‘He is indeed, he is indeed,’ Bahlow said aloud. Then he leaned in to whisper into her ear, with the same menacing tone she’d heard so many times from Jäger. ‘For you and us, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

*

Despite Bahlow’s not so friendly warnings, Müller felt slightly more at ease now everything was out in the open. She didn’t have to worry about a viewing party of leather-jacketed men: they were still there, she knew, just less obviously in the open. They’d be on their own, sitting in cars round corners, pretending to read the newspaper. Or hidden away in delivery vans, or behind the tarpaulins of trucks, posing as the builders themselves. Clicking away with their hidden cameras. Checking that Müller and her small team of detectives and Hauptmann Schriver and his larger team of uniformed People’s Police didn’t start discovering things the Stasi didn’t want them to discover.

‘What was all that about?’ asked Tilsner.

‘You can probably guess, can’t you? A combination of a friendly warning and a setting out of whose patch is whose – and why we shouldn’t stray into their concerns.’

‘Did you get anything out of him?’

‘What do you think? He’s cut from the same cloth as Jäger.’

Tilsner laughed as he glanced back to the two men in the Volvo. ‘Looks like a younger version of him too. He’s probably a secret love child.’

*

They found Schriver’s team, and then divided up the blocks between them for apartment-by-apartment questioning. A few years earlier, in a similar collection of Wohnkomplexe – in Halle-Neustadt – they’d been warned off house-to-house inquiries by the local Stasi, as though crime wasn’t something that could be acknowledged in the Republic. Now, there appeared to be more of a sense of reality. After all, Polizeiruf 110, the Republic’s TV crime show, was one of its most voraciously watched. Lenin might have expected crime to wither away without classes to suppress, but his citizens’ appetite for crime, albeit of the fictional kind, seemed insatiable.

Müller and Tilsner took the nearest occupied block, while delegating Schmidt to do a centimetre-by-centimetre re-check of the crime scene for forensic clues: cigarette butts, footprints, fingerprints and tyre tracks. Though Müller had her doubts as to its worth. Anything there was to find now – after the Stasi had, in effect, pre-sifted the area – would either be something the Ministry for State Security wanted them to find, or had planted there themselves.

*

From the entrance lobby, Müller took the left side of the block, Tilsner the right. Immediately, Müller could tell the inquiry had been compromised.

‘Someone’s already been round, officer,’ said the elderly man who answered the first door she tried. ‘Wasn’t he with the police? I just assumed he was. I told him all I knew.’

‘Which was?’