With Jeschonnek’s gun safely in my coat pocket, I bent down to take a look at him. You didn’t have to be an undertaker to see that he was dead. There are neater ways of cleaning a man’s ears than a 9 mm bullet. I fumbled a cigarette into my dry mouth and sat down at the table to wait for Haupthandler and the girl to come round. I pulled the smoke through clenched teeth, kippering my lungs, and hardly exhaling at all, except in small nervous puffs. I felt like someone was playing the guitar with my insides.

The room was barely furnished, with only a threadbare sofa, a table and a couple of chairs. On the table, lying on a square of felt, was Six’s necklace. I threw the cigarette away, and tugged the diamonds towards me. The stones, clacking together like a handful of marbles, felt cold and heavy in my hand. It was hard to imagine a woman wearing them: they looked about as comfortable as a canteen of cutlery. Next to the table was a briefcase. I picked it up and looked inside. It was full of money - dollars and sterling as I had expected - and two fake passports in the names of a Herr and Frau Rolf Teichmüller, the names that I had seen on the air-tickets in Haupthändler’s apartment. They were good fakes, but not hard to obtain provided you knew someone at the passport office and were prepared to pay some big expenses. I hadn’t thought of it before, but now it seemed that with all the Jews who had been coming to Jeschonnek to finance their escapes from Germany, a fake-passport service would have been a logical and highly profitable sideline.

The girl moaned and sat up. Cradling her jaw and sobbing quietly, she went to help Haupthandler as he himself twisted over on to his side. She held him by the shoulders as he wiped his bloody nose and mouth. I flicked her new passport open. I don’t know that you could have described her, as Marlene Sahm had done, as a beauty, but certainly she was good-looking, in a well-bred, intelligent sort of way - not at all the cheap party-girl I’d had in mind when I’d been told that she was a croupier.

‘I’m sorry I had to sock you, Frau Teichmüller,’ I said. ‘Or Hannah, or Eva, or whatever it is you or somebody else is calling you at the moment.’

She glared at me with more than enough loathing to dry her eyes, and mine besides. ‘You’re not so smart,’ she said. ‘I can’t see why these two idiots thought it was necessary to have you put out of the way.’

‘Right now I should have thought it was obvious.’

Haupthändler spat on the floor, and said, ‘So what happens now?’