While I puzzled out the mystery of how to find Ernst Steiner, my father took me to tea at Lutter and Wegner’s. Though I wasn’t sure he could afford it, he made a show of paying for the whole thing. Despite the fact he no longer owned industrial property to speak of – in fact I think he and my brother both mooned about the house sending my mother half mad – he was ever the anxious capitalist, talking about a new factory he wanted to open, and how he knew someone high up in the Party who would help him get set up again. And then! Who knew, perhaps one day he might outfit the whole of the new German army with plimsolls. I remembered the summer I’d spent in his shoe factory, when he’d paid me not a pfennig more than the other workers. Still, as Walter had proved, it had kept me from worse misdeeds.

When my father shook my hand at the revolving gold doors he quoted Isaiah: ‘Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.’ Then he turned on his heel, mumbling the chapter numbers but explaining nothing, and off he went. Later my mother wrote me a letter of apology, saying the ‘world was bent on dividing us’. I knew she liked Charlotte, and I wondered why she hadn’t come with him. Usually she enjoyed trips away, but then I had written to her in such detail about the Nazi parade, she might have been simply too scared to get on the train.

It wasn’t much longer after the bizarre meeting with my father that I managed to find Ernst Steiner. It was all thanks to Irmi, really. I was walking Charlotte out at lunchtime when I saw the porter’s newspaper: on the front page was a photograph of some of the Party’s top men. I asked the porter if I might have a look.

‘What are you doing?’ Charlotte asked quietly. She didn’t like the porter – Mr Schmidt – she found him unsettling. I knew he didn’t like doing anybody any special favours but he handed over the newspaper anyway. The photographed officials were smiling, war medals hung on their lapels, and the caption read Hotel Kaiserhof, Berlin. Ernst wasn’t in the picture, but he was a politician, and he had always enjoyed a drink.

Charlotte scanned the picture. ‘Who are all these people?’

‘Leaders of the Fatherland,’ I said, in earshot of Schmidt, who, like all Berlin porters, was a paid-up Nazi.

He asked, and not in a friendly way, whether I wanted to keep it. ‘No. Thank you.’ As he took his newspaper he narrowed his eyes at Charlotte’s boyish haircut.

We said goodbye at the front door.

‘That man gives me the creeps.’

‘Just ignore him. Where are you off to?’