‘This is Herr Doktor Hermann Six.’ It was funny, I thought, how it was that in more elevated circles everyone was a damned doctor. I shook his hand and found it held for an uncomfortably long time as my new client’s eyes looked into my face. You get a lot of clients who do that: they reckon themselves as judges of a man’s character, and after all they’re not going to reveal their embarrassing little problems to a man who looks shifty and dishonest: so it’s fortunate that I’ve got the look of someone who is steady and dependable. Anyway, about the new client’s eyes: they were blue, large and prominent, and with an odd son of watery brightness in them, as if he had just stepped out of a cloud of mustard gas. It was with some shock that it dawned on me that the man had been crying.

Six released my hand and picked up the photograph I’d just been looking at. He stared at it for several seconds and then sighed profoundly.

‘She was my daughter,’ he said, with his heart in his throat. I nodded patiently. He replaced the photograph face down on the desk, and pushed his monkishly-styled grey hair across his brow. ‘Was, because she is dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said gravely.

‘You shouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘Because if she were alive you wouldn’t be here with the chance to make a lot of money.’ I listened: he was talking my language. ‘You see, she was murdered.’ He paused for dramatic effect: clients do a lot of that, but this one was good.

‘Murdered,’ I repeated dumbly.

‘Murdered.’ He tugged at one of his loose, elephantine ears before thrusting his gnarled hands into the pockets of his shapeless navy-blue suit. I couldn’t help noticing that the cuffs of his shirt were frayed and dirty. I’d never met a steel millionaire before (I’d heard of Hermann Six; he was one of the major Ruhr industrialists), but this struck me as odd. He rocked on the balls of his feet, and I glanced down at his shoes.