She was shivering, not from the cold but from fear for Nathalie. What had they done with her? Why had Mama said nothing in the kitchen? Why didn’t she stop this? Why had she allowed Nathalie to be taken?

‘Now stand up, Lilly Marais,’ the mayor said. Her father pulled her to her feet, still holding her hands tight behind her back. Her fair hair was strewn on the ground. Her bare body – the body that the German officer loved – was open to all the people. She felt blood trickling down her forehead, into her eyes and down her cheeks.

The mayor took something from one of the other men. Lilly saw that it was a wooden placard with a piece of string attached at both ends. It had four words: Nazi whore, collaborator, slut. Without ceremony, this was thrust over her head, so that it hung around her neck, resting on her breasts.

‘Now march,’ the mayor said. He swept his arm wide to indicate all the assembled village folk. ‘Let the good people of Ste-Estelle-sur-Seine see your shame. Let them know what becomes of those who defile themselves.’

Her father released her hands, then pushed her in the back. ‘Walk, damn you. You are no longer my daughter. I disown you from this day forward and you are banished from ever entering my home again.’

She clasped her hands together and fell to her knees in front of her father and the mayor, and the women with the shears and the razor and the scissors. ‘I implore you, where is my child?’

‘You will never see her again,’ Jean Étienne said. ‘That is our sentence.’

Chapter 6

August 1945

As Tom Wilde and Philip Eaton travelled to London by ministry car, the MI6 man explained all he knew about Walter Schellenberg. ‘He was Himmler’s sidekick, the worst sort of Nazi. Smooth, handsome, arrogant. Whatever he says to excuse himself, he must have known of all the atrocities. He was up to his neck in it. We call him The Shell – because that’s what he is, an empty shell. A hollow man.’

Wilde allowed Eaton to talk on, but in fact he already knew a great deal about the German from his own work with the OSS. Schellenberg had risen through the ranks of the SD secret service – the Sicherheitdienst. By the end of the war, he was an SS-Brigadeführer and head of foreign intelligence, answerable only to Himmler and Hitler.

‘I suggest we try appealing to his vanity,’ Eaton said. ‘These types love to feel important. Play it by ear, see what works best. Remember, he’s desperate to save his own skin, so we have leverage.’

‘I’d like to do it alone,’ Wilde said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ll make him believe I’m on his side, that I understand that like a good soldier he was only obeying orders. One man can form a bond with another. Two men will always look official. Can I try it? If I get nowhere alone, join me.’