March had rolled the list of missing persons into a tube. He leaned forward and tapped Krause lightly on the chest with it. “You forget yourself, comrade,” he said. “Arbeit macht frei.” The slogan of the labour camps. Work Makes You Free.

He turned and made his way back through the ranks of telephonists. Behind him he could hear Krause appealing to Helga. “See what I mean? What the hell kind of a joke is that?”

MARCH arrived back in his office just as Max Jaeger was hanging up his coat. “Zavi!” Jaeger spread his arms wide. “I got a message from the Duty Room. What can I say?” He wore the uniform of an SS Sturmbannfuhrer. The black tunic still bore traces of his breakfast.

“Put it down to my soft old heart,” said March. “And don’t get too excited. There was nothing on the corpse to identify it and there are a hundred people missing in Berlin since Sunday. It’ll take hours just to go through the list. And I’ve promised to take my boy out this afternoon, so you’ll be on your own with it.”

He lit a cigarette and explained the details: the location, the missing foot, his suspicions about Jost. Jaeger took it in with a series of grunts. He was a shambling, untidy hulk of a man, two metres tall, with clumsy hands and feet. He was fifty, nearly ten years older than March, but they had shared an office since 1959 and sometimes worked as a team. Colleagues in Werderscher Markt joked about them behind their backs: the Fox and the Bear. And maybe there was something of the old married couple about them, in the way they bickered with and covered for each other.

“This is the ‘missing’ list.” March sat down at his desk and unrolled the print-out: names, dates of birth, times of disappearance, addresses of informants. Jaeger leaned over his shoulder. He smoked stubby fat cigars and his uniform reeked of them. “According to the good doctor Eisler, our man probably died some time after six last night, so the chances are nobody missed him until seven or eight at the earliest.