She walked on, faster and with greater purpose. Tonight, she had her own version of truth or, rather, of her role in this universe.

She was going home.

Where she belonged.

She picked up the pace and burst through the front door of the house to find Fiona and Gus waiting in the kitchen.

Kate took them in her arms, their warm hands wrapped tight around her. ‘It’s over,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all over now.’

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Yesterday’s Spy

Tom Bradby

Prologue

Göttingen, Germany, March 1933

In another time and place, it would have taken all of Harry’s self-control not to laugh at the spectacle in front of him. But this was neither the time nor the place, and he had the growing sense that they ought to have left long ago.

He had found himself captivated, though, by the woman sitting at the table next to them. She had a wide face, full cheeks, a radiant smile and tumbling auburn hair. Her laugh demanded attention and he’d been rewarding it with more than was polite, even if they had yet to be introduced or exchange a word. He told himself that the pimply youth engaging her in earnest conversation must be a brother or cousin, perhaps a friend.

They were in the gloomy basement of a beer hall called the Ratskeller, normally the haunt of students and those leftists still brave enough to show their faces in public. But tonight it was awash with sweaty Nazis, drunk on Pilsner, their pristine, ridiculous uniforms and the very real prospect—the reality, even—of absolute power. It was a cavernous room, with dark timber panelling, iron light fittings that hung low over the bar, and vaulted stone ceilings, which seemed to magnify the Nazis’ booming voices into something that resembled rolling thunder. Perhaps it was. The gloom was thick with cigarette smoke, tables draped in stained white cloths packed close together.

Harry, who had been studying under the great mathematics professors Hermann Weyl and Edmund Landau for his entire term away from Cambridge, was trying to explain to David Wilson, who had missed the first half of the term due to illness, just how much had changed since the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s emergency decree, which had been its most direct consequence. The Nazis had real power now and, in his view, intended to use it to extinguish what remained of Weimar’s fragile democracy. Even the Ratskeller’s owners had thought it safer to nail up photographs of Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering, which hung just above Harry’s head in the corner.