‘Von der Schulenberg had all the Hauptmanns into the briefing-room at the start of last week. They passed on to us what a lot of the men already suspected. That there was another Gormann on the streets of Berlin. Most of the lads figure that’s why you’re back on the force. Most of the civils we’ve got now couldn’t detect coal on a slag heap. But that Gormann case. Well, it was a good piece of work.’

‘Thanks, Tanker.’

‘All the same, sir, it doesn’t look like this little Sudeten spinner you’re holding could have done it, does it? If you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘Not unless he had a telephone in his cell, no. Still, we’ll see if the left-luggage people at Zoo Bahnhof like the look of him. You never know, he might have had an associate on the outside.’

Tanker nodded. ‘That’s true enough,’ he said. ‘Anything is possible in Germany just as long as Hitler shits in the Reich Chancellery.’

Several hours later I was back at Zoo Bahnhof, where Korsch had already distributed photographs of the trunk to the assembled left-luggage staff. They stared and stared, shook their heads and scratched their grizzly chins, and still none of them could remember anyone leaving a blue-leather trunk.

The tallest of them, a man wearing the longest khaki-coloured boiler coat, and who seemed to be in charge of the rest, collected a notebook from under the metal-topped counter and brought it over to me.

‘Presumably you record the names and addresses of those leaving luggage with you,’ I said to him, without much enthusiasm. As a general rule, killers leaving their victims as left-luggage at railway stations don’t normally volunteer their real names and addresses.

The man in the khaki coat, whose bad teeth resembled the blackened ceramic insulators on tram cables, looked at me with quiet confidence and tapped the hard cover of his register with the quick of a fingernail.

‘It’ll be in here, the one who left your bloody trunk.’

He opened his book, licked a thumb that a dog would have refused, and began to turn the greasy pages.

‘On the trunk in your photograph there’s a ticket,’ he said. ‘And on that ticket is a number, same one as what’s chalked on the side of the item. And that number will be in this book, alongside a date, a name and an address.’ He turned several more pages and then traced down the page with his forefinger.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘The trunk was deposited here on Friday, 19 August.’

‘Four days after she disappeared,’ Korsch said quietly.

The man followed his finger along a line to the facing page. ‘Says here that the trunk belongs to a Herr Heydrich, initial “R”, of Wilhelmstrasse, number 102.’

Korsch snorted with laughter.

‘Thank you,’ I said to the man. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’