Dawn had cracked, the sun edging above the skyline, suffusing the scene with a fierce orange glow. Those citizens who had already roused themselves to start their early shifts, those who were old enough to remember that day thirty-seven years earlier, they would be shivering. Not from the winter cold, but from a terrible knotted fear deep in their souls provoked by that amber sky, something they would live with for the rest of their lives.

The firestorm. When it seemed like the whole city was ablaze.

The silhouetted skyline still had its half-destroyed Baroque ruins, buildings erected when the kings here pranced around on gilded horses, marrying off their sons and daughters so they could seize control not just of Saxony, but of swathes of neighbouring Poland too. When the city’s glories were said to match those of Paris, Vienna, and Venice.

Then the Anglo-American bombers came, wreaking a terrible vengeance not just on Nazi Germany, but on all Germans, even those who’d already lost everything, driven from their homes further east by the relentless, ruthless advance of the liberating forces of the Red Army. Even on those who’d already come to see what Hitler really was – a megalomaniac bent on taking his country down with him.

They didn’t need to descend to Hell. The fires of hell rained down on them instead, turning the cellars where they sheltered into furnaces, sending a vicious superheated wind snaking through the underground tunnels, through the streets, consuming everything in its path, except a few rumps of stone façade.

The city would bear its terrible scars for ever more.

*

By the time Hauptmann Karin Müller reached the scene, the fiery orange had mellowed into a wan gold, and daylight was nearly upon them. She was fascinated by another grotesque silhouette right in front of her eyes. Not that of Dresden’s skyline; this was an arm, waving helplessly, but statically, like a snapshot of a drowning man at sea. Yet the sea his body was encased in was solid, and it was patently obvious he was beyond rescue.

Three workmen, supervised by uniformed People’s Police officers, were attempting to break up the ground around the outstretched arm with hydraulic jackhammers. You could see their bodies shaking as they tried to keep the machines on target, and the vibrations and hammering set Müller’s teeth on edge.

‘You’re sure it’s more than just the arm?’ she asked the uniformed captain nearest the entombed body part. There was a note of pathetic hope in her question, as though someone might have simply planted a severed limb there, though the thought of that was bad enough.

The officer knelt down and brushed some of the loosened concrete aside. She could now see locks of dark hair, matted with the newly dried concrete of the building site. Beneath them, the dome of a skull.