My ears were still ringing from the shots and the carriage smelled strongly of cordite. But I wasn’t disturbed by any of this. After the Battle of Königsberg, nothing like that bothered me much, and my mind was disposed to interpret the ringing in my ears as an alarm and a call to action. If I kept my nerve, I could still complete my escape. In other circumstances, I might easily have panicked, jumped off the train, and tried to make for the American zone, as I’d originally intended; but a better plan was already presenting itself, and this depended on my acting quickly, before the blood spreading on the floor spoiled everything.

Both the German MVD officers had luggage. I opened up the bags and found that each man had brought a spare gimnasterka. This was just as well, as there was blood on both of their tunics. But the all-important blue trousers were still unmarked. First I emptied their pockets and removed their decorations, their blue shoulder boards, and their portupeya cross-belts. Then I pulled their tunics up and wrapped their shattered heads in the thick cloth to help staunch the blood. Weltz’s skull felt like a bag full of marbles.

You have to be a certain type of man to clean up efficiently after a murder, and no one does that better than a cop. Maybe what I was planning wouldn’t work, maybe I’d get caught, but the two Germans had bigger problems. They were both as dead as Weimar.

I took off their boots, unlaced the legs of their blue breeches, and then hauled those off, too. I put both pairs carefully up on the luggage rack, well out of the way of what I was going to do next.

It would have been a mistake to have opened the carriage door. A Red Army soldier in one of the other carriages might have seen me doing it. So I slid down the window, balanced the major’s naked body on the sill, and waited for a tunnel. It was fortunate that we were traveling through the Erzgebirge. There are lots of tunnels for the railway line that runs through the Erzgebirge.

By the time I had defenestrated the two dead Germans I was exhausted, but working down in the mine shaft had given me the capacity to go beyond the limits of my own exhaustion, to say nothing of a wiry muscularity in my arms and shoulders, and in this respect I was also fortunate. I might add that I was also desperate.