The phone call had come in to the incident room they’d set up in Dresden Volkspolizei headquarters just as she and Tilsner were about to start ploughing through piles of missing persons files. Müller couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. The fact that Tilsner was chain smoking – filling the office with a horrible fug in the process – didn’t improve her mood. She wondered if the day would ever come when non-smokers like herself would hold sway, offices could become healthy, smoke-free zones, and smokers could be banished to their own foul-smelling rooms or – even better – forced to stand outside in the cold indulging their nasty habit. Perhaps that was too much wishful thinking.

Tilsner exhaled right into her face, as though he wanted to wind her up further. ‘What exactly are we looking for?’

Müller tried to concentrate on the task in hand, rather than her apprehension about the twins’ new school, and her own feelings of guilt. ‘A male, in his fifties or sixties, possibly a spectacle wearer. Blue eyes, according to the pathologist, a chest scar indicating previous surgery or injury, the pathologist couldn’t be certain which—’

‘Why not?’ asked Tilsner.

Müller rolled her eyes. It wasn’t their job to go questioning the medical experts in that sort of detail. She ignored him, and waved away his cigarette smoke.

‘The pathologist couldn’t establish that. What he could tell us was that the second right-hand molar in the upper jaw had been replaced by a gold tooth. And that replacement tooth had seen some heavy use, so it wasn’t recent dental work.’

‘Does that imply he might have been a party bigwig? Is that why the Stasi is taking such an interest?’

‘Possibly. But remember we’ve got the witness, Petra Abt, who thinks he may have been foreign.’

Tilsner sighed and slapped his hand on his fat pile of missing persons files. They’d divided them in two. ‘If that’s the case, going through this lot is a complete waste of time. We’d be better off searching for places where we’d be most likely to find foreigners – Interhotels, the university, that sort of thing.’

‘I’ve already asked Schriver’s team to check both of those possibilities.’ Müller glared hard at her deputy. ‘But let’s face it, there are plenty of other possible scenarios too. He could have been one of our Soviet friends. We’re near the Czech border. We could go on and on. But this –’ Müller gave her own slap to the files – ‘is as good as any place to start, so why don’t we just get on with it?’

*