‘Let’s just play it gently with Schriver,’ she warned. ‘We’ll do better with him on our side than by making an enemy of him.’

*

Inside the square, modern building – nicknamed by Dresdeners the ‘eating cube’ – their chosen meeting spot was the ‘rustic Radeberger beer cellar’: a faux reproduction of the real thing, complete with waitresses in dirndls. To Müller it all had too much of a West German, even semi-Nazi atmosphere. You could quite imagine Hitler, Göring and their cronies being at home here, with the Bavarian-style wood carvings and furniture, and animal heads and horns adorning the walls. The venue had been arranged by Tilsner. When their drinks were served, the waitress’s dress almost lost its battle to contain her décolletage, and Müller shook her head as she watched the men’s eyes – even Schmidt’s – glaze over.

Tilsner slapped his thighs, as though he were in lederhosen, to grab Schriver’s attention.

‘So, Magnus,’ he said, ‘let’s not talk around the hot porridge. The pathologist has unfortunately raised a little problem with our Concrete Man.’

Schriver took a long gulp of his beer before saying anything. ‘What exactly?’ he asked, finally.

‘It seems as though he was in the concrete for longer than we thought.’

There was a bemused look on Schriver’s face.

‘How’s he come to that conclusion? We attended the scene as soon as we were alerted to it.’

‘Who alerted you?’ asked Müller.

Schriver made a play of looking it up in his notebook. ‘It was an anonymous phone call.’

‘That figures,’ said Tilsner.

Schriver slammed his beer down, his face creased in confusion. ‘Sorry. What exactly are you implying?’

Müller decided to take control before things got out of hand. ‘Oberleutnant Tilsner is not casting any aspersions on your work, Magnus. Far from it. We all need to work together as a team to try to solve this one. That’s why we called this meeting. To make sure the K, we detectives, work in harmony with your uniform team. But it seems the victim was attacked a full day earlier than we thought.’

‘At least a day,’ emphasised Tilsner.

‘And?’ asked Schriver, still apparently none the wiser.

‘And someone’s been trying to pull the wool over our eyes.’

‘What Oberleutnant Tilsner’s trying to say is that if the body was there, half buried in the concrete of a busy building site, someone would have seen it earlier.’

‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ said Schriver.

‘No,’ insisted Müller. ‘It’s impossible it wouldn’t have been seen. So either the pathologist is mistaken – which I doubt very much – or it was hidden, or it was reported to someone else.’

‘Or,’ said Tilsner, with a hint of menace in his voice, ‘it was reported to the police in the usual way, but someone at People’s Police HQ decided someone else should hear about it first.’