Ludwig wound the window up and slipped the Daimler into gear, accelerating away from the checkpoint. He resumed humming whatever tune it was and turned round to address his passengers again with a smile: Mach dir keine Sorgen.

Once they’d passed Ferlach – and another oddly trouble-free checkpoint – Ludwig slowed down. He told them he didn’t want to cross the Alps before daylight, so they waited by the side of the road and watched dawn break in spectacular fashion over the mountains. He shared a flask of brandy with his passengers, but said little until the landscape in front of them had turned from black to grey then to white and he said it was time to go. The Loibl Pass was as good as could be expected at this time of year, he added, in between humming, and then he chuckled.

Mach dir keine Sorgen: don’t worry.

The Daimler pulled into the courtyard of a large house in Trieste later that afternoon. Hanne and Prince were hurried in and taken to a large dimly lit basement where a dozen armed men and women were sitting on the floor, apparently uninterested in their arrival.

Hanne gripped Prince’s hand tightly as the steel door slammed shut behind them and the sound of it being bolted from the outside reverberated. For a few moments they both worried this was a trap, but then a tall figure moved towards them, and when he spoke – enquiring about their journey and the weather over the Alps – his voice was familiar and they realised it was Edvard, the oldest of the Slovenian partisans.

He pointed to the others sitting around the room. They were comrades from the Liberation Front of Slovenia, he said, and reeled off their names. ‘They’ve come to help us. We want to get Friedrich Steiner and catch the others for you.’

‘I thought you’d have done that by now.’ Hanne sounded angry.

‘We have to be very careful. The British have increased their patrols around the city, and especially the port area. And in any case,’ Edvard moved close to them, a strong smell of tobacco on his breath, ‘we’ve been told by our mission in Berlin to wait until we get the signal from them to mount our operation. The British stopped watching the warehouse on Porto Vecchio yesterday, and that same night the Germans must have moved out of it, but we don’t know where to. We’re searching the area, and Jožef and Marija are talking to our contacts on the docks.’

‘Where are we now?’

‘Scorcola. We have to wait here until we find where the Germans are hiding.’

‘And then get the go-ahead from Berlin.’

‘Of course.’

Once it was dark, Edvard took them into a room on the top floor of the house, where Jožef and Marija sat in a cloud of cigarette smoke either side of a short man in oil-stained overalls and heavy boots. His dark face was deeply lined and the black hair sticking out from under his cloth cap was flecked with grey. It was hard to estimate his age, though when he spoke, it was with the rasping voice of an older man.