Wilde pushed him forward again. In the near distance, the house lights were all blazing, a beacon summoning them from the darkness.

‘Who is she, Young? Do you even know?’

‘I never needed to know. And I wasn’t going to waste time on speculation. I have been paying a debt.’

‘You owed something to Bormann?’

Young snorted. ‘You think this ends here? You don’t know who you’re dealing with.’

They were at the end of the garden. A flashlight lit them and Bodie Cashbone’s voice boomed out.

‘You got him, Wilde! You got the bastard!’

‘You’re welcome to him,’ Wilde said wearily.

‘I should kill him here and now. We got two men down. One dead, one critical.’

Wilde saw the body of the old woman a few yards away. Vaguely he wondered about her. What was her story? From her accent she sounded English enough. A crypto-Nazi, he guessed. One of those who had made their minds up that Britain was on the wrong side in the war, just waiting for her time to come. Well, it had come all right, and it had ended in miserable failure and death.

‘Here.’ He handed his captive to Cashbone. ‘He had a knife, but that’s out by the quarry. You’d better search him for other weapons.’

Cashbone signalled to one of the officers to come and help him. More assistance had arrived, and suddenly the place was crawling with men and lights. Wilde’s eyes drifted involuntarily back to the figure of the old woman on the ground, illuminated rather gruesomely by lights from her own back door. She was moving. Not dead, then. An armed officer was standing close to her, his revolver holstered. He seemed to be looking elsewhere. Well, the struggle was over for the old woman. She had been savage and merciless while he was in her power; now she was a pathetic bag of bones and skin, little more than a carcass.

Wilde shook his head in incredulity. She was looking at him, her watery blue eyes malign and radiating hatred. She was turning on her side, and she still had the gun with the jewelled handle in her own small, wrinkled hand. She was deliberately showing the gun to Wilde. Then she aimed it at Young.

A shot split the air and Young let out a cry. His legs gave way.

The old woman seemed to laugh, her lips drawn back from her yellowing teeth.

‘Now he won’t talk.’

They were her final words. The guard at her side belatedly removed his revolver from its holster and put two bullets into her chest, and she lay still.

*

‘I don’t think I’ve thanked you yet, Cashbone. How did you find me?’

‘Guess.’

‘You were watching the college?’

He grinned.

‘I was careless.’

‘Lucky, you mean.’