A well-tended window box was the apartment’s only concession to homeliness, the walls being bare of anything except a couple of photographs in which Gollner was being decorated. He waved me to the room’s solitary armchair and sat himself on the edge of the neatly made bed.

‘Heard you was back,’ he said quietly. Leaning forwards he pulled out a crate from under the bed. ‘Beer?’

‘Thanks.’

He nodded reflectively as he pushed off the bottle-tops with his bare thumbs.

‘And it’s Kommissar now, I hear. Resigns as an inspector. Reincarnated as a Kommissar. Makes you believe in fucking magic, doesn’t it? If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were in somebody’s pocket.’

‘Aren’t we all? In one way or another.’

‘Not me. And unless you’ve changed, not you either.’ He swigged his beer thoughtfully.

Tanker was an East Fresian from Emsland where, it is said, brains are as rare as fur on fish. While he may not have been able to spell Wittgenstein, let alone explain his philosophy, Tanker was a good policeman, one of the old school of uniformed bulls, the firm but fair sort, enforcing the law with a friendly box on the ear for young rowdies, and less inclined to arrest a man and haul him off to the cells than give him an effective and administratively simple bedtime-story with his encyclopaedia-sized fist. It was said of Tanker that he was the toughest bull in Orpo and, looking at him sitting opposite me now, in his shirt sleeves, his great belt creaking under the weight of his even greater belly, I didn’t find this hard to believe. Certainly time had stood still with his prognathous features — somewhere around one million years BC. Tanker could not have looked less civilized than if he had been wearing the skin of a sabre-toothed tiger.

I found my cigarettes and offered him one. He shook his head and took out his pipe.

‘If you ask me,’ I said, ‘we’re every one of us in the back pocket of Hitler’s trousers. And he means to slide down a mountain on his arse.’

Tanker sucked at the bowl of his pipe and started to fill it with tobacco. When he’d finished he smiled and raised his bottle.

‘Then here’s to stones under the fucking snow.’

He belched loudly and lit his pipe. The clouds of pungent smoke that rolled towards me like Baltic fog reminded me of Bruno. It even smelt like the same foul mixture that he had smoked.

‘You knew Bruno Stahlecker, didn’t you, Tanker?’