‘I’m sure, Comrade Hauptmann,’ the man replied, looking up at her with a thin smile. ‘The builders had already managed to break away some of the new concrete around the arm. That’s why they called us.’

‘Have you secured the scene, Comrade?’ asked Müller.

The captain gestured with his eyes. Müller followed his glance and could see a couple of Vopos marking out the perimeter of the incident site with red and white police tape. Beyond that, in the shadows of one of the half-finished apartment blocks of the Neu-Gorbitz district of Dresden, there was a group of what Müller at first took to be onlookers. They were dressed more casually than the detectives, with leather jackets de rigueur rather than winter overcoats. They could have been shift workers interrupting the walk to their factories to gawp. The giveaway was their studied, theatrical indifference. They wanted to appear like factory workers, but Müller knew they were not. She felt that familiar tingle in the back of the neck as her body hairs stood on end. They were almost certainly agents of the Ministry for State Security.

Concrete Man – and from what had been uncovered of the body so far it did indeed appear to be male – seemed to have attracted wider interest than simply that of her branch of the People’s Police, the Kriminalpolizei or Kripo.

She was distracted, and strangely relieved, by another arrival – or rather, another two arrivals. Her forensic officer, Kriminaltechniker Jonas Schmidt, heralded as always by the pungent smell of his wurst-breath, panted out as though he was in pain, and her deputy, Oberleutnant Werner Tilsner.

All three had been in disgrace for nigh on a couple of years now, but the one concession from their boss, Oberst Reiniger, after a case in which they’d shouldered the blame for the escape of a couple of Republikflüchtlinge, was that they could stay together as a team. Rather than the grand title they had before – the ‘Serious Crime Department’ – they were now simply a floating murder squad, sent wherever, and whenever, particular regions of the Republic were understaffed.

She watched Tilsner hold his hands over his ears and grimace, trying to shut out the machine-gun hammer of the pneumatic drills. His face was pale – perhaps the sound was too close a reminder of actual automatic weapons, the memories of what she knew he’d witnessed and taken part in as a teenager during the war.

‘You’ve already clocked our spectators, I expect,’ Tilsner shouted into her ear above the din.

She glanced towards the group of what they both assumed were Stasi officers, and nodded. Although for Tilsner, given his own close association with the MfS, perhaps it was less an assumption and more him recognising his colleagues from ‘the Firm’.