Hester felt the breath leave her body, not because of the impact, but because the tall, immaculately suited blond-haired figure in the centre of the group of men now walking past her, was Claus.

Her first reaction was that he looked ill. The skin was stretched tight across the high cheekbones he had inherited from his mother and a nervous tic was jumping convulsively at the corner of his eye.

And then he saw her.

His eyes widened, the blood leaving his face. In a beat of time that could not have been more than a few seconds, she saw outright disbelief, total horror—and the realization that it would be fatal if it became suspected that he not only knew her, but was related to her by marriage.

The group of men, with Claus still in their centre, moved on.

The guard gave a sigh of fervent relief and swung her in front of him, administering a clenched-fist blow to the middle of her back that sent her half falling through the doors of the inspection room.

Hester barely registered it.

Claus had seen her; recognized her. What would happen now? Would he make contact with her? Or, in order to protect his own reputation as a choice specimen of Aryan manhood who could not possibly have family-by-marriage links with a Jewess, would he ensure she was sent back to Sachsenhausen and the nightmare labour at the brickworks? There was no way of telling. All she could do was pray fervently for the best—and wait.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Berlin, June 1943

Claus’s always tight self-control had never come so close to breaking. Hester alive and in his factory! Hester alive! As the men from the inspectorate finished off their tour of the factory, the super-human effort he was making to keep a lid on his feelings made him feel as if he were about to explode.

Hester alive—just. Jesus God. How many years had she been a prisoner? Three? Four?

‘The changes you have made to the working conditions of the Untermensch will be reported, Herr Remer,’ a member of the inspectorate was saying to him icily. ‘Under the present system, your factory will not be able to fulfil its quotas.’

‘My factory would not have been able to fulfil its quotas if the slave labour assigned to me had continued falling down dead as they worked, as the prisoner in the spinning division fell down dead,’ he heard himself respond in a dispassionate, almost disinterested voice. ‘Dead prisoners, or even half-starved and exhausted ones, cannot perform work. The lunchtime issue of soup is to enable them to work to full capacity. It does not infringe on their allocated rations. It is a cost the factory is shouldering to ensure there is no deplorable loss of labour.’

‘It will be reported,’ the member of the inspectorate repeated.

The entourage had stepped outside the factory now and the Adler limousines that had brought them were lined up on the cobbles of the factory yard, ready to whisk them away. The official speaking to Claus pulled on gauntleted leather gloves. ‘The labour assigned to you is expendable. There is an endless supply. Your directive is to exploit these workers to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure. That directive has come from the highest level. It is a directive you will ignore at your peril, Herr Remer.’