‘So it seems we could trust her, Corporal?’

‘Absolutely, yes.’

‘But would she know about anything clandestine going on in the town now?’

Corporal Harcourt shrugged. ‘Why don’t we go and ask her?’

They’d wanted to bring Frau Winkler to the FSS base on Hauptplatz, but Hanne suggested she go to the shop near the station on her own. It was dimly lit and dusty, with women’s clothes crammed on one side of a narrow aisle and men’s on the other. Most of the shelves were taken up with hats and gloves, and the rails with jackets and coats. At the end of the aisle Frau Winkler sat behind a raised counter, surveying the shop like a schoolteacher watching her pupils.

Hanne explained that she was working for the British authorities, at which point she noticed Frau Winkler pale and grip the side of the counter. She told her not to worry, she was not in any kind of trouble; in fact Herr Mayer had told them how decent she’d been, and would it be possible to ask her some questions?

Come back in forty minutes when I close for lunch: we can talk upstairs.

The apartment was as crammed as the shop below it: dark furniture adorned with ornaments and framed photographs, many of them by a bay window draped in an ornate net curtain. Frau Winkler sat nervously on the edge of her seat and gave a series of polite but sparse answers to Hanne’s questions.

Yes, Herr Mayer was a fine landlord and a decent man as his parents had been… All this dreadful talk about Jews, they were the most decent people in the town… The arrangement was a very fair one… There was no question we would honour our agreement to return the property to him after the war… No, my husband died in 1941 – from cancer…

At that point Frau Winkler indicated a silver-framed photograph of a man in what Hanne assumed was the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army, smiling at it fondly.

We were always opposed to the Nazis; we considered ourselves social democrats… We were very private people… never wanted any trouble, you understand… but what the Nazis were up to was appalling, especially to the Jews…

She explained how she and her husband had resolved they would do nothing to help the regime, but nor would they do anything to draw attention to themselves. ‘If someone had come and said their life was in danger, I hope I would have helped. But here, in this town, that situation never arose. After dear Klaus died, I was too occupied with keeping the business going by myself. Many shops were destroyed by the bombing, but this one was spared. Nonetheless, I was a coward. I’m ashamed of myself.’

She was wringing her hands, looking down at the rug that lay between her and Hanne, tilting her head as if following the pattern. Her distress was quite sincere, and it was at this point that Hanne decided she could trust her.