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morning would have gone. In the section, they all worked like beavers at the direction of the FrauBoss , and Elke had been back on his mobile to ask when they should expect him – as if he had a criminal’s tag on his ankle. He pushed the sheet of paper through the grille. A uniformed woman took the girls to a side room.
    Jago continued to wait. Earlier it had seemed a good idea but the excitement had palled. In Canning Town no one made witness statements. His act of defiance was to get out a cigarette, not light it but roll it between his lips. He’d give it five more minutes.
     
    On an upper floor of the station, in a pinched office, a picture on the wall faced his desk. Each time he looked up it was straight ahead, there for him to feast on. The sun was at its height. The sea was pure blue. The beach was golden, and not many of the pebble banks showed. Bikini-clad girls lay on multi-coloured towels, stood on the sand, or among the slight waves. He had taken the photo himself. He gloried in it, bathed in its warmth. It made the greyest, coldest day in Berlin a little more acceptable.
    He was an investigator, had passed the ‘detective’ course run by the national police college, was in the KriminalPolizei, but would never allow himself to be promoted to sergeant. If he looked away from his screen and ignored the picture, he had the window to look out of. There was a courtyard and a glimpse of the sky – it had clouded over, wasn’t raining yet but soon would be. The picture was his joy . . . He sighed, then allowed himself a brief smile. Manfred Seitz, investigator of the KrimPol based at the station on Bismarckstrasse, smiled infrequently when others might see him do so. Sometimes in the presence of his wife, not often . . . He was given the shit by those who ran the KrimPol section that dealt with organised crime in that part of Berlin. He was a dinosaur. Most of them were young enough to be his kids but they had the status of ‘sergeant’ or ‘lieutenant’ and could instruct him on his duties, which events he should follow-up. He fielded the rubbish and was kept at a distance from any work that might offer a step up the promotion ladder. He didn’t complain . . . There was a bank worker in Reception, with a scarred face, a foreigner reporting ‘extortion’. No one was dead, and there had been no hospital admission. It was for him to handle.
    Fred – everyone used the abbreviation – sipped the coffee he had brought to work in his Thermos. He did not patronise the canteen, thought it tiresome. He brought his own sandwiches, which Hilde made for him while he showered each morning – he went to the station before she left for the infant school – so he could avoid the gossip and back-biting at the lunch tables. He had been Fred to his parents and at school in the Baltic city of Rostock, and when he had joined the police. . . . His children used it – the daughter in Zürich and the son at college in Dresden. He thought it suited him, that it matched his appearance.
    It was a quiet morning. The ‘kids’ had made arrests the previous day, Kurdish pickpockets, and were still celebrating. Fred Seitz was at that stage of his career – within three years of retirement – when he was too junior to appear before the cameras or brief the press, and too old to appear in court as a witness on whom a conviction that could lead to advancement might depend. He was in a rut. A last glance at the sea, the beach and the bikini girls. His screen showed a new report from a Nature Conservancy group handling the parkland to the east of Lübeck, across the estuary. His pipe was on the table with sweet-smelling ash in the cold bowl. He killed the screen, hitched his jacket onto his shoulder and closed his door. The kids were around a central table in the work area but did not want him in their midst so he had been awarded the partitioned small room as an office, space that should have gone to a team leader.
    He took