‘No,’ she said for the umpteenth time. ‘I warned no one. I got in touch with no one. What is it to me if someone in Grunewald was about to be arrested?’ There was brazen indifference in her voice. ‘I don’t live in the Grunewald. I don’t have neighbours in the Grunewald. I was drinking champagne and enjoying myself. That is all.’

She gave a careless lift of her shoulders.

A blow came out of nowhere, sending her reeling from the chair and crashing heavily onto the stone-flagged floor.

Unable to break her fall with her hands, her face caught the full impact.

‘You tipped off those about to be arrested,’ the voice from behind the arc light said again as she struggled to her feet. ‘And that means that you know the identities of those who were about to be arrested. I need names, Fräulein Lennartz. And you are going to give them to me.’

‘I can’t give you what I don’t know,’ she said as she was forced back down onto the chair. ‘I’m a singer.’ She fought to keep her fear under control, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing it. ‘I was sent to join a table and I joined it. I didn’t pay any heed to what was being said. Why should I? It was nothing to do with me.’

‘You left the table. You made a phone call. And the result of that telephone call was that no one was in the house at Grunewald when SS officers went to make their arrest. Now once again—who did you telephone? What is his name? What are the names of the friends who were with him?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t make a telephone call. I went backstage to change my dress. I can’t tell you what I don’t know and I don’t know the names of those you say were about to be arrested.’

The dove-grey uniformed figure behind the arc lights didn’t move, but from out of the darkness someone else did. The same man who had sent her crashing to the floor stepped towards her again, this time accompanied by a man whose presence she had been unaware of.

The chair she was seated on was fitted with straps and as one of the men unbound her hands, the other began buckling cold, unyielding leather around her waist and her legs. Her left arm was anchored behind her, her right arm was yanked forward, her hand slammed palm down on a table bare save for a black Bakelite telephone.

‘Once again, Fräulein Lennartz,’ the man behind the arc light said, invisible to her but for the gleam of the silver tabs on his uniform. ‘The name of the man you telephoned at Grunewald. The names of his co-conspirators.’

As her hand was held in place by a vice-like grip on her wrist, the man who had strapped her to the chair took hold of her index finger. She knew what he was about to do; knew that her finger was about to be broken.