One thought was lodged in my head like a bullet.

KLJ was dead.

I had asked Pol about it and he said: " Floating in the Grunewald See." So there was Kenneth Lindsay Jones's place. We all have a place. We know where we were born but not where we shall die. At home or a mile away at the crossroads or far across the face of the earth, not knowing it in our sleep or pitched down on the wet road or trapped in the wreckage on the mountainside and knowing it only too well. A place for each of us, and there was his, the lake at Grunewald renamed Kenneth Lindsay Jones by virtue of his presence.

We'd lost five men during my time at the Bureau but this one was said to be unkillable.

Pol had told me more because I had asked. "A very long-range shot in the spine from a 9.3 again, as it was with Charington."

Then we stopped talking about KLJ as if he'd never existed. Pol set about stalking me and I let him, sitting with my back to the balcony and listening to the quiet modulated tone that I was already beginning to hate.

"We are highly impressed with the way you have been working on these war-crime inquiries. There was no need for secrecy because the matter comes under the terms of the London Agreement, yet you chose to maintain strict hush and we have been told that even the chief of the Z Commission had no knowledge of the man responsible for the arrests. We assume that your reason was to keep in practice."

He waited for confirmation. I enjoyed my silence.

"Further, your operations have been on the periphery of a search-area that was opened at the Bureau three weeks ago, on pressure from Paris. No one – now – has more information on the Berlin nucleus of ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis than yourself. This now becomes invaluable to us and so do you."