A man was sitting on the floor in the far corner of the room by the washbasin. Chavasse closed his eyes and breathed deeply. When he opened them again, the man was still there. There was only one thing wrong. His eyes were fixed and staring into eternity. Where his jacket had fallen open, a ragged, smoke-blackened hole was visible on the left-hand side of the white shirt. He had been shot through the heart at close quarters.

Chavasse got to his feet and stood looking down at the body, his mind working sluggishly, and then something seemed to surge up from his stomach and he leaned over the basin quickly and vomited. He poured water into a glass and drank it slowly, and after a moment or two he felt better.

There was a bruise on his right cheek and a streak of blood where the skin had been torn. He examined it in the mirror with a frown and then glanced at his watch. It was twelve-fifteen. That meant that the train had already passed through Osnabruck and was speeding through the night toward Bremen.

Even before he examined the body, Chavasse knew in his heart what he was going to find. The man was small and dark, with thinning hair, and his cheeks were cold and waxlike to the touch. The fingers of his right hand were curved like hooks reaching out toward a wad of banknotes that lay scattered under the washbasin.

It was in the inside pocket that Chavasse found what he was looking for. There was a membership card for a club on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in the name of Hans Muller, a faded snapshot of him in a Luftwaffe uniform with his arm round a girl, and several letters from someone called Lilli addressed to a hotel in Gluckstrasse, Hamburg.

Chavasse slowly got to his feet, his mind working rapidly. As he turned away from the body, his eyes fell upon the Mauser automatic pistol lying in the corner. As he bent to pick it up, there was a thunderous knocking on the door and it was flung open.