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On an easel was displayed a delicate eighteenth-century stone mosaic ('Touch and Smell', the one that Wolfgang Eichwede had bought from Hans Achterman in a deal struck on a beer mat). Against a wall stood a chest of drawers that had once belonged to a housewife from West Berlin.

15.40 hours: Pooled footage from the VGTRK Rossiya (All-Russia State Television and Radio Company) showed a large man in a glossy Italian suit with a plump salt-and-pepper moustache glad-handing the guests. Tatiana Kosobokova, reporting for Pravda, wrote: 'Ivan Sautov, the head of the museum, assumed responsibilities as private tour guide to Vladimir Putin.'

A day that had begun with performances by Luciano Pavarotti, Demis Roussos and 'the famous German hard-rock group Scorpions' (who sang 'Anthem to a Great City') ended with an evening of candlelight, fountains and music. All of St Petersburg, from the acquisitive former palace deputy director Valeria Bilanina in Pushkin to the thrifty journalist Vladimir Telemakov in Ozerki, and from furniture expert Malinki Albina in Pavlovsk to Our Friend the Professor in the northern suburbs, sat back with thimbles of Pertsovka vodka and slivers of herring to watch great volleys of fireworks cascade over Putin's 'Window on the West' (restored at a cost of L.5 billion dollars).

Nothing had been allowed to get in the way of this Great Day. The smarting Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi, the vengeful Duma deputy Nikolai Gubenko and the patriotic plenipotentiary Valentina Matviyenko were all present and smiling (as was Professor Wolfgang Eichwede of Bremen University). And the sun too had been made to shine. Russian air force jets, armed with freezing agents, had been mobilized on missions to 'influence the rain clouds', banishing them from the skies above St Petersburg (at a cost of twenty-nine million roubles).13

As for the story of the Amber Room, it had been sealed forever, like an insect trapped in resin, a facsimile of the original room now served as a constant reminder of Russia's greatest loss to anyone who walked through it.

Epilogue

In the summer of 2003, we were sent more extracts of a report from the Hamburg-Eppendorf Psychiatric Hospital to the Ingolstadt coroner. Dated 25 August 1987, it stated that there was 'mutual hatred within George Stein's family'. It revealed that Elisabeth, Stein's wife, was not murdered in 1983 but committed suicide, in fear of her husband.

The report noted: 'Exactly fifteen years ago on Good Friday [1972], [George Stein] had encouraged his wife to make sacrificial cuts in his abdominal wall, using a dissecting scalpel. On Good Friday in 1982 he asked her to do it again.' On both occasions George Stein had called the police, claiming to have been attacked by knife-wielding masked raiders who warned him off the Amber Room mystery. But he had invented the stories, after forcing his wife to perform sadomasochistic acts.

When Stein was admitted to hospital for the first time in 1987, having been found in a wood outside Hamburg with stab wounds, it was on Good Friday. When he was discovered three months later, bleeding in woods outside Starnberg, his injuries were similar. And when his corpse was recovered on 20 August 1987 from a clearing in Titting Wald, the wounds from which George Stein bled to death were in the same position on his abdomen. They were all masochistic mutilations.

Stein was compulsive, convincing and manipulative. Brilliant at first, he located the missing Pskov icons. Then he became careless and clumsy. Even Stasi agent Paul Enke warned of Stein's unreliability, his propensity to tamper with Nazi documents. One of the many doctors who treated Stein realized these qualities too late, writing to a colleague, just five days before Stein died: I have involved myself in this case perhaps excessively and certainly in a somewhat amateurish manner.'1

George Stein took his own life in such a dramatic fashion, bleeding to death in an