Then I see the man pick something up. A broken concrete block. It looks like he’s going to start to use that on poor Arnie. I look round frantically for a weapon myself to try to help my friend. As the man looks on the point of smashing Arnie on the skull, I find a piece of metal pipe, grab it, and with all the force I can muster, bring it down hard on the back of his head.

The man’s grip loosens, he stumbles backwards, and falls to the floor. Arnie gets up slowly, shakes himself down. Then he realises the man has fallen into the concrete. He’s sinking, frantically waving his arm for help. Arnie grabs it.

‘Help me pull him out, Lotti,’ he cries.

But this is the man who has come between me and Arnie – the boy I fell in love with all those years ago at the top of the Personenaufzug in Bad Schandau. Instead of trying to help pull him out, a flash of anger comes over me and I push down on his head.

Arnie looks at me as though I’m a madwoman, yanks me away, and continues frantically trying to pull the man out. Eventually he realises he’s not strong enough, that it’s hopeless, and more than that – that if we stay here we’re both in danger of being accused of murder.

‘What the hell do you think you were doing, Lotti?’ he shouts at me.

That provokes a slanging match between us. Me accusing him of never loving me. Him accusing me of betraying him and undermining his life’s work.

Then suddenly we come to our senses, and realise we have to get away from here. That we’re now fugitives. I reach into my coat pocket to check my purse is still there with my return train and bus tickets.

That’s when I realise.

It’s disappeared!

We try to look for it, but neither of us has a torch, and I realise Arnie’s also lost his glasses. Then we see some people coming, and decide we have to get out of there.

I’m annoyed, though. I’d only just been paid my monthly retainer by Bahlow. I had a hundred marks in that purse.

A hundred marks I’ll never see again.

Chapter 48

48

People’s Police HQ, Dresden

March 1982

Müller and Tilsner turned the corner into the corridor leading to Southwick’s cell. Up ahead she saw two men walking quickly in the other direction. The gait and body shape of one of them looked familiar. She was racking her brain, trying to pinpoint it in her memory, when she saw a flash of the side of the man’s face as he turned the far corner and disappeared from view.

It was Weiß, or Breitmann, the fake Stasi agent.