‘But he may have been framed. Do you know a man named Kurtz?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘He wears a toupée.’

‘Oh.’ He could tell that that struck home. He said, ‘Don’t you think that it was odd they were all there – at the death? Everybody knew Harry. Even the driver, the doctor …’

She said with hopeless calm, ‘I’ve wondered that too, though I didn’t know about Kurtz. I wondered whether they’d murdered him, but what’s the use of wondering?’

‘I’m going to get those bastards,’ Rollo Martins said.

‘It won’t do any good. Perhaps the police are right. Perhaps poor Harry got mixed up –’

‘Fräulein Schmidt,’ the voice called again.

‘I must go.’

‘I’ll walk with you a bit of the way.’

The dark was almost down; the snow had ceased for a while to fall, and the great statues of the Ring, the prancing horses, the chariots and eagles, were gun-shot grey with the end of evening. ‘It’s better to give up and forget,’ Anna said. The moonlit snow lay ankle-deep on the unswept pavements.

‘Will you give me the doctor’s address?’

They stood in the shelter of a wall while she wrote it down for him.

‘And yours too?’

‘Why do you want that?’

‘I might have news for you.’

‘There isn’t any news that would do any good now.’ He watched her from a distance board her tram, bowing her head against the wind, a dark question mark on the snow.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

AN AMATEUR DETECTIVE has this advantage over the professional, that he doesn’t work set hours. Rollo Martins was not confined to the eight-hour day: his investigations didn’t have to pause for meals. In his one day he covered as much ground as one of my men would have covered in two, and he had this initial advantage over us, that he was Harry’s friend. He was, as it were, working from inside, while we pecked at the perimeter.

Dr Winkler was at home. Perhaps he would not have been at home to a police officer. Again Martins had marked his card with the open-sesame phrase: ‘A friend of Harry Lime’s.’