Though Vicky had never said so, he had known it was a relationship that had caused her deep disquiet. She hadn’t wanted Nancy becoming what she had been: wife to the head of the House of Remer. Even more than Hitler, it had been the family steelworks that had marred his relationship with Vicky.

He walked out of the weaving sheds and along the stone-floored corridor that led to the building’s offices. That he didn’t now feel quite so euphoric about Hitler was not something he’d been able to share with anyone, not when his disquiet had been aroused by the government’s cavalier attitude to private property.

The instant he was back in his office he took a bottle of schnapps from the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet and poured a good three fingers into a glass.

Once he had downed it he stood facing the window, gazing broodingly out over the factory yard.

Paul walked down the crowded street with long easy strides. He was on his way to the Charité hospital to meet Eva at the end of her shift, and they were then going to the cinema. Even though the war was now in its seventh month, his being in Berlin was causing him no great problems. Because he spoke with far more of a Yorkshire accent than an American one, he’d begun suppressing the Yorkshire and cultivating the American, and that, apart from constantly being stopped on the street by the police and being asked to show his passport, was the only inconvenience he had met with.

His only concern, other than his failure to have located Hester, was that the war looked like being a short one and the victor, Germany. Denmark had already been taken. Norway invaded. It meant that two countries which could have given Britain aid, were now firmly in German hands. The thought of Britain following suit appalled him.

‘But if the war continues, it will be even worse,’ Eva had said to him when she had told him that she couldn’t marry him. ‘America will eventually join forces with Britain and France and then what would we do? You would have to leave Germany before she did so and I could not go with you. To leave my country at such a time would be unthinkable. And if you stayed, you would be imprisoned as an enemy alien and that I couldn’t bear. When the war is over, then we will marry, Paul. And then you can take me to Yorkshire and to Shuttleworth Hall and I can meet your aunt and your cousins—and the little dog, Tinker.’

It was a rosy picture and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to point out to her that if Germany were the victor in the war, Shuttleworth Hall would no longer exist, as it existed now. When he thought of jackbooted feet tramping over Vicky’s lovingly polished oak floors and Wehrmacht or SS officers polluting the house with their presence, he felt physically ill.