‘Thank you.’

‘She is a brave girl, but like all children she has her own ideas and is no saint. She will be cold and scared, for she has only her nightgown and coat and a pair of shoes. But say to her these words: Bismarck loves carrots. That is our code. Bismarck is – was – our beautiful dog, and he did eat carrots when we cooked them. Once you have spoken those words, she will know to trust you.’

Wilde nodded.

Rieger’s eyes bored into Wilde. It was a look of infinite sadness but there was hope in it, too. The eyes were entreating him: don’t let me down.

‘God go with you both,’ he said. ‘You are here at great risk to yourselves, Monsieur Sable, and you, dear lady, for which I thank you. I pray with all my heart that you can get Klara to safety. She is an innocent in all this – a pawn in the game of a powerful man who fears her more than anything or anyone else in the world.’

‘Martin Bormann?’

He nodded. ‘I wanted to leave Germany, but Maria would not have it. I never told her how great was the threat we faced. I knew, you see, that if he ever found us, he would not stop until he had killed her. She is living evidence of his own murderous crimes. I could not share this with Maria. She has never been a healthy woman – her nerves would not have taken it.’

‘You can trust us to do all we can,’ Wilde said. ‘That’s all I can promise. God go with you, too, Herr Rieger.’

‘Just one more thing – do not carry on walking towards the east along the line of the lake or you will almost certainly come across a great number of soldiers. There is an army training camp there. And the Luftwaffe has a fighter base nearby.’

From somewhere to the south they heard another burst of machine-gun fire. It seemed random, but vaguely in their direction, for bullets smacked into the trees nearby. Wilde instinctively dropped to the ground, as did Matthias and Sunny. The volley had been close. Too close.

In the dim morning light, he looked to his side, to Matthias Rieger, and felt sick to the stomach. A bullet had hit Rieger. His head and face were a mass of blood. He had been hit with some sort of exploding bullet, the same as the one that had torn his guard dog apart.

Wilde urgently grabbed Sunny’s hand.

‘Move.’

CHAPTER 11

A pair of jackdaws rose lazily into the air, replete from a feast of carrion. The sun was up now, shimmering across the waters of the lake. The sounds of shooting had grown more and more distant and then ceased.

Wilde had walked ahead by a couple of hundred metres; now he was sure they had reached their destination, so he turned and waited for Sunny to catch up with him. As she approached, he reappraised her. The upper-class flying ace’s widow no longer cut the domineering figure that she had in Potsdam a few hours earlier. Her skirt and wool stockings were torn, her hair was a tangled mess and her hands and face had cuts and scratches from pushing her way through the undergrowth. On meeting her, he had thought her rather attractive in a no-nonsense American sort of way. Not pretty, but oozing self-assurance. Now she appeared to have lost her confidence.