‘Aye – to get her away from there, away from Quirke, away from – whoever.’ He leaned forward heavily and set his fists on the desk, his big shoulders hunched. ‘To send her’ – he lowered his voice to a whisper – ‘somewhere else.’

Ned Gallagher again echoed him.

‘Somewhere else?’

‘That’s right. To some other place.’

They looked at each other in silence for a long moment. Then Gallagher said:

‘That’s a tall order, Minister, if I understand rightly what it is you’re saying.’

Bill Latimer saw with satisfaction the look of alarm that had settled on the other’s face. At last it had dawned on the numbskull what exactly it was he was being told to do.

‘And aren’t you a tall man, Ned,’ the Minister said briskly, pushing himself up out of the chair. ‘Tall enough for any task.’

They parted then, with a cold handshake, Gallagher looking queasy and the Minister, suddenly, grimly cheerful. On his way downstairs, Latimer encountered again the pale-faced little man in the pinstriped suit whom Gallagher had earlier dismissed. He was standing in a corner of the ground-floor hallway, pretending to read the notices pinned to a green baize board on the wall. He glanced at Latimer going past, with what seemed to Latimer the ghost of a slyly knowing smile. Christ, he thought, is everyone in on the Latimer family’s secrets?

Chapter 30

Paul Viertel was not by any measure a vain or self-regarding man, or so he believed, but there was one thing he prided himself on, and that was his tolerance of the shortcomings of those around him. He had grown up an orphan – his father had died young, his mother, Evelyn Quirke’s sister, had perished in the camp at Theresienstadt – and so he had been left to make his own way in the world.

He was a man of science, and, as such, a rationalist. He had every right to bear a grievance, against the Nazi rulers and their lackeys, indeed against the entire German nation, but also against the world in general and the people in it who had stood by and allowed his mother and millions of her fellow Jews to be murdered. However, he would not have dreamed of indulging in such a waste of emotional energy. He followed the motto his Tante Evelyn lived by, that the past was the past, and that in the present all one could do was observe, think, bear witness, and work to alleviate the sufferings of those less fortunate than oneself.

Some people saw him as sanctimonious, he knew that. In his heart, however, he thought himself to be simply a good man. Not a saint, or anything like it. Just as he believed that goodness weighed more in the moral scales than evil did – which was a truism, of course – so too he considered it not immoderate to place himself on the side of the good.