‘I’ll do that. No doubt he will also be greatly disturbed at your failure to appreciate the menace of the third international conspiracy dedicated to the ruin of Germany. Catholicism is no less a threat to Reich security than Bolshevism and World Jewry.’

‘You forgot men from outer space,’ I said. ‘Frankly, I don’t give a shit what you tell him. VD1 is part of Kripo, not the Gestapo, and in all matters relating to this investigation Kripo is to take priority in the services of our own department. I have it in writing from the Reichskriminaldirektor, as does Dr Schade. So why don’t you take your so-called case and shove it up your arse. A little more shit in there won’t make much of a difference to the way you smell.’

I slammed the receiver down on to its cradle. There were, after all, a few enjoyable aspects to the job. Not least of these was the opportunity it afforded to piss on the Gestapo’s shoes.

At the identity parade later that same morning, the left-luggage staff failed to identify Gottfried Bautz as the man who had deposited the trunk containing Irma Hanke’s body, and to Deubel’s disgust I signed the order releasing him from custody.

It’s the law that all strangers arriving in Berlin must be reported to a police station by their hotelier or landlord within six days. In this way the Resident Registration Office at the Alex is able to give out the address of anyone resident in Berlin for the price of fifty pfennigs. People imagine that this law must be part of the Nazi Emergency Powers, but in truth it has existed for a while. The Prussian police was always so efficient.

My office was a few doors down from the Registration Office in room 350, which meant that the corridor was always noisy with people, and obliged me to keep my door shut. No doubt this had been one of the reasons why I had been put here, as far away from the offices of the Murder Commission as it was possible to be. I suppose the idea was that my presence should be kept out of the way of other Kripo personnel, for fear that I might contaminate them with some of my more anarchic attitudes to police investigation. Or perhaps they had hoped that my insubordinate spirit might be broken by first being dramatically lowered. Even on a sunny day like this one was, my office had a dismal aspect. The olive-green metal desk had more thread-catching edges than a barbed-wire fence, and had the single virtue of matching the worn linoleum and the dingy curtains, while the walls were a couple of thousand cigarettes’ shade of yellow.