‘Don’t worry, we have some Italian comrades helping us: I’ve been promised at least half a dozen. Are there any other questions?’

‘What do we do when we enter the office?’

‘Don’t worry Marija, Jožef knows what to do.’

‘We need to know too, Edvard.’

‘The German, the one called Friedrich Steiner – the one we know as König – he’s ours. And the English Nazis and Bormann… Maybe you explain?’

Hanne stepped forward and said they were looking for a man and a woman, both English, both Nazi sympathisers. ‘The woman is involved in a group helping to fund the Kestrel Line – we need to know who else in Britain is involved in that group. The man is called Edward Palmer: he was a very senior Nazi spy – Richard?’

‘I’ve been hunting for Palmer for a while now. He was a British officer who was working in the intelligence department of our War Office and gave the Germans military information about the Allies’ offensive in Europe. He disappeared in April in London, just as we were about to arrest him.’

‘So we want them alive, and Bormann too, if he’s there,’ said Hanne. ‘It’s essential they’re interrogated and put on trial.’

Myrtle Carter was utterly exhausted: she looked back on the journey from England as a succession of places they’d hurried through, like stations flashing past a speeding train. It had been a perilous journey. Paris had been fine; Geneva she was less sure about and had been glad to see the back of, and Turin had felt so hostile she’d insisted they head for Verona sooner than planned. From there they’d made it safely enough to Trieste. She doubted she’d slept more than a dozen hours since leaving England.

Once in Trieste, they’d met Friedrich Steiner and the man called Ulrich in the Catholic hostel. She found Steiner deeply unpleasant: an entitled, spoilt young man with few manners who thought everything revolved around him – insisting on the best revolver, the most comfortable place to sleep, the most food… The man called Ulrich was little better. He didn’t mask his hostility to them, even though she’d explained how she and Palmer were in a minority of English people – albeit a very small minority – whom he must regard as friends rather than enemies. And then there was the other German, the older one dressed as a priest who said he’d been a senior official in the Reich, though she doubted he was as important as he gave the impression he was.

Two younger Germans had turned up to move them from the hostel on Via dell’Istria to the warehouse on Porto Vecchio, and for the very first time on the journey, Myrtle wondered if they were being watched. Until then she’d been sure they’d not been followed, but now she wondered about the odd movements she’d caught sight of outside the warehouse, the strange vans that had appeared, the people hurrying past the building and glancing up at it, holding their gaze for a second or two too long.