“Listen,” I said. “We’re looking for a man called Erich Fritz Emil Mielke. Perhaps you know him by a different name. I don’t care about his politics—he’s wanted for the murders of two Berlin policemen in 1931. I’m sure many of you read about it in the newspapers at the time. This man is thirty-three years old, fair-haired, medium height, brown eyes, Protestant, from Berlin. He attended the Kollnisches Gymnasium. Probably speaks Russian quite well, and a bit of Spanish. Maybe he’s good with his hands. His father is a woodworker.”

All the time I was speaking I could feel Mielke looking at me, knowing I’d recognized him the way he’d recognized me and doubtless wondering why I didn’t arrest him straightaway and what the hell was going on. I holstered my pistol and took off my officer’s cap in the hope I might look a little less like a Nazi.

“Gentlemen, I make you this promise. If any one of you identifies Erich Mielke to me now, I will personally speak to the camp commander with a view to organizing your release as soon as possible.”

It was the kind of promise that a Nazi would have made. A shifting promise that no one would have trusted. I hoped so. Because after what had happened to the prisoners from Gurs in the forest near Lourdes, the last thing I wanted to do was help the Nazis arrest any more Germans, even a German who had murdered two policemen. I couldn’t do anything about the other men who were on Bömelburg’s list, but I was damned if I was going to finger any more Germans for Heydrich. Not now.

Once again I met Erich Mielke’s eye. He didn’t look away, and I suppose he guessed what I was doing. He was older than I remembered him, of course. Broader and more powerful-looking, especially across the shoulders. He wore a light beard, but there was no mistaking the surly-looking mouth, the watchful ruthless eyes, or the coxcomb of unruly hair on top of his largish head. He must have thought I was a beefsteak Nazi: brown on the outside, red on the inside. But he couldn’t have been more wrong. The murders of Anlauf and Lenck had been just about the most cowardly I’d ever seen, and nothing would have pleased me more than to have snapped him for it and for the Berlin courts to have sent him for a permanent haircut; but as much as I disliked him now, I disliked the casual, instinctive brutality of the Nazi police state even more. I almost wanted to tell him that but for the murders of eight men on a country road the day before he’d have been on his way to a date with a man wearing white gloves and a top hat.