‘“That man has the instinct of a hound and the soul of a hunter,” he said to me that first day when you questioned him about his dead neighbour,’ Dr Mabuse continued. ‘What an unlucky coincidence that was. He thought she was a nobody. Little did he know that killing her would bring him into your orbit. Needless to say, he knew who you were. Had known of you ever since you started investigating Daisy’s murder. He knew you were a dog with a bone, and he had felt relieved that you had never picked up on his scent but had, instead, always concentrated all your efforts on Jasper. But he could never be sure of you, and so he followed your career very, very closely over the years, as did I. I think when years passed and you did not question us about Daisy’s murder, we relaxed – and then we made two mistakes. The first was that we thought you had given up trying to solve her murder. The second was that we thought we had got away with it. When the two of you met, he could tell that you remembered his name from the Daisy case and he panicked. He tried to steer you away by “helping” you and sending you to me, which, was of course, his … our undoing. The only way I can make a straight line down the middle of a torso is if I first form a “V” shape at the top. As soon as you reacted to the dissection, I knew we had been right to continue worrying about you.’

The Chief Inspector did not respond in any visible way; he continued to watch the hopping pigeons.

‘You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this,’ Dr Mabuse said. ‘No, you’re realising I’m telling you all this because there is nothing you can do about it. Truth is, there never was. Not since the 1960s anyway, when Silas joined the SIU as an undercover operative around the time that the nationalists were beginning to agitate for independence or war. The SIU would never have let you touch him. And yet he still was afraid of you.’

The Chief Inspector’s head moved slightly – a sign that he had received information he had not hitherto known.

‘The torsos in the Zambezi: what were they? The work of the SIU?’ the Chief Inspector asked at last. The calm in his voice surprised Dr Mabuse.

‘After everything you know about Silas and me, you still want us to have some goodness in us, I see,’ Dr Mabuse said, smiling thinly. ‘You want us to have done things because we had to, and not because we wanted to. Those torsos in the Zambezi belonged to young men and women seeking to fight for their country, and willing to die for a cause. I suppose in some people’s way of looking at the world, they were the good guys.’