It was not Jung’s charm that secured the interview with Todt, but the mention – through the minister’s secretary – of the missing Tomas Esser.

Todt did not rise from his desk, nor did he salute or invite the visitor to sit down. He looked up from the table covered with plans with cold eyes.

‘You mentioned Esser to my secretary – have you heard something about the American, Herr Jung? Is that why you’re here?’

‘No, sir, I am looking for him.’

‘I know you, don’t I? You inherited the Höffle Galleries.’

‘Indeed, it is now the Jung Galleries. But that is not why I am here. I leave all that to my managers while I do my bit for the war.’

‘Doing what exactly?’

‘Providing taxes, Herr Todt. And much else which modesty precludes me from mentioning. The fact that I am wealthy should not be held against me. I just happened to marry Herr Höffle’s daughter and when the tragedy befell them, I found myself in control of their great company. But it was clear to me that my expertise lay elsewhere, for I was educated in diplomacy and foreign affairs.’

‘Well, you look like a greasy lawyer to me.’

‘Very well then, I will tell you, sir. I am working on behalf of the foreign ministry.’

He managed a reassuring smile. Lying came easy to Charlie Jung; it always had. As a boy he had been sent home from India to a third-rate prep school where beatings and cross-country runs and bitterly cold dormitories had been designed to toughen up small boys for the rigours of service life.

Jung – Charles Young as he then was – had learned fast. A boy had to lie and cheat and use every means at his disposal to survive the hellhole to which he had been despatched by uncaring parents.

From there he had been shunted to a minor public school, the sort of place which churned out colonial administrators by the shipload: civil servants, prison governors, district officers. Charlie was never going to accept that sort of life. He had no intention of emulating his parents with their false life of luxury in the empire: servants by the dozen and then, for those who survived and came ‘home’, impoverished retirement in the Weald of Kent when they discovered that they were excluded and sneered at by those who mattered in Britain. The old families still owned the land and they still ruled the country.

He despised all his teachers and all the other pupils, with their second-rate ambitions: church, army, colonial service or, for the slightly brighter ones, law or medicine. He learned to steal, to dissimulate, to use sex as a means of control – of both men and women.