There was a knock at the door as she was laying out the un­structured, billowing georgette evening dress and wondering just how inappro­priate it was for the task at hand. Instinctively, she calmed her breathing to near nothing, rose up onto the balls of her feet, and silently skipped across the room to the door.

She wasn’t expecting any visitors, so she readied to either defend herself or attack whoever was waiting in the corridor. However, as she flung the door open all she saw was a porter, holding a large, flat parcel.

Her face transformed into a wide smile, instantly disarming the shocked young man.

‘The manager sends his apologies,’ he said, holding out the paper-wrapped package, ‘that this didn’t arrive before you did.’

Anna took the parcel.

‘Did he arrange the delivery?’ she asked, adding a stern edge to her voice.

‘Erm, no,’ the porter stuttered, suddenly nervous.

‘Then there’s really nothing to apologise for,’ Anna replied, smiling broadly again and slamming the door in the porter’s face.

Anna felt the parcel as she carried it back into the suite. It was heavy and hard-edged. Solid enough, she decided, to have crushed the porter’s windpipe with one sharp thrust, if she’d wanted to.

It would have been crude, and inaccurate, to describe Anna as a psychopath. Anna was more than that. She delighted in the pain she caused, relished her craft, and always understood exactly what she was inflicting on people. The only thing she didn’t know was why she did it, but that wasn’t her job.

Anna had been found by the Soviets in the bombed-out husk of Dresden in 1945.

Allied air raids had destroyed more than half of the city in the cold early months of the year, and by the time the Red Army marched into its rubble-strewn streets the rule of law, along with most other signs of civilisation, had collapsed.

Tales had spread, among the people who had managed to survive the bombings and a harsh winter with barely any protection from the elements and even less food, of a ghostly killer haunting the city’s ruined buildings, murdering the weak and the sick. Some called this spectre the angel of death, others the angel of mercy.

After several months spent ignoring the rumours, and a few more impatiently waiting for them to fade, KGB investigators were sent to end them once and for all. The agents were astonished when they discovered that the real, flesh-and-blood human who had been steadily adding to the city’s mass of corpses was a beautiful twenty-one-year-old woman. They were even more stunned when she openly confessed to all the murders and recounted the gruesome details of each one, starting with her first two victims: her parents.