‘But not with you?’

‘No,’ he said, his voice still gentle. ‘Not with me.’

He rose to his feet, drawing her to hers.

There were tears in her eyes and he brushed them away. ‘Nancy is with me,’ he said. ‘She arrived in the city a few hours ago and it’s thanks to her having met Eva that I got your address.’

‘Nancy?’ Incredulity replaced the disappointment and sadness in her eyes. ‘But where is she? Where did you leave her?’

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘I think she had the sensitivity to realize I wanted to speak to you alone and so stayed in the jeep.’

‘Nancy? Sensitive?’ She gurgled with amusement at the very idea. He cracked with laughter and everything was suddenly easy between them again. They were cousins and friends, and that there had once been anything more was something relegated to the past.

‘Lotti is meeting up with Eva at six o’clock.’ He glanced down at his watch. ‘It’s already fifteen minutes past.’ He shot her his familiar down-slanting smile. ‘Do you think you can squeeze into the back of the jeep with Nancy?’

‘Just try and stop me,’ she said, convulsing with laughter when, a minute or so later, they discovered the jeep to be empty and Nancy long gone.

The instant they walked into the medical centre, now empty of patients, Max knew something was wrong. Not only was Lotti not there—a disappointment so crushing he hardly knew how to handle it—but the expression on Eva’s face was almost hostile and Nancy looked extremely sheepish.

As Ilse rushed towards her and hugged her, Nancy hugged her back, saying to Max as she did so, ‘I’m sorry, Max. When I told Lotti about your reunion with Ilse she took it badly. I can’t think why.’

Eva had already told her why, but it wasn’t something that could be spoken of in front of Ilse.

Ilse gave a gasp of distress, well aware of the assumption Lotti had come to. Max, equally well aware of it, swung away from Nancy—who he could have cheerfully throttled—and said urgently to Eva, ‘Where might she have gone? Which bars? Which cafés?’

‘She doesn’t go to bars and there are no cafés yet to speak of.’ Understanding now that things may not have been as Nancy had thought them, she tried hard to be helpful. ‘She said she wanted to be on her own, so she may have gone to the Tiergarten.’ Another thought struck her. ‘And there’s another possibility.’

‘Yes?’ Max demanded in a fever of impatience. ‘What is it?’

‘Major Gleeson, the American officer she’s been acting as an interpreter for, has been posted to Frankfurt. He wanted her to go with him—as his interpreter, nothing else. He’s due to leave from Tempelhof at seven-thirty. And it’s just possible, if she really thought Nancy’s assumption was correct, that she’s heading for Tempelhof to go with him.’

He didn’t waste a second. That Lotti was capable of leaving Berlin if she thought he had returned there for Ilse, not her, he didn’t doubt for a moment.