The stationmaster, a stooping, etiolated figure, was sweeping up after the crowds. His flower bed had been trampled and, as a result, he could have been in a better mood. He shook his head when I asked him about Frau Kettenacher, but he seemed to remember the pastor all right.

“That was Pastor Overmans, from the church in Hebenshausen.”

“Where’s that?”

“A couple of kilometers south of here. You can’t miss it. There’s even less in Hebenshausen than there is here in Friedland.”

Wenger drove south, and we soon found ourselves in a village that lived down to the stationmaster’s description. We were just in time to see a bus leaving the village square, and the pastor and the old lady, still carrying her missing-person sign, walking away from the bus stop. Behind the bus stop was a largish half-timbered house, and behind the house was a small square church tower. The pastor and the old lady went inside the house and some lights were turned on.

Wenger stopped the car.

“Moeller,” I said. “You come with me. And don’t say anything. The rest of you wait here.”

The pastor was surprised to see us there so late, until I explained that I was from the VdH and that we’d missed Frau Kettenacher at the station.

“I try to see all of the families in this part of Lower Saxony who have a missing loved one,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve met the lady before.”

“Ah, that’s because she’s from Kassel,” explained Pastor Overmans. “Frau Kettenacher is from Kassel. I’m her brother-in-law. She’s been staying with me in order that she could be at the railway station tonight.”

“I’m very sorry that your son wasn’t on the train,” I told her. “In the hope of avoiding further disappointments, we’ve been pressing the Russians to provide more details of who they’re still holding. And when these POWs might be released.”

The pastor, a brick-faced man with white hair, glanced around the somberly furnished room at the sagging heap of a woman who was sitting on an inadequate-looking chair. “Well, that would be something, eh, Rosa?”

Frau Kettenacher nodded silently. She was still wearing her coat and a hat that looked like an air-raid warden’s helmet. She smelled strongly of mothballs and disappointment.

I continued with my cruel deception. If I was correct and Edgard de Boudel was indeed using the name of Hauptmann Richard Kettenacher, it could only mean one thing: that the real captain was dead and had been for some considerable time. I managed to persuade myself that his cruelty and the cruelty of the Russian intelligence service that had put together this legend was crueler than mine, but only just.