They dragged me to another room, almost as large, and sat me on a dining chair in front of a long table. There was a glass chandelier immediately above my head but the shutters were closed and most of the light came from some standard lamps in the corners and an Anglepoise on the desk.

The pale-faced man behind it was wearing a seersucker suit and thick glasses and seemed more interested in the contents of his cherrywood pipe than in me. His hair was thin and so were his nose and mouth and, to my way of thinking, his blood, too. At the far end of the room the door was open, and while I could not see who was in there I was certain from the clouds of tobacco smoke that the room was occupied by more than one person. Perhaps the two spymasters from London.

“Did you bring some clothes from his flat?” the pale-faced man asked the other two.

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded. I’d never seen him before, but he was English and very still and deliberate, like a monk from a nearly silent order.

“He smells. Wash him, give him something to eat and drink, and then bring him back here wearing a change of clothes.”

Fifteen minutes later I was back in front of the monk, who stared at me with polite indifference, as if he’d been watching a dull game of cricket. When I sat down the monk stood up slowly and from a wallet file removed some papers and then placed them on the table in front of him as if they were evidence. I couldn’t yet see these clearly from where I was sitting but I had a strong idea that they were to form the basis of some serious accusation against me that might easily cost me my liberty or my life. In the monk’s hand was my passport. The one Erich Mielke had given me.

“You are Walter Wolf,” he said. “And you work at the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat as the hotel concierge.”

“Yes. And I must protest. Why have you brought me here?”

“But that’s not your real name, is it? Your real name is Bernhard Gunther, is it not?”

“No.”

“Your real name is Bernhard Gunther and this passport was provided by the state security service of the German Democratic Republic, also known as the Stasi.” His tone was almost apologetic, as if he regretted bringing me inside on such a warm day.

“No.”

“You are in fact an agent of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, the foreign intelligence service section of the East German Ministry for State Security. Is that not so? You work for the Communist HVA, don’t you, Herr Gunther?”

“No.”