‘I’m the doctor, so I’ll decide if you’re OK or not. Apart from which, I’m extremely glad you’re here because I’m worried about Lilly. There’s been no word from her, and Colonel Appache says there’s nothing he can do. Says she’s a free agent. But I don’t buy that.’

Wilde rather thought the colonel had a fair point. ‘I’m afraid he is probably right.’

‘We have to get her away from that place. I heard what they did to the poor maidservant. We know these Nazi bastards kill people.’

*

Standartenführer Julius Boden was awaiting the promised use of the telephone. He was very weak and couldn’t move from bed, so it would have to be brought to him.

The doctors had been giving him morphine for the pain. It took away the physical agony of the wound, but it did not induce euphoria. Instead, he found himself in purgatory.

He was back in Kiev in 1941 with his Waffen-SS company, at that time deployed as part of Einsatzgruppe C – Task Force C. For two days his troops had manned the machine guns along one side of a gully near the city, a dark, forested place known by the local people as Babi Yar. The dates – 29th and 30th September – would be imprinted on his brain for ever.

It was the date of lost innocence. The day he became death.

From childhood, he had helped take the cattle and goats into the mountain pastures near the family home in Schwarzenkirche. Now he was herding babies, children, women, men. They were undressed and trembling, knowing they were about to die, yet still modestly trying to cover their genitals and breasts with their bare hands.

On and on they came, hour after hour, into the burning hot rattle of the machine guns, into the cauldron of death. Their bodies white and splashed with red in the gully that became their grave.

The thrill of guilt had been beyond anything Julius Boden had ever experienced. He was born and baptised a Catholic and had expected to be struck down by God. But he wasn’t. God stood idly by and did nothing.

Nor had nightmares come to Boden. Not then. He was able to laugh and find love. And in the four years since Babi Yar he had slept every night in perfect peace. Until now.

Why did the dead visit him now? Why, when he closed his eyes, was he assailed by their stained white flesh? Why now, when he lay between life and death, did their tens of thousands of eyes rise from the earth to judge him?

Of course, he knew the answer. He had sold his soul like Faust. Lilly was both his Helen and his Gretchen. Beauty and innocence that would haunt him as he fell to damnation.

The devil was coming to claim his debt.