As the aircraft peeled away, there came another sound. The rattle of tanks.

‘They may be ours,’ Ilse said, reading everyone’s thoughts.

‘And they may not be,’ Lotti said. ‘Goodbye, Claus. Keep safe.’

Ashen-faced, Claus kissed his mother and Ilse goodbye and then turned to Hester.

Their real leave-taking had taken place before they had left Spandau, and now, for what might be the last time, he held her hands in his. ‘Goodbye, Hester,’ he said, longing to kiss her deeply and passionately and knowing it was now unlikely he would ever be able to do so. ‘Take care. Survive. Be happy.’

‘Goodbye,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘I’ll always remember. I’ll never forget.’

Somehow he turned away from her. Somehow he left the room.

Minutes later, they heard the sound of his car speeding away.

Ilse slid her hand into Hester’s and Hester gripped it hard, asking urgently, ‘Have you any news of Hugo?

Ilse shook her head, her lovely face sombre. ‘No. The only news I can give you is that at the start of the war he joined the RAF. Since then we have heard nothing—and we know nothing of Max and Paul either.’

‘And you, Hester?’ Lotti asked, wanting to change the subject before thoughts of Max overwhelmed her. ‘Tell us what happened to you. Tell us everything from the point where Ilse saw you being driven away by the Gestapo.’

‘I can’t,’ Hester said quietly. ‘Not now, Lotti. Not yet. Those horrors aren’t for a moment like this, when we are finally together again.’

‘Hester’s right.’ The agony of her goodbye with Claus, not knowing what his fate was going to be, had aged Zelda in a way years of remorseless bombing raids had failed to do. ‘The present horrors are quite enough to cope with,’ she said, so visibly distressed that Lotti crossed the room to her, putting her arm around her shoulders.

‘Have you any schnapps hidden away, Mutti?’ she asked, aware it was the first time in her life she had ever had to offer comfort to her indestructible mother.

‘No, but I have something better. There’s a bottle of good old American bourbon in the bottom of my wardrobe. Max left it with me the last time he was in Berlin. If ever there was a time to crack it open, now is it.’

As Lotti made a beeline for her mother’s bedroom there came a sound she had never heard before. A low keening sound, it seemed to be coming from a long distance away. Full of foreboding, she rushed back into the drawing room, the bottle of Jack Daniels in her hand.

‘What on earth—‘ she began as the sound rose into a terrible, ear-splitting scream.

As second later it was as if they were in the middle of an air raid, only this time it wasn’t bombs that were dropping on them, it was artillery shells.

The four-storey apartment building juddered, the Ferdinand Preiss figurines toppled. Outside, there was mayhem. People ran in terror as tongues of flame ricocheted down the street, dozens of them mown down by shrapnel as if by a scythe. Cars erupted in balls of fire. The windows of the bedroom Lotti had just been in blasted into smithereens. The air pressure was terrific.