‘No, he wouldn’t have been. Bormann is almost certainly dead. If the Americans and the British want to believe he’s still alive, then that is fine with us – we can use the prospect as a way to confuse them for many years.’

‘But the information we got from Willi Kühn suggested he could be alive?’

Zhukov stared at Gurevich, letting him know he was deciding whether to share a confidence with him. ‘Bormann escaped from the bunker on the first of May and reached Friedrichstrasse station, and was then seen on the railway line near Weidendammer Bridge, so if people want to believe he’s alive they have that to cling on to. But there was a very heavy artillery attack on the area where he was last seen, and we have good reason to believe he was killed there. We don’t have the body as such; you know how it is after an artillery attack…’

Gurevich nodded.

‘It serves the interests of the Soviet Union to leave a question mark hanging over his fate.’ Zhukov clapped his hands to signal there was to be no more talk of Bormann. ‘And Wolfgang Steiner… his interrogation was a serious disappointment. Did you carry it out yourself?’

‘Kapitan Fyodorov was the main interrogator, sir, but of course I supervised it and take full responsibility for it. I have to admit that once he’d recovered from the shock of being captured by us, he proved to be remarkably resilient, which was quite unexpected. Fyodorov is an experienced interrogator, but it took him a long time to break Steiner.’

‘And that information he eventually divulged – about the films and notebooks he’d hidden in a farm in Bavaria – he held out for how long until he gave us that?’

‘Five days, I’m afraid, sir. I think he was hoping to keep it to negotiate for his life, but even when Fyodorov resorted to more physical methods of persuasion, he still gave us very little. But once we told him his son had been killed in Maribor, he appeared to give up; he seemed like a broken man. After that, he was quite forthcoming.’

Marshal Zhukov nodded and looked carefully at Gurevich, clearly not quite satisfied. ‘By which time it was too late.’

‘I’m afraid so, sir. We managed to get a special unit to the farm, which was no mean feat given that it’s in the American zone, but there was nothing there.’

‘The incompetence!’ Zhukov slammed his fist on the desk and was now shouting, his face red.

Kommissar Gurevich said he could quite understand how the marshal felt; indeed, he shared his anger, his frustration…

‘It’s more than anger and frustration, Gurevich. We’ve been made to look like bloody fools, and by the British of all people. What was it that woman on the farm said?’

‘That only two days before we got there, some British troops had arrived at the farm and searched it. Apparently they went straight to the cellar and removed some suitcases. They turned the farmhouse upside down but didn’t take anything else. They knew precisely what they were coming for.’