‘You don’t need to worry,’ he said in German.

Prince recognised the voice as the deep bass tones of Ludwig, the man he’d telephoned the previous evening in Vienna to send the message to Iosif.

‘Comrade Gurevich sent me to help you. Maybe put the small light on.’

When Prince turned on the bedside light, he recognised the heavily built man as the one he’d met in the woods when Gurevich had driven him from Vienna, who’d then taken him into Klagenfurt in his Daimler. The three of them looked at each other, Ludwig’s bloodshot eyes blinking from under his thick eyebrows.

‘You know they’re watching the hotel?’

‘Who are?’

‘Your people – the British.’ He shook his head in a derisory manner. ‘They’re not very good: two of them in a car at the front, one of them asleep. There’s a man in the alley at the back too – an amateur: all he does is smoke. He may as well be waving a torch around.’

‘How did you get in?’

‘It’s my job. In any case, your people paid the hotel owner to let them know if they heard anything or if you went anywhere. Once they do that, it’s easy: we just pay more. You’d better get ready.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Comrade Gurevich says he’s more or less sorted everything out, so you need to get back to Trieste. You’d better get a move on, or you’ll miss all the fun.’

The Allied Kommandatura met three times a day: at seven in the morning, noon and seven in the evening. The Kommandatura was the body that brought Berlin’s four governing powers together, and since July it had met at a building on Kaiserswerther Strasse in Dahlem, opposite Triestpark.

There was a certain predictability to the meetings. The Western Allies had four representatives each, the Soviet Union eight. The meetings would begin with discussions on non-controversial matters – power and water supplies, for example – although in the fetid atmosphere of December 1945 Berlin, nothing could be described as non-controversial. There had once been a lengthy and heated row over who was responsible for cleaning gutters. They would then move on to more difficult matters, and as the meeting came to an end, if any party wanted to raise a matter directly with another, they would then do so.

It was bitterly cold, with a wind building up, when they gathered for the meeting at seven o’clock that Wednesday evening. No one was in the mood for a long meeting, and in any case the evening meeting tended to be the least difficult one of the day.

As the meeting closed, one of the Soviet representatives asked to meet with an American representative about a delicate matter. The senior American officer present was a colonel, who carefully studied the Red Army officer who’d made the request. He was a one-star NKGB commissar, young for such a senior rank, and the colonel had met him before but couldn’t recall his name. The colonel nodded to one of his colleagues, an affable Italian American in civilian clothes who was responsible for what were euphemistically called ‘sensitive issues’.