The Führer was no longer a laughing matter, if he ever had been. And the presence at the long Nazi table of Simon Hughes-Hallett and Ed Haddon, their fellow Cambridge students, only served to underscore that fact. If the cream of the British aristocracy was now paying homage to these dangerous men, the world had a problem. ‘We should go,’ Harry told Wilson. His friend was not of a martial, or even brave, disposition and he thought it best to get him away before things deteriorated.

The pimply youth at the table next to them appeared to agree. He nodded. ‘We should, too,’ he told the vibrant woman opposite him.

‘I’m enjoying myself,’ she shot back. ‘I haven’t seen anything this funny in years.’

‘We shouldn’t be laughing.’

‘So you say. I don’t see why not. They’re all fat and sweaty, the ugliest people I’ve ever seen in my life.’

‘Sadly, politics in Germany,’ Harry interjected, sensing his chance for an introduction and leaning across the gap between their tables, ‘as everywhere else, is not a beauty contest.’

The woman turned to him and gave him the benefit of her mega-watt smile. ‘It really should be.’

He offered her his hand. ‘Harry Tower.’

She took it, her palm cool to the touch. ‘Amanda James.’

The Brownshirts at the table nearest to the wall stood to delight the few student drinkers who had remained with another rendition—their third—of the Horst Wessel song. Hughes-Hallett rose to his feet beside them. He was a big man, gone early to seed, with a puffy face that made him look like a pumpkin. He was very drunk too, with a voice that could shatter glass at a hundred paces. ‘Isn’t he the one who urinated on you from his rooms in the quad?’ David Wilson asked.

Harry had forgotten he’d told Wilson that.

‘Die Fahne hoch!’ the men belted out. ‘Die Reihen fest geschlossen!’ Raise the flag! Our ranks are closed!

The room fell silent in acquiescence. There were already rumours that Göttingen’s world-famous mathematics department was about to be purged of all its Jews, or those married to them, which would likely render it next to useless. The assumption was that every other faculty would soon face similar pressures. Harry had already written to the college authorities back home to outline his concerns, not that it would do him, or them, much good. He was giving serious thought to cutting short his studies here.

‘SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt.’ The SA marches with calm, steady step.

Like hell it does, Harry thought. The SA was the least calm and steady body of men he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter.

‘My God,’ Amanda said, in horror. ‘They are simply appalling.’