Geli had been twenty-three, but she did not seem that mature. Everyone said she was a fun-loving girl, the only woman the Führer had ever loved. Fun-loving? If so, why had she been so frigid and difficult? He had walked in on her when she was writing a letter, pen in her right hand, phone clasped to her ear with the left. She instantly seemed angry to see him. All he had wanted from her was the truth about her child and a little fun, but she had flown off the handle, had sworn at him and told him to leave – had threatened to tell the Führer about his visit and his vile slurs against her.

When he slapped her, she went mad. She reached for the Führer’s Walther 6.35mm pistol, the one he always kept in the apartment, loaded. Bormann had had to wrestle it from her. It was her damned fault that the thing went off, the bullet hitting her in the chest. The stupid cow. It had been an accident, for pity’s sake! Suicide, maybe. No blame could be attached to anyone else; the police doctor, Müller, was clear about that in his report.

They had found her body inside her room, locked from the inside; and so it had to be suicide or an accident. No one else had been in the apartment, no one among the neighbours reported hearing a gunshot. How could it be anything but a self-inflicted wound when she was found in a locked room?

Well, perhaps not quite an accident. He could admit these things to himself, couldn’t he? She was a juicy little slut, that Geli. Why had she resisted me, wondered Bormann? Other tarts associated with the Party bigwigs were quite amenable to a quick jig-jig with ever-ready Martin Bormann. Why not Geli? Why did she have to make a song and dance about his hand on her tit? Why did she have to react so irrationally when he pushed her on the bed, put his hand up her skirts and relieved her of her undergarment? When she slapped him, of course he slapped her back.

And then she squirmed away from him, ran out and returned with the Führer’s pistol. She waved it about in his direction. He had to take it from her. And then the inevitable struggle and the bloody result. An accident.

What no one knew – or wanted to know – was that there was a second key to Geli Raubal’s room, and that Martin Bormann had removed it and thrown it in the Isar. And that was it; the whole thing had been quietly put to rest because no one wanted any publicity about a young woman being found dead inside the apartment of the man who, within sixteen months, would be Chancellor of Germany.