‘It’s a good job I am,’ Lotti retorted, unfazed. ‘If I hadn’t been, my legs would have been cut to ribbons by flying glass.’ She lowered the suitcase they had brought with them with so much difficulty. ‘And if you smelled lilac yesterday, you were lucky. All I’ve been smelling are burning buildings, rubble dust and the stench of dead bodies. Where shall I put this?’ She nudged the suitcase with her foot.

‘What’s in it?’

‘Food, mainly. Some medical supplies. A few items of clothing.’

‘You’ve come to stay, then? This isn’t just one of your flying visits?’

Before she could reply with equal tartness that they had risked life and limb to be with her in order to offer her what protection they could, Ilse gave Zelda a hug and a kiss, saying, ‘Yes. We’ve come to stay. We thought it best if we were all together until the Americans and the British arrive.’

‘The Russians won’t overrun Charlottenburg,’ Zelda said, holding Ilse a little closer than usual, knowing very well why the two of them were there and what it was they feared might happen. ‘They’ll fight their way through the eastern suburbs and smash into the centre of the city and storm the government buildings and the Reichstag, but they won’t bother with the western suburbs. Why should they? There’s hardly anybody left in them to offer any resistance.’

‘They won’t just enter the city from the east. They’ll encircle it. The fighting here is going to be as fierce as anywhere else,’ Lotti said, deciding that the best place for the suitcase was where it was always in sight and to hand. ‘And there might be worse,’ she added grimly. ‘We need protection and so I’m going to try and get to Spandau. If Claus is there, he’ll give me a gun.’

Her mother merely nodded and then, as a car screamed to a halt outside the apartment block, she looked out of the window again.

‘You’ve been spared a journey,’ she said drily. ‘You don’t have to go to Spandau in search of Claus. He’s here.’ She stiffened, leaning forward to see out of the window a little more clearly. ‘And he’s got someone with him. Either his secretary or a girlfriend.’

Lotti took a deep, steadying breath. Now, of all times, she didn’t want to be faced with one of Claus’s Hitler-loving girlfriends.

Neither did Ilse nor her mother. As the whirr of the caged lift could be heard, they instinctively grouped together. Zelda, still dramatically beautiful at sixty-two, was totem-pole straight, her silver-streaked hair wound in a knot high on her head, her mouth the same searing red as her theatrically distinctive dress.

Though Ilse’s beige skirt had a rip in it from where she had caught it on one of the barbed-wire barricades, and though the skirt and her caramel-coloured jacket were creased and grimy, she still had an ethereal quality about her. Because of the lack of soap or shampoo her pale blonde hair was again braided, hanging in a long, heavy rope down her back.