Her eyes still held his. ‘And what about your mother?’ she asked steadily. ‘Is it too dangerous for her as well?’

He flinched. His mother’s journeys in and out of Germany had become a source of great concern to him, for she had made, and was still making, many more trips than he had ever originally envisaged. She had also—and this was something he doubted Max would ever forgive him for—become intimate friends with the small circle of people carrying out the passport and visa forgeries. It meant that if the forgery ring was busted, there was the risk his mother’s name would be mentioned in connection with the smuggling of Jewish assets out of the country. And if that happened, even though she was a foreign national, the charge against her would be of being an enemy of the state.

‘You know exactly how I feel about the number of trips my mother is now making, but at least she isn’t Jewish, Hester. See sense. Wait until we can travel together.’

She shook her head. ‘No, darling,’ she said resolutely. ‘I have to go. I have to sort things out for the Schimmels. Paul has already agreed to act as sponsor for them.’

She put her coat over her arm and picked up her handbag.

Swiftly, he rounded the bed towards her. ‘One last time, darling,’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t go.’

Silently, she stepped into his arms, raising her face for his kiss and then, when he finally drew apart from her, she simply picked up her suitcase and walked from the room.

*

‘Good God! Of course you shouldn’t have come!’ Max said explosively when she walked into her parents’ home to find him in the kitchen, enjoying a bowl of chicken soup with her father. ‘Any Jew fortunate enough to get out of Germany should stay out of it. What the devil is Hugo thinking of, allowing you to come back here on your own?’

Hester put her suitcase down, kissed her father and said in a voice of sweet reason, ‘I wish you wouldn’t use the word “allow,” Max. I’m not a child. No one need “allow” me to do anything.’

Max pushed his half-finished bowl of soup to one side and stood up. ‘Would you excuse us, Solomon?’ he said to her father. ‘I want to talk to Hester alone, if that’s OK with you?’

Solomon Dresner nodded. Max was, after all, his daughter’s brother-in-law—and he was also a deeply trusted friend.

Putting a hand beneath her arm, Max propelled her out of the kitchen and into the minuscule room beyond that served as a parlour, a room far different from the spacious living accommodation the Dresners had previously occupied in their Haberlandstrasse home.

‘I know you’ve been back to Berlin at least three times since Hugo was transferred to London,’ he said the instant he closed the door behind them, ‘but you haven’t lived here. And because you haven’t been living here, I don’t think you realize just how much more dangerous Berlin is for you now.’