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on in my own headquarters?’
    The journalist stiffened and the photographer lowered his camera.
    ‘It’s quite true,’ said Douglas.
    ‘And now, gentlemen, I must get some work done,’ said Kellerman. He shooed them out, like an old lady finding hens in her bedroom. ‘Sorry about that,’ Kellerman explained to Douglas after they’d gone. ‘They said they would need only five minutes, but they hang on and hang on. It’s all part of their job to exploit opportunities, I suppose.’ He went back to his desk and sat down. ‘Tell me what’s been happening, my boy.’
    Douglas read his report, with asides and explanations where needed. Kellerman’s prime concern was to justify money spent, and Douglas always wrote his reports so that they summarized the resources of the department and showed the cost in Occupation Marks.
    When the formalities were over, Kellerman opened the humidor. With black-market cigarettes at five Occupation Marks each, one of Kellerman’s Monte Cristo No 2s had become a considerable accolade. Kellerman selected two cigars with great care. Like Douglas, he preferred the flavour of the ones with green or yellow spots on the outer leaf. He went through a ceremony of cutting them and removing loose strands of tobacco. As usual Kellerman wore one of his smooth tweed suits, complete with waistcoat and gold chain for his pocket watch. Typically he had not worn his SS uniform even for this visit by the photographer. And Kellerman, like so many of the senior SS men of his generation, preferred army rank titles to the cumbersome SS nomenclature.
    ‘Still no word of your wife?’ asked Kellerman. He came round the desk and gave Douglas the cigar.
    ‘I think we have to assume that she was killed,’ said Douglas. ‘She often went to our neighbour’s house during the air attacks, and the street fighting completely demolished it.’
    ‘Don’t give up hope,’ said Kellerman. Was that a reference to his affair with the secretary, Douglas wondered. ‘Your son is well?’
    ‘He was in the shelter that day. Yes, he’s thriving.’
    Kellerman leaned over to light the cigar. Douglas was not yet used to the way that the German officers put cologne on their faces after shaving and the perfume surprised him. He inhaled; the cigar lit. Douglas would have preferred to take the cigar away with him but the General always lit them. Douglasthought perhaps it was a way of preventing the recipient selling it instead of smoking it. Or was it simply that Kellerman believed that, in England, no gentleman could offer a colleague a chance to put an unsmoked cigar in his pocket.
    ‘And no other problems, Superintendent?’ Kellerman passed behind Douglas, and touched the seated man’s shoulder lightly, as if in reassurance. Douglas wondered if his general knew that his internal mail had that morning included a letter from his secretary, saying she was pregnant and demanding twenty thousand O-Marks. The pound sterling, she pointed out, in case Douglas didn’t know, was not the sort of currency abortionists accepted. Douglas was permitted a proportion of his wages in O-Marks. So far Douglas had not discovered how the letter got to him. Had she sent it to one of her girlfriends in Registry, or actually come into the building herself?
    ‘No problems that I need bother the General with,’ said Douglas.
    Kellerman smiled. Douglas’s anxiety had led him to address the general in that curious third-person form that some of the more obsequious Germans used.
    ‘You knew this room in the old days?’ said Kellerman.
    Before the war it had been the Commissioner’s procedure to leave the door wide open when the room was unoccupied, so that messengers could pass in and out. Soon after being assigned to Scotland Yard, Douglas had found an excuse for coming into the empty room and studying it with the kind of awe that comes from a schoolboy diet of detective fiction. ‘I seldom came here when it was the Commissioner’s