By all accounts, old man Höffle had been appalled by the suggestion of handing over any of his wealth to a bunch of anti-Semites but, at the urging of his fearful wife and daughter, he had gone along with Jung’s suggestion. As a senior official, in control of much of the Party finances, Bormann had been the right man to approach with the offer. Even now, the thought of it made Bormann laugh; money had never been so easy to come by.

Jung and Bormann had both seen into the other’s dark heart; they were like scorpions mating. Each had a lethal sting, but they both had much to gain from an alliance.

Hitler slammed his fist on the table so that the plates and cutlery jumped – jolting Bormann back to the present.

‘Yes, Mein Führer,’ he said, making a mental note to himself to have a large bouquet delivered to Eva at the Berghof.

Hitler’s bloody women. When the Führer drove past them in the street, the young girls flaunted themselves like prostitutes, some tearing open their blouses to reveal their breasts. One would have thought he was a sports champion or a movie star. Women would be the undoing of him because the ones he liked were all crazy bitches in heat: the Berchtesgaden shop girl Mitzi Reiter, who’d tried to strangle herself with a cord attached to a door when he jilted her; the actress Müller who’d leapt to her death; the English hellcat Mitford; Eva Braun and her overdose . . . but worst of all, Geli stinking Raubal.

She had deserved to die. Not that Bormann had gone to Hitler’s Munich apartment at Prinzregentenplatz in September 1931 with the intention of killing her. Anything but. He didn’t want her dead – he wanted her secrets.

That filthy serving wench Angela Raubal, Geli’s mother, had hinted at a secret child and Bormann wanted to know more. Of course he did. Secrets were his currency.

If Hitler had a child and only he, Bormann, knew about it, there would be endless possibilities for advancement. And so he needed to prise those secrets from Geli, as leverage for his own ambitions. He chose that particular day because he knew Hitler would be away on his electioneering tour to Nuremburg and then on to Hamburg, and that Frau Winter, the housekeeper, would be out at the cinema with her husband Georg and Frau Reichert, the landlady – though they would later deny this. That only left Frau Dachs, Reichert’s mother, and she was profoundly deaf and kept to her own room.