‘So there you are,’ said Hoffman, adjusting his gold watch as he spoke. ‘Now you’re on the trail of the most important Nazi still at large.’

Chapter 18

England, November 1945

‘You do realise you can’t stay here for ever, don’t you?’

Edward Palmer began to respond, but stopped himself. Actually he saw no reason why he couldn’t stay there for another few months at least, if not a lot longer – possibly until late 1946 or maybe even into 1947. Hopefully by then the baying of the hounds would have faded in the distance and the police and security services would find other people to hunt.

In his more fanciful moments – not that he allowed himself too many of those, it had to be said – he imagined that sooner or later they’d forget about him altogether. But in truth he knew this was so unlikely as to not be worth wasting his time thinking about: it was no more than a fantasy. He considered himself too much of an outsider to be regarded as a pillar of the establishment, but that was just his opinion. No one else would see him as an outsider, other than those who’d been astute enough to spot it when they recruited him as a German spy some twelve years before. Then he’d been a student at Cambridge. By the time he went on the run earlier this year, he was a major in Military Intelligence, based at the War Office and probably Germany’s most productive spy in England.

They’d always be hunting for him. He’d always be looking over his shoulder.

So he’d not replied about how long he hoped he could stay there, because she was in one of those moods when her gaze was fixed on a point either side of him. She was also smoking: she could go days without touching a cigarette and then furiously smoke one after another, as if in a competition to see how quickly she could work her way through a packet.

Life was like this with the woman he knew as Myrtle – utterly unpredictable. He’d first met her in December 1938, a largely silent but very passionate encounter that had lasted for two days, at the end of which she’d confided in him that it had taken place because ‘they wanted to be sure there wasn’t anything untoward about you’, which apparently there wasn’t. She’d then told him how much she admired him – ‘if only there were more men like you’ – and assured him that if he ever needed her help, he was to go to an art gallery in Cork Street called Bourne and Sons and ask if they had any paintings by an artist called Myrtle. But he was only to do this, she said, if it was a matter of life and death.

In the third week of April, he’d realised the security services were closing in on him and the Nazi spy ring he’d been so carefully if reluctantly drawn into had all but collapsed. His career as Agent Milton was about to end. He calculated that as Major Edward Palmer of the Directorate of Military Intelligence at the War Office, he was enjoying his final hours of freedom, so he’d fled London and moved around the north of England.