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I shrugged as if I cared nothing now for what happened to her. And I shrugged because I knew Heydrich was right. Nothing could save Arianne now. Not even Heydrich.

‘The real question here is what happens to you, Gunther. In many ways you’re a useful fellow to have around. Like a bent coat hanger in a toolbox, you’re not something that was ever designed for a specific job, but you do manage to come in useful sometimes. Yes, you’re an excellent detective. Tenacious. Single-minded. And in some ways you’d have done a good job as a bodyguard. But you’re also independent, and that’s what makes you dangerous. You have standards you try to live up to but they’re your standards, which means that ultimately you’re unreliable. Now that I’m where I am in the scheme of things, I can’t tolerate that. I had hoped I might be able to bend you to my will and use you when I could. Like that coat hanger. But I can see now I was wrong. Yes, it’s difficult to turn a woman over to the Gestapo, especially a good-looking woman like Arianne Tauber. Some can do it and some can’t and you’re just the type who can’t. So, I have no further use for you. You’ve become an unfortunate liability, Gunther.’

This sounded like the best thing he’d ever said to me; but I was through opening my mouth like that for a long while. Perhaps permanently. He hadn’t yet finished telling me my own fate.

‘You will return to your desk in Kripo and leave Germany’s destiny in the hands of men like me who truly understand what that means.’

He smiled his paper-knife smile and toasted me silently.

I toasted him back but only because, perhaps for the last time, I was hoping to point out a long hair in his chicken soup.

‘And the attempt on your life, sir? The poisoning, at Rastenburg? I accept that you no longer wish to have me act as your bodyguard. But am I to take it that you no longer wish me to investigate the recent attempt to kill you?’

He stared at me for a moment and, with a quiet surge of pleasure, I realized he had forgotten all about this incident.

‘There never was such an attempt,’ he said defiantly. ‘I made it up so that I might have a plausible reason to invite you to Prague with the rest of them.’

I nodded meekly, a little surprised that he’d admitted such a thing; and I wondered where the actual truth was to be found: if there really had been an attempt to poison Heydrich at Rastenburg after all.

‘Besides, as the most powerful man in Bohemia and Moravia, I think I’m quite safe here, wouldn’t you agree, Horst?’

So that clinched it, for me; he was lying.

Bohme smiled an obsequious smile. ‘Absolutely, sir. You have Prague’s SS and SD at your immediate disposal; not to mention the Gestapo and the German Army.’

‘You see?’ crowed Heydrich. ‘I have nothing to worry about. Especially not in Prague. The day the Czechs try to kill me – really try to kill me, not that half-baked attempt we had today, although you mark my words that will have its own repercussions – the day they try to kill me will be the very worst day in the history of this country and will make the defenestrations of Prague look like a childish prank. Isn’t that right, Horst?’

‘Yes sir. In a long line of crazy Czech ideas that would be the craziest idea of all.’

I had my doubts about that. I hadn’t been in Bohemia for very long but from what little I knew about the country it seemed only appropriate that the idea of the Bohemian – a type of fellow not easily classified and who never acted in a conventional or predictable way – had got started in Prague. In Prague throwing someone out of a window was just a childish prank. A bit of harmless fun. But I didn’t expect a Roman Catholic German from Halle-an-der-Saale to understand this. And if I really had been as single-minded and independent as Heydrich said I was, I would probably have told him he was wrong: murder – even political assassination – is rarely ever committed by people who are anything else but crazy; and, over the centuries, one way or another, a lot of crazy things had happened in Prague.

So I nodded and told Heydrich he was right, when I knew he wasn’t.

And that is what makes anyone dangerous.

I moved back to the Imperial Hotel and waited for my Berlin rail warrant to arrive. Heydrich liked to keep most people waiting and I waited for several days. So I saw the sights and tried not to think about what might be happening to Arianne. But of course that was impossible. I preferred to believe that she hadn’t actually condoned my murder but that she had felt obliged to go along with it as part of the general plan to kill Heydrich; and after all, when you’re shooting Germans it’s hard to know who is a Nazi and who isn’t. It’s a dilemma I understood very well.

Finally my travel papers came through, and on my last night in Prague I remembered my ticket for the Circus Krone, and decided to go along.