‘I know no such man – and I have received no phone call from him. And where is Braundorf?’

‘This is pointless. Soon you will be telling me the truth – and begging me to believe you.’

Romy felt her limbs begin to shake uncontrollably.

‘Won’t you let me go, sir? Please. I will do anything for you. I am told I am still an attractive woman . . .’

‘That’s true.’

She fell from the bench seat on to her knees.

‘I beg you. I am innocent of any crime.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Kalt replied.

*

They hung her by her wrists from a wall in the barn where the sows suckled. The acrid reek of the animals’ excrement was overpowering. Kalt’s wife, Johanna, twice the size of her husband in girth, glanced at the proceedings, blank-eyed. She wore a blood- and mud-spattered housecoat that might never have been washed.

Johanna Kalt spat on the ground, then carried on her work shovelling up pig shit from the enclosures as though nothing was amiss, as though a terrified woman, her clothes coated in mud and other filth, was not hanging like the Christ from the old brick wall. Johanna Kalt was a farmwife; one creature’s distress was the same as another’s, and no concern of hers as long as the pigs got to market.

Kalt and Brunner went about their business with grim efficiency, suggesting this might be something they had done before. After binding Romy Dietrich’s wrists and attaching them to old iron hooks high up in the wall so that her stockinged feet were suspended inches from the ground, Kalt asked her again.

‘Now then, Frau Dietrich, where is the girl? Klara Wolf – where is she?’

Romy shook her head. Her throat was constricted and she was gasping for breath.

Kalt shrugged and put his arm around Brunner’s shoulders.

‘Let us have a bottle of beer, Hans. We’ll come back in half an hour . . .’ He spoke the words loud enough that she was sure to hear. ‘. . . with the tools.’

*

It was a short walk from Todt’s office on Wilhelmstrasse to the US Embassy in the old Blücher Palace at the Brandenburg Gate. The consular section gave out on to Hermann Göring Strasse, but it was the embassy on Pariser Platz which Wilde and Offenbach now approached, for this was where the remnants of the American diplomatic mission were presently housed. The light drizzle had stopped and the day was a great deal brighter. Todt had been right – it promised to be a fine afternoon.

The mass of humanity passed him by, heads bowed against the cold. They all looked so shabbily dressed and down at heel. This was the people that had conquered most of Europe and was now marching halfway across Asia in its push to the east – its Drang nach Osten – but they hardly looked like victors. How different was the reality of this drab, grey city from the sharply choreographed propaganda films, full of smartly attired citizens, put out by Doktor Goebbels.