‘I didn’t think he was the sensitive type,’ Illmann commented, watching him go. ‘Imagine a detective not wanting to see the body. It’s like a wine merchant declining to try a Burgundy he’s about to purchase. Unthinkable. Wherever do they find these face-slappers?’

‘Simple. They just go out and shanghai all the men wearing leather shorts. It’s what the Nazis call natural selection.’

On the floor at the back of the left-luggage office lay the trunk containing the body, covered with a sheet. We pulled up a couple of large parcels and sat down.

Illmann drew back the sheet, and I winced a little as the animal-house smell rose up to greet me, turning my head automatically towards the better air that lay behind my shoulder.

‘Yes, indeed,’ he murmured, ‘it’s been a warm summer.’

It was a full-sized steamer trunk, and made of good quality blue leather, with brass locks and studs — the kind you see being loaded on to those high-class passenger liners that sail between Hamburg and New York. For its solitary occupant, a naked girl of about sixteen years old, there was only one kind of journey, the more final kind, which remained to be embarked upon. Partly swathed in what looked like a length of brown curtain material, she lay on her back with her legs folded to the left, a bare breast arching upwards as if there was something underneath her. The head lay at an impossibly contradictory angle to the rest of her body, the mouth open and almost smiling, the eyes half closed and, but for the dried blood in her nostrils and the rope around her ankles, you might almost have thought the girl was in the first stages of awakening from a long sleep.

Deubel’s sergeant, a burly fellow with less neck than a hipflask and a chest like a sandbag, arrived with a notebook and pencil, and sat a little way apart from Illmann and me, sucking a sweet, his legs crossed almost nonchalantly, apparently undisturbed at the sight which lay before us.

Illmann looked appraisingly at him for a moment and then nodded, before beginning to describe what he saw.

‘An adolescent female,’ he said solemnly, ‘about sixteen years of age, naked, and lying inside a large trunk of quality manufacture. The body is covered partially with a length of brown cretonne, and the feet are bound with a piece of rope.’ He spoke slowly, with pauses between the phrases in order to allow the sergeant’s handwriting to keep pace with him.