She skidded into the hallway. Pulling her pistol from her belt, she stormed her way into Frau Menzel’s flat and, as the half-naked Russian pinning her mother to the bed turned his head towards her in drink-befuddled consternation, she shot him between the eyes.

Blood, brain and bits of bone sprayed the room.

As the rapist’s body slithered off the bed, Zelda rolled over and over until she fell off the other side of the bed and onto her feet.

‘Are you all right, Mutti?’ The pistol was now so heavy in Lotti’s hand she didn’t know how she was still managing to hold it. ‘I had to kill him. There was no other way.’

‘Don’t apologize for it!’ Zelda rasped, tugging her torn dress back down over her skinny hips. ‘Just apologize for taking so long to get here!’

On unsteady legs she rounded the bottom of the bed.

‘Now what do we do?’ she asked, as they stood shoulder to shoulder eyeing the body. ‘Even Gertrud’s Andrei won’t be able to protect us if it gets out we’ve shot a Russian soldier.’

Still holding the pistol, Lotti wiped perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘We get Hester and Ilse to help us, and we drop his body down the lift shaft. It will be found eventually, but as this apartment block is now uninhabitable, with luck not for weeks and perhaps not for months.’

Her mother nodded and then, as they heard Hester and Ilse racing pell-mell towards the building, she said, ‘You might like to know there was a radio broadcast while you were out dandelion-picking.’

Lotti felt as if her heart had ceased to beat. ‘Germany’s surrendered? The war is over? The Americans are on their way?’

‘No, but that news won’t be long in coming now.’ The exultation in Zelda’s voice was euphoric. ‘The Führer is dead, Lotti! Germany is free of the monster at last!’

Chapter Thirty-Four

Berlin, July 1945

Major Paul Gould lit a Lucky Strike and watched as his men continued with their task of controlling and filtering the flow of refugees over one of the Elbe’s bridges that was still intact. Initially, two months ago, it had been hordes of Wehrmacht soldiers they had been scrutinizing. With the war at an end and the surrender signed, the defeated German forces had been desperate to fall into American hands rather than Red Army ones.

His detachment’s task had been to relieve them of their weapons and to identify and then detain any Waffen SS. Their fate—to be handed over to the Russians—was an unenviable one and they tried every ruse possible to cross the river undetected, often resorting to suicide if they failed.

Paul tilted his cap a little farther back on his head. The operation he was now supervising had become more of a mopping-up than anything else. A searching of civilians and the checking of their identity papers, with a close eye being kept for anyone who could possibly be SS.