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Near the entrance to the [Knights] Hall, where the staircase runs, covered in three layers of ash, totally burned and discoloured, we have found the mosaic pictures. Examining the profile of the bronze frames and the small decorative tendrils of wire that surrounded the stone pieces one could confirm that they were of Italian production and therefore the ones that once decorated the Amber Room.13

The findings appeared to bolster Brusov's theory that the Amber Room had burned. But Kuchumov argued the reverse. Having learned about the mechanics of the Amber Room while researching his book, Kuchumov advised Moscow that he had left all four small stone mosaics in the Catherine Palace in June 1941, and only three had now turned up in the rubble of the Knights' Hall.

The stone mosaics could be detached from the amber panels and the fourth might have survived elsewhere. If this fourth stone mosaic had been packed and stored elsewhere by the Nazis, then surely the possibility existed that the amber panels and thick carved frames that had comprised the Amber Room were still concealed alongside the fourth mosaic, in another location.

Space. When it came to them, Kuchumov wrote that both men burst out laughing. Kuchumov had memorized the Amber Room's original dimensions - a dozen large panels twelve feet high, ten medium panels just over three feet high and twenty-four sections of amber skirting board. He knew that the large amber wall panels could not be broken down into smaller pieces and so, when they had been packed up by Alfred Rohde in January 1945, they would have required large, cumbersome crates. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow:

More important than the number of stone mosaics is the issue of size. If we suppose that these stone mosaics were packed together with the large amber panels being still mounted upon them, all of which burned in the inferno [in the Knights' Hall], then the cases for the panels and mosaics would have had to be vast. And yet this place, between the two doors and the windows where we have found the three stone mosaics, is cramped and tiny.

Tronchinsky and Kuchumov studied the pile of ash on the floor before them. In the searing temperatures, the stone mosaics had been perfectly preserved in a neat stack, although they were now more fragile than a spider's web. The picture on the uppermost mosaic was even discernible, until Kuchumov touched it and it imploded in a puff of ash. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow:

If the mosaics had been stacked still hooked on to the amber panels, a layer of amber panel with its wooden backing, a layer of stone mosaic, and so on and so on, when the panels burned individual amber pieces would have separated as the glue that bound them melts at low temperatures, and the board that backed the panels ignites at around the same mark. Some trace of the amber, now loose and insulated by the stone mosaics, would have remained trapped. But we found nothing.

Nothing. It was inconceivable that not a single piece of amber from more than a dozen twelve-foot-high amber wall panels, each one of which was made up of thousands of slivers of the resin, had survived. In addition, Kuchumov advised Moscow that the Amber Room was decorated with twenty-four mirrored pilasters that, according to Pravda, had been marked as received in the castle's Gift Book. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow: 'Above these pilasters were twenty-four bronze wall chandeliers. Inspecting the ash we did not find a single trace of bronze or mirrored pilaster.'

Three mosaics not four. A tiny space in which to store only the smallest crates. No bronze or mirror fragments to be found in the ash. Nothing sandwiched between the stone mosaics. Kuchumov's reasoning was at times hard to follow but he argued that the evidence - much of which he had decided not to burden Moscow with - pointed to the Amber Room having been packed up and stored in multiple locations, or at the very least not solely in the Knights' Hall, where Dr Rohde and Brusov had said it was. Rohde's correspondence made