‘Your choice, Michael,’ Swallow said quietly. ‘Just don’t waste my time. There’s an evening train I’m going to catch, either on my own or with you. Make your mind up.’

Carmody grinned mirthlessly.

‘Like this bloody sausage-eater says, I don’t have much bloody choice do I?’

He shot a glare at Pfaus.

‘All right, Inspector. Lay out yer writin’ paper. I’ll make me statement, like you want.’

The hammering on the cell door was hard and urgent.

Carmody had just signed the fourth and final sheet of his four-page witness statement. Swallow signed as chief witness and handed the steel pen to Pfaus for his countersignature.

The statement had been remarkably coherent, Swallow reflected. He guessed that Carmody had rehearsed it well in his head during the night and in the hours before he and Pfaus had returned to the cell. It set out succinctly what Carmody claimed to have seen and heard after Alice Flannery sustained her injuries in the kitchen of the New Vienna restaurant a year previously. It described Stefan Werner’s anger. It recounted her conversation with Carmody in which she spoke of her intention to take Werner to law in order to secure compensation. Perhaps most significantly of all, Swallow estimated, it recounted Werner asking Alice for her home address and his departure from the restaurant almost immediately after she had finished work.

The witness had required a little prompting here and there, but not much. Swallow was careful to allow Carmody’s bad grammar to stand so the statement spoke the words of an uneducated man rather than a stenographer concerned with making the right impression in court. When Michael Carmody would give evidence in the Dublin Criminal Court, his statement and his evidence would complement each other.

‘If he is returning to Dublin as a witness, that makes things very simple,’ Pfaus had said earlier. ‘There is no need to have any extradition warrant if he is going with you voluntarily. What happens when you return to your own jurisdiction is not of concern to us. If he is then charged with a crime, what is the German Empire to do about that?’

‘Apologies, Kapitän Pfaus, I have an important message.’

The uniformed officer who had hammered on the door now hovered on the threshold. Pfaus crossed the cell and stepped out into the corridor, closing the door behind him. When he stepped in again, perhaps a minute later, Swallow knew instantly by his expression that something was terribly wrong.

Chapter 35

The train journey through the dark of the freezing Prussian night was like a bad dream from which there was no escape. Swallow sat, transfixed, staring through the window into the blackness that hurtled by, broken occasionally by showers of orange sparks from the locomotive.