After the attack, she had been dragged away and consigned to a large bedroom with pine panelling and a pair of single beds with fresh white sheets and eider-feather duvets. It was a beautiful room, the sort of room that tourists might pay good money for. But Lilly was keenly aware that this was no hotel room; this was a prison cell.

Ilse Boden hadn’t said another word to her after the terrifying assault on the dais when the stranger came out of nowhere and fired at Julius. All Lilly wanted was to help him, but the other women pulled her away.

On instructions from Ilse Boden in a language that Lilly was a long way from mastering, her two teenaged children, Brünnhilde and Siegfried, had marched her here and put her in this room. The girl had brought her a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of beer. ‘Eat, sleep,’ she said in French with no hint of a smile, then backed out. Lilly heard the key turn and realised she was locked in.

She had met these two briefly when she first arrived with Julius. She was struck by their welcoming smiles. Their faces so innocent, fresh and sweet – but their whisperings so sly.

The window opened on to a balcony. Lilly stood out there in the cold night air. She was still wearing these dark green Bavarian clothes that were so unfamiliar and wanted to take them off. They felt expensive but she hated them. And now, they were stained with Julius’s blood. And yet her own clothes had been taken away from her, so this was all she had.

She looked out at the dark waters of the lake and the forbidding mountains all around her. The room was high up on the third floor of the Bauernhof Edelweiss, but perhaps she could climb down from here. Then where would she go? A woman could die alone in these mountains. The alternative was to stay and pray that Julius lived. She wondered where he was. Was there a doctor in the village or would he have been driven to hospital?

She had many questions, and no answers.

*

Wilde was woken by Angie Gray. ‘Good night’s sleep, Tom?’

‘I needed it.’

‘And you didn’t even finish the whiskey. I had thought better of you.’

He clambered out of the sleeping bag. ‘Forgive my sorry state,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m shocked. I have never seen a man in his underwear before.’

He laughed. ‘And you a doctor of medicine.’

‘Breakfast?’

‘Angie, you will make some man a wonderful wife one day.’

‘And that, Tom Wilde, is where you’re more wrong than you could possibly imagine. Come on, coffee and good fresh bread awaits us.’

*

Two hours later, Wilde found Mo Heck sitting up in bed, his arm bandaged and in a white sling. A US Army nurse was checking his pulse.