His man wasn’t due back until the day after Boxing Day so he applied himself to the task in hand, going through the house and especially the cellar and removing everything that could be regarded as incriminating. By midnight on Boxing Day all; the evidence had been burned. He now turned his thoughts to Bourne and Ridgeway.

Since being ordered to make themselves scarce they’d moved furtively around the country, three or four days at a time in cheap bed and breakfasts, travelling coast to coast, county to county and calling him at the isolated telephone box twice a week for brief, coded conversations.

But now it was clear British Intelligence were closing in on them. The art gallery in Cork Street had been raided, as had their homes. It was only a matter of time before they were caught and the Admiral doubted either of them would hold out very long under interrogation.

He assured them he would look after them: they were to travel by train and bus and on New Year’s Eve meet him at a wood some five miles from his house from where he’d take them to safety.

When he arrived at the wood at eleven o’clock that night they’d clearly been waiting for a while, both drenched and looking thoroughly miserable. The Admiral told them they’d walk through the wood to where a car was waiting. They appeared confused but did as instructed and it was, the Admiral reflected later, like leading lambs to the slaughter. Along the route he’d carefully prepared, the two men breathed heavily behind him until he stopped and told them to rest and would like they like a drop of whisky and they both nodded as he made to remove a flask from his jacket pocket.

Ridgeway spotted the pistol first but before he could utter a sound he was hit just below the throat and when Bourne spun round the Admiral shot him on the side of the head. He finished both off with shots to the temple and allowed himself a minute or so to regain his breath before dragging their bodies down the small slope to the pit he’d dug earlier that day. He retrieved the spade from the undergrowth and covered them with earth and then re-arranged the surface.

To his surprise the Admiral caught himself whistling a jolly tune as he made his way through the densely packed trees and out of the woods.

Kommissar Iosif Gurevich was apprehensive when a week after Wolfgang Steiner’s capture he was ordered to meet Marshal Zhukov. Any concerns Gurevich might have had about meeting the commander of the Soviet zone in Germany seemed to be allayed when the hero of the Battle for Berlin nodded as he entered the room and said the operation to lure Wolfgang Steiner to Berlin had been most clever.

‘May I ask about Martin Bormann, sir?’

‘What about him, Gurevich?’

‘There seems to be some unresolved questions as to his fate. The other man they found in Trieste – the one dressed as a priest – wasn’t Bormann, so I understand.’