Then they were through the village, the headlamps illuminating a tree-lined avenue that stretched straight ahead for a mile or more before disappearing into another area of woodland. The sky was still dark, but the horizon to the east was beginning to glow with the first inklings of sunrise.

‘We must have passed it,’ Wilde said.

‘No, carry on. I was told it was well beyond the village. There should be a rough track on the left. The farm is called Der Steinhof, but there’s no sign by the road, only a pair of white boulders on either side of the track.’

Wilde slowed down even further, the engine growling smoothly. He didn’t want to miss the track, but his mind was also racing ahead. What if it was the wrong house? They couldn’t afford that at any price.

‘Here,’ Sunny said, her voice rising a notch. ‘I think that’s it – look, two large stones.’

Wilde stopped. ‘I’m not going to drive in. We should park the car and approach on foot, check out the lay of the land. They’re not expecting visitors.’

Sunny Somerfeld was silent for a few moments, then shrugged.

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Trust me on this,’ he said.

CHAPTER 9

Wilde parked the car off the road, a hundred yards down from the two white boulders that proclaimed the entrance to the farm track.

There was enough light from the approaching dawn for them to walk without a flashlight.

He was acutely aware that neither of them knew for sure what they were walking into.

‘So you have never spoken to the Riegers?’

‘Everything I know comes from Jim Vanderberg. He knows me too well – he knew that I couldn’t refuse to help this child.’

Wilde increased his pace.

*

A delivery van and a car were parked in the driveway. The blackouts were still up at the windows, but they were not well secured, and Wilde could see chinks of yellow light showing at the edges.

The farm track had taken them far from the road – at least half a mile. They had walked to the edge of the field, then into a wood. Now they stood at the edge of a clearing, watching the house.

‘Why do they have a van?’ Wilde said.

‘Why not? It is a useful thing. Perhaps they use it to take produce to market.’

‘But Matthias Rieger is a schoolteacher.’

‘Ach, in the countryside, everyone has a few animals or grows things to sell.’

‘Well, from the lights, I guess they’re all up, probably having breakfast. You go and knock at the door, Frau Somerfeld. Better a woman alone than a strange man who doesn’t speak good German. I’ll wait back here until you signal me to come.’

Sunny Somerfeld crossed the forecourt of the farm. The building looked at least two hundred years old but had been renovated quite recently. It was three storeys high and a great deal more attractive than the houses Wilde had seen in the villages on the way there. Not a manor house by any means, but the property of a reasonably well-to-do farmer at some point in its history.