“No problem.” Krause looked relieved and swivelled round in his chair to the sour-faced woman. “You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything’s come in in the last hour.” He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. Td have left it an hour. But any trouble around that place — you know how it is.”

March looked up at the Berlin map. Most of it was a grey cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of colour: the green of the Grunewald Forest and, running alongside it, the blue ribbon of the Havel. Curling into the lake, in the shape of a foetus, was an island, linked to the shore by a thin umbilical causeway.

Schwanenwerder.

“Does Goebbels still have a place there?”

Krause nodded. “And the rest.”

It was one of the most fashionable addresses in Berlin, practically a government compound. A few dozen large houses screened from the road. A sentry at the entrance to the causeway. A good place for privacy, for security, for forest views and private moorings; a bad place to discover a body. The corpse had been washed up fewer than three hundred metres away.

Krause said: “The local Orpo call it ‘the pheasant run’.”

March smiled: ‘golden pheasants’ was street slang for the Party leadership.

“It’s not good to leave a mess for too long on that doorstep.”

Helga had returned. “Persons reported missing since Sunday morning,” she announced, “and still unaccounted for.” She gave a long roll of printed-out names to Krause, who glanced at it and passed it on to March. “Plenty to keep you busy there.” He seemed to find this amusing. “You should give it to that fat friend of yours, Jaeger. He’s the one who should be looking after this business, remember?”

Thanks. I’ll make a start at least.”

Krause shook his head. “You put in twice the hours of the others. You get no promotions. You’re on shitty pay. Are you crazy or what?”