Wilde’s own heart was pounding from the inhuman obscenity of what they had found. He took deep breaths to calm himself and tried to make sense of the blood and cruelty. Even the grey stone walls seemed to lose their solidity and the floor was moving like a vessel in a storm. His teeth were clenched, every muscle taut, his mind numbed.

Get a grip, Wilde, you’ve seen blood and death before. You have to act. Now.

He had to take it all in, to search thoroughly for any clues that might lead to the killer. Find the killer, find Hitler.

While Paula prayed, Wilde placed his hand on the dead man’s forehead and arm and found a little warmth. The blood was coagulating, but still had a bright sheen. Wilde was no expert but he reckoned the man had been dead a couple of hours.

He walked around the little chapel, taking everything in. Apart from the altar with its defaced paten and its crucifix, it was an austere space, lit by a single plain glass window. No ornamentation here. Nothing to distract the meditations of the hermit. In a corner, he found a rucksack, a coil of climber’s rope and an ice axe. They were all smeared with blood. The body itself had been bound with similar rope, perhaps cut from this coil.

He tried to imagine the way it had gone. The killers had come here and overpowered Jaeger at gunpoint, then tied him up and carved him to death with the axe and a blade. From the shape and size of the corpse, it seemed he had been a strong and healthy man in his fifties. But no one, however physically powerful, could counter the threat of a firearm.

The reason for his murder was obvious. This was nothing to do with vengeful husbands from the valleys of the Tyrol taking retribution on the man who had seduced their wives. This was all about the telephone call to Wilde at Garmisch.

Whether he had inadvertently revealed his intentions, or the phone had been bugged, someone must have known that Jaeger had made contact with him.

The severing of a tongue was a universally understood warning to others to keep their mouths shut. The eyes and the ears? That meant he had seen and heard too much.

One thing was clear: Wilde and Lieutenant Heck had been on the right track almost from the start. The answer lay here in the Alps, and August Jaeger had been the key. It was his name that slipped from the lips of Himmler’s henchman Walter Schellenberg in London, and it had been sound information.

But that line of inquiry was dead. Literally, he thought, gazing once more on the terrible remains of a man. The only thing Wilde was left with was a growing certainty that Hitler was alive, and that he was hiding somewhere in these mountains.