Frau Weber shook her head. ‘Have you heard from your father?’

‘No,’ Lieselotte said.

‘We don’t even know where he is,’ Bette said. ‘That’s what Mutti told us. Top secret.’

‘Top secret, eh?’ Frau Weber smirked. ‘She may pull through,’ she said. She lifted the cloth from Mutti, dipped it in the water. ‘I have to go. I can’t leave my girls.’ She handed it to Lieselotte. ‘Keep sponging her. I’ll come back in the morning.’

She walked around the side of the bed.

‘Lock the door after me,’ she said.

The candle burned out and Lieselotte fetched another.

‘This is our last,’ she said, lighting it from the embers of the old. It flickered in the breeze from the empty window, but stayed alight.

‘We’re running low on water,’ Bette said, wringing out a cloth, wiping her mother’s face. ‘I wish Frau Weber had stayed with us.’

‘Well, she didn’t,’ Lieselotte said.

Bette felt as if her blood had turned to oil, was flooding through her veins, heavier than grief.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Berlin: July 1945

The springs were soft and the mattress hard, but at least the old police barracks were undamaged and John had the room to himself, small though it was. There was a cupboard for his clothes, shelves in one half, hanging space down the rest. The previous occupant had left his roster on the inside of the door. Three nights on, two days off. Night shifts. Not for the faint-hearted. He’d had to work through the night more than once, took time winkling out the details in the Walterwerke and everywhere else he’d been sent in the last few weeks. Physicists, John thought, are not the most garrulous of men.

A small table and hard-backed chair nestled under a tall casement. The room was stuffy, needed some air. John opened the window. The thin yellow curtain blew inwards, tangled itself around the edge of the frame, caught on the latch, but the breeze was welcome in the July heat. He could hear a bird singing. There was a shrub not far away, and there in its thickets John could see the outline of a nest. A blackbird was entering the tangle of leaves and branches, a worm in its mouth. Fledglings. He liked that idea. In a landscape of soot, a baby blackbird was learning to sing.