He glanced across at her. The platform lighting was dim, but she caught his eye and smiled back fleetingly, then looked away. Her bandaged and gloved left hand was in the pocket of her maroon wool coat. Her right hand held the handle of a leather suitcase that had belonged to one of the junior clerks at the embassy, and had had its travel stickers removed with hot water.

Vanderberg could not imagine the pain and terror Romy had suffered at the hands of those brutes at the pig farm. She had told him, too, of her chance encounter with a Polish slave worker and the way he saved her, asking nothing in return. If such a man was willing to help her, Vanderberg decided, then surely he, too, must do all he could. Persuading the chargé d’affaires that the embassy should help her with new clothes and forged papers had not been easy in the first instance. But finally the boss had shrugged and said, ‘What the hell, Jim, let’s do it. Take my car around to your apartment and fetch her. We’ll be banged up soon anyway. Might as well be hanged for a sheep.’

They had moved her, hidden in the back of an official embassy vehicle, from Vanderberg’s apartment to the courtyard of the embassy, and from there she had been smuggled upstairs to be made over with a new hairdo to cover her bruised forehead, and dressed in silk stockings, skirt, cardigan, dark red coat and beret, all provided and fitted by a willing pair of female American secretaries. Finally, her hand was cleaned up and the fingers dressed with antiseptic ointment and individual plasters, so they could fit in a man’s pair of gloves.

‘We’ll get you out of here close to departure time and leave you in a crowd,’ Vanderberg told her. ‘From there, you’ll need to go straight to the Potsdamer railway station and keep your eyes peeled for me. We travel close to each other but not together. That way if one of us is hauled up, the other one might still get across to Switzerland. Until then we don’t know each other, OK?’

‘Thank you, Herr Vanderberg.’

‘Oh hell, don’t thank me. It’s our duty to help the victims of this brutal regime.’

During the hours waiting for her to depart the embassy, they had sipped coffee together and Romy returned to her reminiscences of Geli Raubal, talking very quietly, aware the whole time of the possibility that the walls could be bugged. Vanderberg played jazz records on his gramophone to muffle her voice.

‘Don’t get the idea that Geli was perfect,’ Romy said. ‘She had moods and could be difficult like anyone else. But overall, she was a lovely girl.’

‘I take it she had a sexual relationship with Hitler?’