The other remarkable woman is Guillaume's wife, Christel. She might have been created as Rut's antithesis cold, charmless and unapproachable. She was thought by the journalists who met her to be much more intelligent than her husband, and for a long time it was she who had the starring role as a spy, because she had managed to get a job in the Chancellery of Hesse, in Wiesbaden. She must have had to make a painful readjustment when Guillaume leapfrogged over her into the Federal Chancellery and she was ordered to act as his courier - though by the time they were both unmasked she seemed to be about to recover some of the lost ground by getting a job in the Ministry of Defence.

At no point, though, did she have much control over her own destiny. She was not consulted about the Stasi's plan to send her with her husband to the West - merely informed about it and told to keep quiet and co-operate - while her mother, who had Dutch nationality, was used as the lever for getting permission for the three of them to settle in the Federal Republic. She put on a great performance of marital solidarity at their trial, because, she said much later, she didn't want to appear weak. But the marriage had long been dead, and kept in being only because the Stasi required them to be a married couple. Many years later, after the collapse of the DDR, she gave a long and desolating television interview. Her life, she said, had been a series of uprootings. She had been taken out of her own country and dumped in the West to live a life of fiction. Then dumped in prison, where she served over five years of the eight to which she was sentenced, during which time she lost contact with her son Pierre (another victim who could step forward to claim a play about his own story). Then she was dumped back in the DDR, and, as soon as her husband was also exchanged and arrived to join her six months later, dumped by him. Then dumped again, by the collapse of the DDR, in yet another new and alien society. At the end of the interview she sat in silence for some moments, thinking back over it all. 'Ein verpfuschtes Leben,' she said eventually 'a botched life'.

There is a third, more shadowy, woman missing from the play: Nora Kretschmann, the wife of Guillaume's controller. But then my Arno Kretschmann himself is a simplification of reality. At the beginning of his career in the Federal Chancellery, Guillaume had other controllers whom he does not name. In his interview with Guido Knopp, Guillaume says that Kretschmann took over at the time of the election campaign in the autumn of 1972. In his memoirs, though, Guillaume dates his arrival a year earlier, and gives so many circumstantial details that I suspect this version is more likely to be the correct one. Although Kretschmann was younger than him they seem to have hit it off immediately. They had lunch together at their first meeting and found themselves enjoying 'a conversation about God and the world as completely unconstrained as any two men who wanted to spend a stimulating afternoon with beer foam under their noses'. After this he remained controller until the Guillaumes were arrested.