‘You mean a Gentile home?’

He nodded. ‘Lotti would be a good bet. And she’ll be lively company for him,’ he added, a glimmer of the old Max resurfacing. ‘Meantime, be careful, Hester. When people are arrested now they don’t reappear after a few weeks, as was once the case. They stay imprisoned. If you should need me in a hurry, Lotti usually knows where I am. And if Lotti isn’t around, I can be contacted via Zelda. Auf Wiedersehen— and remember: be very careful.’

He left the room. She heard him say goodbye to her father and then the sound of his feet as he descended the stairs.

As the door leading onto the street closed behind him, she crossed to the window, watching him as he walked away. The part of Berlin her parents now lived in was a predominantly Jewish area and, since it was now next to impossible for Jews to find employment, it was also fast becoming run-down. In his faded shirt and shabby trousers and looking every inch a labourer, Max merged into the general street scene without drawing undue attention to himself. She wondered where he was going, whom he was going to see. She also wondered if Hugo knew the reason for Max being in Berlin so often—knew, and hadn’t told her, because knowledge could now be such a dangerous thing.

She hugged her arms to her chest. Apart from Max and Vicky, no one else in the family knew of her and Hugo’s involvement with the forgery ring and only the Yorkshire side of the family knew of the thousands of pounds’ worth of jewellery Vicky so regularly smuggled out of the country for Jews who had emigrated, or who were about to emigrate. It didn’t mean to say, though, that there weren’t other secrets within the Remer family circle. Max telling her he could be contacted via Zelda, as well as by Lotti, had come as a complete revelation.

As he rounded the corner of the street and disappeared from view, she wondered if Max had always been close to Zelda Remer. Hugo, she knew, never had been. ‘Uncle Josef is a grasping, manipulative, overbearing, dyed-in-the-wool Nazi,’ he had once said to her, long before Hitler had ever come to power. ‘At the end of the Great War he ruined my parents’ marriage by bullying my father into remaining in Berlin instead of joining my mother in Yorkshire and Zelda backs him up in whatever he says or does. If I think of Berlin as my second home—and I do—it’s because of the long years I’ve spent visiting my father here and because Claus, Lotti and Ilse are as close to me as Max and Nancy are.’

‘And because you love the city,’ she had added, knowing him even better than he knew himself.

‘And because of that,’ he had agreed, drawing her close. ‘Especially the lakes in the Tiergarten and the wonderful stretches of open water at Wannsee.’

Broodingly, she remained at the window, looking down the street to where blood lay in the road outside the boarded-up grocery shop. Though Hugo was still as close to Ilse and Lotti as he was to Nancy, he was no longer close to Claus and hadn’t been ever since the day Claus had begun wearing a small circular swastika badge in his lapel.