With its arched doorways and cupolas, surmounted by a dome, it was a building which exuded power and authority, and just like all the other buildings in his life which had done that – Winchester College and Christchurch College Oxford, and, for a brief while, the Palladian building off Trafalgar Square which housed his uncle’s merchant bank – it provoked in Rupert an urge for rebellious dissent. It was an urge he was obliged to quell that morning as he arrived for a meeting in the Police Museum with his only contact in the Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo, Kriminalinspektor Alfred Bremer. It was at a barber’s shop a few doors down from the Alex that Rupert had first encountered Bremer. The barber’s was a place where policemen went for a relaxing shave after a long night of beating people up and, being sleepless and vulnerable, the policemen were liable to treat the barber’s chair as a kind of confessional. The conversation Rupert had with Bremer that first morning had continued, off and on, for the past five years in a gruff acquaintance of mutual admiration which was never overtly expressed.
