‘I really don’t know. I saw her briefly, but after that I don’t have any idea what happened.’

‘Well, I’d like to find out – wouldn’t you?’

‘I’m going to sound heartless, Angie, but I have to say that she wasn’t my immediate priority. She went there of her own accord.’

‘But she couldn’t have had any idea what she was getting into. Is she safe?’

He shrugged. ‘OK, I’ll see what I can do, though we have to face it that she might be happy in the company of a bunch of fanatical Nazis. Who knows? One way or another we’ll find out.’

She looked at her watch. ‘Tom, I’ve got to turn in now.’

‘Of course.’ He smiled. ‘Thanks for listening to me. I couldn’t talk to Colonel Appache. Gets my goat.’

Angie Gray left him with the remains of the rye, a pot of strong black coffee and a sleeping bag. He sat at her table and unfolded August Jaeger’s map. It was a metre and a half wide and a metre deep and Jaeger’s handwriting was minute but perfectly legible. Wilde had never seen such an intricate chart.

Once again, he studied it using a magnifying glass, but this time he was concentrating on a select area – the high mountains and lakes between Almrosen and Schwarzenkirche. He had no evidence to suggest that this area might be significant, just a hunch.

For one thing, it was remote. A few villages were dotted around both Almrosen and Schwarzenkirche, but nothing in between – just harsh terrain at lung-sapping altitude, broken by what were probably rushing streams, dark lakes and meadows. No roads, no communications.

His eye kept going back to one small area, which he took to be a pasture in a mountain bowl. It was the name that August Jaeger had written there in tiny black letters that caught his attention: Die versteckte Alm.

The hidden meadow.

The height of this meadow was 2,000 metres, which Wilde converted to 6,500 feet. A mountain hut or something similar was delineated without any accompanying legend. It seemed absurd, of course. Perhaps the rye whiskey was melting his brain. But why not that place? If Hitler was alive, he had to be somewhere.

And August Jaeger had wanted to tell him something, hadn’t he? Why else would he have made that phone call and arranged a rendezvous?

Wilde worked out that the hidden meadow was four or five miles from the hermit chapel where he and Paula Jaeger had found the mutilated body. Had Jaeger regretted finding a hiding place for the murderous tyrant? Maybe he had already helped Collingham and Harper and was aware of their deaths. That could be why he had made himself scarce in the mountains these past few days.

But then he had had second thoughts and called Wilde. He had paid a terrible price for that fateful phone call.