‘We’re collecting signatures, sir. I wonder if I might trouble you for a moment.’

‘I’m afraid I’m—’

‘I’m sorry, sir, I won’t keep you. But do you know anything about the Holodomor?’ The Slav held him with a steady, inquisitive gaze. Fabel noticed the man’s eyes. Piercing blue, and cold; like the winter-morning sky above them. He felt a lurch in his gut as he thought of another Slav he had known who had piercingly bright eyes.

‘Are you Ukrainian?’ Fabel asked.

‘Yes, I am.’ The Slav smiled. ‘The Holodomor was the deliberate genocide of my people, carried out by the Soviet Union and Stalin. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died. One quarter of the Ukrainian population. Starved to death by the Soviets between nineteen thirty-two and thirty-three.’ He flicked open the folder he had been holding beneath his clipboard. It was filled with grainy black-and-white photographs of human misery: emaciated children, bodies lying in the street, huge communal grave pits being filled with stick-like bodies. The images were redolent of those that Fabel had grown to associate with the Holocaust. ‘At one point, twenty-five thousand Ukrainians were dying every day. And practically no one outside Ukraine knows about the Holodomor. Even in Ukraine it was only after independence that we spoke about it openly. Russia still refuses to acknowledge that the Holodomor was an act of deliberate genocide. They say it was the result of incompetent collectivisation by Stalin’s commissars.’

‘And you dispute this?’ said Fabel. He looked at his watch to check how much time he had before he was due to meet Susanne on the top floor of the Alsterhaus.

‘It’s a downright lie,’ continued the Slav, undeterred. ‘People starved to death all over the Soviet Union because of Stalin’s insane collectivisation mania. That’s true. But in nineteen twenty-seven we had started to Ukrainianise our country. We made Ukrainian, not Russian, our official language. Stalin saw us as a threat, so he tried to exterminate us by starving us. More than twenty-five per cent of the Ukrainian population were wiped out. Please, your signature will help us have this crime recognised for what it is: genocide. We need the German and British and other governments to do what Spain has already done and formally recognise the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m not saying that I won’t support your claim, but I can’t sign this until I know more about what happened. I need to find out more about it for myself.’

‘I understand.’ The man handed Fabel a leaflet. ‘This tells you where you can get more information. Not just from our organisation. But please, sir, when you have read all of this, please visit our website and add your name to our list there.’

When Fabel looked up from the leaflet the Ukrainian was already hooking another shopper from the stream on the pavement.

Fabel made his way up to the top floor of the Alsterhaus. Susanne wasn’t there when he arrived, so he bought a coffee and sat in the café by the escalators and with a view of their agreed meeting place. He looked for a moment at the leaflet he had been handed by the Ukrainian. Fabel hadn’t come across the name ‘Holodomor’ before, but he had heard of the great starvation in the nineteen-thirties. In the nineteen-eighties, the Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had cited the Holodomor as part of the reason he had turned cannibal. Chikatilo’s brother had been murdered and eaten by starving villagers, but all that had been before Chikatilo’s birth. One detail that the campaigners, quite understandably, had chosen to omit from the leaflet was that the Holodomor had resulted in mass cannibalism. The Soviet authorities had set up special tribunals to try and execute people found to have consumed human flesh. Distraught parents had had to find secret burial places when a child died because it was so common for the corpse to be dug up as meat. Worse still, there had been many instances of parents killing and eating their own children. Even today in Ukraine, there was an unusually high number of serial murders involving cannibalism.