Blood on her hands, blood in her nails, and the German screamed and was defenceless. Her thumb and forefinger stabbed at his closed eyes.

Howled, the triumph of revenge, ‘How’d you like it? Bloody bastard murderer! What’s it like?’

Only her voice, her voice alone in the silence. The minders reacted first.

A chopping blow to the back of her neck, a kick in her ribs. The minders dragged her clear, threw her aside.

The German was bleeding, gasping, cringing in shock.

· He heard Johnson’s shout, hoarse: ‘Get her out, Christie. Get the bitch under lock and key.’

Their fists clenched, standing over their man, coiled, were the minders.

·. He had started his day shitty cold and shitty tired.

Julius Goldstein knew of nowhere more miserable than a commercial airport in winter as the passengers arrived for the first flights of the day. They had flowed past him, business people and civil servants, either half asleep or half dressed, either with shaving cuts on their throats or with their lipstick smeared, and they brought with them the shitty cold and shook the snow patterns off their legs and shoulders.

He had gazed out into the orange-illuminated darkness, and each car and taxi showed up the fierceness of the cavorting snow shower. Of course the bastard was late. It was the style of the bastard always to be late. He had managed to be punctual, and Raub had reached Tempelhof on time, but the bastard was late. He was tired because the alarm had gone in the small room at the back of his parents’ home at four. No need for his mother – and him aged twenty-nine – to have risen and put on a thick housecoat and made him hot coffee, but she had. And his father had come downstairs into the cold of the kitchen and sat slumped at the table without conversation, but had been there. His mother had made the coffee arid his father had sat close to him because they continually needed to demonstrate, he believed, their pride in their son’s achievement.