A knot of police surrounded the covered stretcher which they lowered carefully down the steps for fear of sliding on the trodden snow. The man said, ‘They can’t get an ambulance into this street because of the ruins. They have to carry it round the corner.’ Frau Koch came out at the tail of the procession; she had a shawl over her head and an old sack-cloth coat. Her thick shape looked like a snowman as she sank in a drift at the pavement’s edge. Someone gave her a hand and she looked round with a lost hopeless gaze at this crowd of strangers. If there were friends there she did not recognize them, looking from face to face. Martins bent as she passed, fumbling at his shoelace, but looking up from the ground he saw at his own eyes’ level the scrutinizing cold-blooded gnome-gaze of little Hansel.

Walking back down the street towards Anna, he looked back once. The child was pulling at his father’s hand and he could see the lips forming round those syllables like the refrain of a grim ballad, ‘Papa, Papa.’

He said to Anna, ‘Koch has been murdered. Come away from here.’ He walked as rapidly as the snow would let him, turning this corner and that. The child’s suspicion and alertness seemed to spread like a cloud over the city – they could not walk fast enough to evade its shadow. He paid no attention when Anna said to him, ‘Then what Koch said was true. There was a third man,’ nor a little later when she said, ‘It must have been murder. You don’t kill a man to hide anything less.’

The tramcars flashed like icicles at the end of the street: they were back at the Ring. Martins said, ‘You had better go home alone. I’ll keep away from you awhile till things have sorted out.’

‘But nobody can suspect you.’

‘They are asking about the foreigner who called on Koch yesterday. There may be some unpleasantness for a while.’

‘Why don’t you go to the police?’

‘They are so stupid. I don’t trust them. See what they’ve pinned on Harry. And then I tried to hit this man Callaghan. They’ll have it in for me. The least they’ll do is send me away from Vienna. But if I stay quiet – there’s only one person who can give me away. Cooler.’

‘And he won’t want to.’

‘Not if he’s guilty. But then I can’t believe he’s guilty.’

Before she left him, she said, ‘Be careful. Koch knew so very little and they murdered him. You know as much as Koch.’