Once out on the street he began striding down it so fast she had to run to keep up with him. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked breathlessly as he reached a parked jeep and vaulted into the driving seat. ‘I’m meeting up with Eva and Lotti at six. I thought you’d want to come with us.’

‘I do,’ he said, revving the engine into gear. ‘But I’m going to see Ilse first.’

‘Not without me, you’re not!’

Tossing her bag into the rear of the jeep, she scrambled into the passenger seat. ‘God, but you’ve got a high-and-mighty attitude!’ she said, falling into the old pattern of sibling bickering. I discovered her address. It should be me taking you there, not the other way around.’

He shot her a grin, his hair, beneath his major’s cap, as thick and curly as that of a Medici princeling’s. ‘You can’t, sister dear,’ he said, loving her to bits, ‘because I’m the one who has the jeep!’

As they veered down potholed streets still filled with rubble, she said suddenly, ‘We’re going to have to tell her about Hugo.’

‘I’ll tell her.’ He swerved round a burned-out tank that still hadn’t been removed.

There was something in his voice that made Nancy frown. ‘Do you think the news you were able to give us—the intelligence news that Nicholas had been executed for being one of the plotters in an attempt on Hitler’s life—is going to prove correct? Do you think she’s going to have bad news of her own to give?’

‘I know it.’ He turned out of the street and into the even busier Kurfürstendamm. ‘That news wasn’t speculation. It was hard fact.’ He sped past the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. ‘Ilse is a widow. Has been a widow for over a year.’

There was something in his voice that sparked intuition even as latent as Nancy’s into life.

‘You’re not thinking of—‘ she began as he swerved off the Ku’damm and into a side street, about to ask if he was thinking of resuming the affair Ilse had broken off in order to marry Nicholas. It was a sentence she never finished.

‘Sweet Christ!’ he said savagely, ramming on the brakes and bringing the jeep to a screaming halt. ‘There she is!’

She was stepping out of a black Opel car.

Nancy sucked in her breath. Berlin’s streets were full of malnourished-looking women dressed in pathetically shabby clothes and down-at-heel shoes. If Ilse was also malnourished, it didn’t look like malnourishment; it looked like ethereal slenderness. Her ivory-pale hair was worn shoulder length in a gleaming pageboy bob. Her dress was cream and exceedingly simple. Her shoes were wedge-heeled and a highly polished nut-brown. She looked as Ilse always looked. Cool and elegant and heart-stoppingly beautiful.

Before Nancy could catch her breath, Max was out of the jeep, sprinting towards her. She saw Ilse gasp. Saw her eyes fly wide open. And then saw the flaming smile of joy that lit her face.