an overzealous element in Nebe’s beloved police force may quite simply have framed this man.

‘But you, Gunther, you have no racial or political axe to grind. And what is more you have considerable experience in this field of criminal investigation. After all it was you, was it not, who apprehended Gormann, the strangler? That may have been ten years ago, but everyone still remembers the case.’ He paused and looked me straight in the eye — an uncomfortable sensation. ‘In other words, I want you back, Gunther. Back in Kripo, and tracking down this madman before he kills again.’

I flicked my cigarette-butt into the bushes and stood up. Arthur Nebe stared at me dispassionately, almost as if he disagreed with Heydrich’s wish to have me back on the force and leading the investigation in preference to any of his own men. I lit another cigarette and thought for a moment.

‘Hell, there must be other bulls,’ I said. ‘What about the one who caught Kürten, the Beast of Dusseldorf. Why not get him?’

‘We’ve already checked up on him,’ said Nebe. ‘It would seem that Peter Kürten just gave himself up. Prior to that it was hardly the most efficient investigation.’

‘Isn’t there anyone else?’

Nebe shook his head.