‘Because once we’re finished they’ll be able to get back to catching herring to fill hungry German bellies. That is why they’re out here.’

*

Horst Spahn was puzzled. The deeper he delved, the stranger this whole affair became. The Sicherheitsdienst had influence and informants in every police agency throughout the state, and so Spahn instigated a wide-net search, which quickly produced dramatic and surprising results.

Spahn discovered that Martin Bormann’s office had made a car registration check on a Horch belonging to Frau Sigrun Somerfeld, the widow of Generalmajor Werner Somerfeld, the great Luftwaffe hero.

Now why, Horst Spahn wondered, would Bormann do that? Why was Bormann interested in Frau Somerfeld and that car?

Spahn made further checks and soon discovered that the Horch had been found burned out on a road outside a village called Kossertheim in Brandenburg, north of Berlin.

And then he unearthed something else from the local police. There had been two deaths in the vicinity of the car, and during the same hours as the fire. The victims were a husband and wife named Matthias and Maria Rieger. They had almost certainly been murdered. The man, a schoolteacher, had died of a gunshot wound to the head, deep in the woods near his home. The absence of a gun by his side ruled out suicide. His wife had fallen or been pushed down a flight of stairs in their house. And there was something else: their daughter, Klara, a gifted pupil at the local school where Herr Rieger also taught, was now missing.

So a child is missing, her parents are dead, and a burnt-out car is traced to the widow of a flying ace. What could any of this have to do with Martin Bormann, Hitler’s closest aide?

And there was another thing: the matter of the American diplomat and his communications with a professor at Cambridge University in England, by the name of Thomas Wilde. Why did Bormann want to know about these people? The SD had a separate file on Wilde and it made interesting reading; he had first crossed the path of the German intelligence services at the end of 1936, and again in June and September 1939. In all three cases, he had worked against Germany’s interests and was believed to have had links to Britain’s secret intelligence services. On the first occasion he had suffered a glancing gunshot wound to the side of his head. Unfortunately, there was no photograph in the file.

Given the gravity of the information coming in, Spahn realised this was a very big affair. Handled correctly and with delicacy, these were matters that might win him great favour with his own masters, Himmler and Heydrich. But one never knew until one had the whole picture, and so he held back from sending any information further up the line. First he needed to understand Martin Bormann’s role, for he was a dangerous man to cross.