With the heavy dread that had been weighing her down beginning to lift, she ran up the stone steps to the front door. The conclusion the SS would most likely come to was that whoever had told them of the Grunewald meeting had done so on the strength of rumour alone. That in actual fact there never had been such a meeting. And if that was the case, then she wasn’t in the slightest danger at all.

Almost light-heartedly she turned her key in the lock and opened the door.

They were waiting for her.

Not SS men, but plainclothes Gestapo.

Behind them, wide-eyed with fear, were two of her flatmates.

‘If you had not returned here,’ one of the men said almost conversationally as he strolled towards her, ‘we would have arrested them in your stead. Your friends have a lot to thank you for, Fräulein Lotti Lennartz.’

As they led her out of the house a large black car slid from around the corner, stopped in front of it and she was bundled into the back. The journey to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse was so frighteningly swift she was there long before she had got her thoughts into order.

The car swept to a halt in front of the huge, grey granite building and as it did so she was still struggling with the dilemma of whether or not to tell them her real name was Lotti Remer and that she was the sister of Claus Remer, head of the giant Remer steelworks.

If Max hadn’t been involved in the reason for her being there, it was what she would most certainly have done, for if anyone could get her out of the mess she was now in, that person was Claus—or one of Claus’s influential friends.

The problem was that though the men at the club hadn’t known the identities of any of those they had believed were about to be arrested, it didn’t mean those senior to them didn’t know. That a Remer was a spy for the British and a contact of those conspiring to kill the Führer was something that just might be known and, if it were, Claus might already be walking a perilous tightrope, albeit one he wasn’t aware of.

Deciding that she posed far less danger to Claus and Max as Lotti Lennartz than she did as Lotti Remer, she decided to volunteer nothing about her real name until official paperwork brought it to light. Until then she would remain Lotti Lennartz. And she would remain emphatically bewildered as to why she was being questioned in Gestapo headquarters.

‘You overheard that an arrest was to be made at a certain house in the Grunewald and you tipped off those about to be arrested.’

The room she was in was small, the window all boarded up. She was seated on a chair. Her hands were bound behind her back and there was a light shining in her face. A light blazing so fiercely it was hard to think straight.