The houses on Herbertstrasse, in any other city but Berlin, would each have been surrounded by a couple of hectares of shrub-lined lawn. But as it was they filled their individual plots of land with little or no space for grass and paving. Some of them were no more than the front-gate’s width from the sidewalk. Architecturally they were a mixture of styles, ranging from the Palladian to the neo-Gothic, the Wilhelmine and some that were so vernacular as to be impossible to describe. Judged as a whole, Herbertstrasse was like an assemblage of old field-marshals and grand-admirals in full-dress-uniforms obliged to sit on extremely small and inadequate camp stools.

The great wedding-cake of a house to which I had been summoned belonged properly on a Mississippi plantation, an impression enhanced by the black cauldron of a maid who answered the door. I showed her my ID and told her that I was expected. She stared doubtfully at my identification, as if she were Himmler himself.

‘Frau Lange didn’t say nothing to me about you.’

‘I expect she forgot,’ I said. ‘Look, she only called my office half an hour ago.’

‘All right,’ she said reluctantly. ‘You’d better come in.’

She showed me into a drawing-room that you could have called elegant but for the large and only partially chewed dogbone that was lying on the carpet. I looked around for the owner but there was no sign of one.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ said the black cauldron. ‘I’ll tell her you’re here.’ Then, muttering and grumbling like I’d got her out of the bath, she waddled off to find her mistress. I sat down on a mahogany sofa with dolphins carved on the armrests. Next to it was a matching table, the top resting on dolphin-tails. Dolphins were a comic effect always popular with German cabinet-makers, but, personally, I’d seen a better sense of humour in a three-pfennig stamp. I was there about five minutes before the cauldron rolled back in and said that Frau Lange would see me now.

We went along a long, gloomy hallway that was home to a lot of stuffed fish, one of which, a fine salmon, I stopped to admire.

‘Nice fish,’ I said. ‘Who’s the fisherman?’ She turned impatiently.

‘No fisherman here,’ she said. ‘Just fish. What a house this is for fish, and cats, and dogs. Only the cats is the worst. At least the fish is dead. You can’t dust them cats and dogs.’