He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and ground it out savagely beneath his heel. The possibility that they were dead was one he had stubbornly refused to contemplate all the years he’d been in uniform and he wasn’t about to start contemplating it now. They would still be alive and he would find them. Just as he would find Eva. And the first thing he was going to do, after he had found Eva, was to get permission to marry her. That way, even before he was demobbed, she stood a chance of being able to travel to England.

The thought of her being at Shuttleworth Hall, waiting for him when his war service was over, made the nerves in his belly clench in knots. It was all he wanted in life. Eva, and a life far removed from the hell of the last six years—a life dedicated to the breeding of beautiful roses and lived amid the incomparable beauty of the Yorkshire Dales.

By the time Max finally got his orders to leave for Berlin as one of the scores of intelligence officers who were acting as interrogators there, there was no longer any question as to where the demarcation lines in the city had been drawn. The Russians had vacated half of the city, to the merciful relief of those who now found themselves in British, French or American hands. Everything east of the Brandenburg Gate was in the Soviet sector—and that included the Charité hospital and the house on Unter den Linden.

His aunt and uncle’s home in Charlottenburg and the Remer clothing factory in Spandau were in the British sector, or were if they were still standing. And Lotti’s flat and Ilse’s apartment were both in the British sector, though only just.

‘It’s chaos,’ said the young lieutenant who picked him up by jeep from Tempelhof Airport. ‘We’ve only just managed to clear the runways of the remains of wrecked German aircraft. There’s still no water or electricity in most of the city and every Nazi we interrogate is full of the guff that they’ve been badly misunderstood. They know nothing about extermination camps and every crime committed was committed by the SS.’

As they zipped as fast as they could down streets that were still full of craters, Max was staggered by the scale of destruction. He’d expected to see a city that had been bombed into ruins, but this was a city that had been annihilated. For the first time it occurred to him to wonder if it could ever be rebuilt.

‘Detour to Lützowstrasse,’ he said.

The lieutenant looked at him, startled. ‘Colonel Hargrave is at headquarters waiting to brief you, sir.’

‘I’m aware of that, Lieutenant, but Lüzowstrasse first.’

‘Is it in the British sector, sir?’

Max nodded, his apprehension growing as he saw the extent of the almost unbelievable devastation.

He thought of his father who, when Max had last been in the city, had still been living in the mansion on Unter den Linden. According to the intelligence reports he’d read, Unter den Linden was now a wasteland. It was also in the Soviet-occupied sector.