Franklin felt an instant wave of contempt towards his new wife but suppressed it and recognised the time had come to employ his fabricated backstory.

“Alicia, I only have my mother and uncle left. My family originates from Kraków in Poland. They were working-class factory workers and small-time shopkeepers who struggled to make a living. Then the war came, and the city was occupied. They weren’t religious but were good Christians who were appalled by the relentless massacre of Jews that they witnessed day after day. My father and uncle got heavily involved with an underground organisation run by a man named Oskar Schindler. He was a wealthy factory owner who’d created a network of anti-Nazi sympathisers offering refuge in their homes to Jewish families. It was perilous work and they knew the penalty of exposure was certain death, or at best a trip to Auschwitz.

“My father enlisted the help of all his immediate family, but in the summer of 1943, they were betrayed by a Nazi informant. Most of them were lined up and shot in the Jewish Quarter as a public warning to others. My parents and uncle got a few minutes’ warning of the imminent raid and managed to escape, and, over the next few months, they made a tortuous eight-thousand-mile journey to South America, where they arrived with nothing more than three suitcases. My father was in bad health, so, sadly, didn’t live for very long, and now my poor mother suffers from dementia and hasn’t recognised me for some years. But my uncle is a truly remarkable man and, in many ways, I regard him as my father. He’s generous, caring and inspirational. During the early war years, he worked in a small pharmacy in Kraków, helping the pharmacist dispense drugs and today, almost forty years later, despite all that hardship, he now runs one of America’s biggest pharma companies. And my mother lives in a small town in Patagonia where, thanks to my uncle’s success, she has a comfortable life.”

Alicia squeezed her body even closer to her husband’s, nestling her head in his chest. “My God, Richard, that story is incredible. One day you’ve got to tell it to the world.”

An evil smirk appeared on Franklin’s face. He couldn’t believe how easy it had been to spin his wife a total work of fiction.