‘If the contracts are to remain with the House of Remer, then your wife must be expunged from the Remer family tree,’ Göring said, matter-of-factly. ‘No similar action will be demanded where your children are concerned.’

‘Expunged?’ Josef blinked, trying to grasp just what it was that Göring meant. ‘But how…?In what way…?’

‘You will divorce her and have no further contact with her,’ Göring said, as if the request was a mere trifle. ‘And when she disappears—as disappear she must—you and the rest of your family will accept her disappearance without question. Now, can I have your answer, Herr Remer? Is it to be yes? Or is it to be no?’

Chapter Fifteen

Berlin, September 1934

Ilse wound the heavy blonde braids of her hair in a circlet around her head and secured it in place with pins. The effect, in the soft lamplight of her bedroom, was reminiscent of a halo.

She smiled at the thought and ran a hand over the shiny smoothness of her gold satin evening gown. It was halter-necked, the bias-cut of the long skirt accentuating the perfection of her flawless young body.

Still seated at her dressing table she reached for her perfume, spraying Je Reviens onto her throat and wrists, deeply happy. Tonight was going to be a lovely evening, for Max was in Berlin and was taking her to the club in which Lotti was singing. They wouldn’t be on their own because, before Max had contacted her, she’d arranged to spend the evening with Prince Vladimir Ovelensky, a White Russian émigré she had met at a British Embassy ball. Not wanting to rudely cut Vladimir, and feeling sure Max would enjoy the prince’s company, she had suggested he join them for the evening.

She opened her jewellery box and took out a pair of drop-pearl earrings that her mother had given her when she had moved out of the house for good.

‘We’re going to move into an apartment in Charlottenburg,’ her father had said, grey-faced. ‘It will be more suitable now I’ve retired from public life. As the new head of the House of Remer Claus will remain here, in the family home—a family home that is, of course, now his.’

Schloss Niedernhall hadn’t become Claus’s property, though, or at least she didn’t think it had. The problem was the difficulty in understanding exactly what had taken place over the last few turbulent weeks. First there had been the incredible murder of Ernst Röhm and the arrest of hundreds—some said thousands—of his stormtroopers. Rumours and counter-rumours were still rife, with the only certainty being that the Brownshirts existed no longer. Because of her father’s sudden collapse of health, Ilse, though, had been unable to give the event the attention she knew it deserved.

At first she thought her father had suffered a heart attack for she could think of nothing else that would account for both his ghastly pallor and the frantic haste in which he signed over ownership of the House of Remer to Claus. Then her father had dropped the bombshell that he and her mother were moving out of the Unter den Linden mansion and into an apartment at the far side of Berlin, in Charlottenburg. Finally and equally incredibly, Claus had told her that Schloss Niedernhall was off limits to the family as a high-ranking Nazi minister and his family had moved into it.