Carol studied the picture more intently. Now, she could see differences. Katerina’s eyes were a couple of shades darker. Their mouths were distinct in shape. Her chin was stronger than Katerina’s. Side by side, you could have told them apart without any difficulty. Yet that first impression of identity lingered on for Carol. ‘It’s weird to think there’s someone else out there with the same face. What a bizarre coincidence.’

‘They do sometimes happen,’ Morgan said. ‘You can imagine how gobsmacked I was when I saw your face looking up at me from an application form. That’s when we had the idea for this operation.’

Carol shook her head in wonder. ‘She could be my sister.’

Morgan’s smile reminded Carol of a lion’s yawn. ‘Let’s hope Tadzio thinks so.’

Chapter 15

15

The Wilhelmina Rosen was under way, carving a passage through the murky waters. It was a stretch without locks or complex navigation, so Gunther was at the helm, leaving him free to settle down in the cabin with a stack of paperwork. Bills of lading, receipts for fuel, payroll accounts all sat waiting for his attention. But his mind kept slipping away from the task.

Heinrich Holtz’s story had opened up so many questions. His fellow crewmen might think him simple and straightforward, but there had always been much more going on behind his eyes than he’d revealed. He’d always had to live in his head, starved as he had been of the company of his contemporaries. The only thing that had kept the inner darkness at bay had been reading, though his grandfather had tried to deny him even that. As a teenager, he’d become adept at smuggling books on board, battered paperbacks bought from charity shops and market stalls. He’d read late at night in the privacy of his tiny berth in the bows, devouring violent adventure novels, biographies and true crime, dropping them overboard once he’d finished with them, lest the old man catch him in something that would at the very least be scorned as a waste of time. It had taught him to look beyond the surface to what lay beneath.

So the revelation of the secret of Schloss Hochenstein was the key that had unlocked the closed mansion of his past. He still had to wander down the corridors and explore the rooms before he could have any understanding of what really lay within. Some of those rooms remained obstinately dark, with no possibility of illumination. His grandmother, for example. She had been dead before he was born. He had no idea if she had borne the brunt of his grandfather’s sadism or if her love had been enough to calm his rage while she lived. There was no way of telling.