How quickly one becomes aware of silence even in so silent a city as Vienna with the snow steadily settling. Martins hadn’t reached the second floor before he was convinced that he would not find Lime there, but the silence was deeper than just absence – it was as if he would not find Lime anywhere in Vienna, and, as he reached the third floor and saw the big black bow over the door handle, anywhere in the world at all. Of course it might have been a cook who had died, a housekeeper, anybody but Harry Lime, but he knew – he felt he had known twenty stairs down – that Lime, the Lime he had hero-worshipped now for twenty years, since the first meeting in a grim school corridor with a cracked bell ringing for prayers, was gone. Martins wasn’t wrong, not entirely wrong. After he had rung the bell half a dozen times a small man with a sullen expression put his head out from another flat and told him in a tone of vexation, ‘It’s no use. There’s nobody there. He’s dead.’

‘Herr Lime?’

‘Herr Lime, of course.’

Martins said to me later, ‘At first it didn’t mean a thing. It was just a bit of information, like those paragraphs in The Times they call “News in Brief”. I said to him, “When did it happen? How?”’

‘He was run over by a car,’ the man said. ‘Last Thursday.’ He added sullenly, as if really this were none of his business, ‘They’re burying him this afternoon. You’ve only just missed them.’

‘Them?’

‘Oh, a couple of friends and the coffin.’

‘Wasn’t he in hospital?’

‘There was no sense in taking him to hospital. He was killed here on his own doorstep – instantaneously. The right-hand mudguard struck him on his shoulder and bowled him over like a rabbit.’

It was only then, Martins told me, when the man used the word ‘rabbit’, that the dead Harry Lime came alive, became the boy with the gun which he had shown Martins the means of ‘borrowing’; a boy starting up among the long sandy burrows of Brickworth Common saying, ‘Shoot, you fool, shoot! There,’ and the rabbit limped to cover, wounded by Martins’ shot.

‘Where are they burying him?’ he asked the stranger on the landing.

‘In the Central Cemetery. They’ll have a hard time of it in this frost.’