‘Call me again in half an hour, Kalt. And don’t tell me you have almost found what we are looking for. I want to know that it has been found and despatched. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Herr Reichsleiter.’

This time Kalt put the phone down more gently. The call had not been as bad as he feared, but there would be a great deal worse to come if the task was not completed with great haste. And he hadn’t even dared mention that the midwife was missing. To think that the night had started so promisingly. How had it ended like this?

*

Martin Bormann paced the room, a lit cigarette in either hand. They had left Bavaria and were back in East Prussia at the Wolfsschanze. He liked it here, away from the filthy Munich cabal. Here he held sway. No Eva Braun here to whisper against him in the dead of night.

The internal phone rang. The Führer wanted him. For a few moments, Bormann drew on first one cigarette, then the other, trying to work out what to do about the events in northern Germany. His administrator’s brain was ranging through various possibilities and their potential drawbacks.

He was livid – murderously so. What the hell were Kalt and that illiterate sidekick of his doing? If they had taken the midwife and she had led them to the correct place, how had they let the child evade them?

But he really couldn’t think about this now. The master would not wait, and nor did he want him to. Hitler had to believe that he could not manage his great responsibilities without the aid of his loyal servant. He stubbed out both cigarettes and waved helplessly at the air around him, as though somehow he could rid himself of the smell the Führer so disliked.

In any other circumstances, he would have called straight through to Himmler to get the whole of the local Gestapo and SS involved. But of course he couldn’t do that. No one, not even Uncle Heinrich, could ever be allowed to know about the events of September 1931. Nor could he himself leave the Führer’s headquarters, not even for half a day. Perhaps there was some other assistance to be had.

Jung. It had to be Charlie Jung.

There was something else on his mind, too. Something that might seem of little consequence – something for Heydrich and the SD to deal with under normal circumstances. An American had arrived, legally, and had then disappeared after visiting the American embassy. This might have meant nothing to Bormann, but Kalt had discovered something while torturing the midwife; she revealed that in the hours between Braundorf and Berlin, she had gone to the American diplomatic mission and had met a man named Vanderberg and had begged him for help. That was all, but it was enough to jangle the nerves. Who exactly was Vanderberg? And who was this new American visitor who had disappeared? Things were spiralling out of control.