I paused briefly, trying to imagine what might have happened, certain now that Heydrich must have had a hand in it. Back in the garden at the Prinz Albrecht Palais, had he not asked me himself what my answer to his proposition would be if ‘the obstacle’ that was my obligation to find Bruno’s murderer, were ‘removed’? And wasn’t this as completely removed as it was possible to achieve? No doubt he had anticipated what my answer would be and had already ordered Hering’s murder by the time we went for our stroll.

With these and other thoughts I searched the apartment. I was quick but thorough, lifting mattresses, examining cisterns, rolling back rugs and even leafing through a set of medical textbooks. I managed to find a whole sheet of the old stamps commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Nazis coming to power which had consistently appeared on the blackmail notes to Frau Lange. But of her son’s letters to Dr Kindermann there was no sign.

6

Friday, 9 September

It felt strange being back in a case-meeting at the Alex, and even stranger hearing Arthur Nebe refer to me as Kommissar Gunther. Five years had elapsed since the day in June 1933 when, no longer able to tolerate Goering’s police purges, I had resigned my rank of Kriminalinspektor in order to become the house detective at the Adlon Hotel. Another few months and they would have probably fired me anyway. If anyone had said then that I’d be back at the Alex as a member of Kripo’s upper officer class while a National Socialist government was still in power, I’d have said that he was crazy.

Most of the people seated round the table would almost certainly have expressed the same opinion, if their faces were anything to go by now: Hans Lobbes, the Reichskriminaldirektor’s number three and head of Kripo Executive; Count Fritz von der Schulenberg, deputy to Berlin’s Police President, and representing the uniformed boys of Orpo. Even the three officers from Kripo, one from Vice and two from the Murder Commission who had been assigned to a new investigating team that was, at my own request, to be a small one, all regarded me with a mixture of fear and loathing. Not that I blamed them much. As far as they were concerned I was Heydrich’s spy. In their position I would probably have felt much the same way.