‘Please, I beg you. You are mistaken . . . I never hurt a soul.’

Heck pulled the trigger and the German SS soldier screamed.

Chapter 8

Wilde looked at the scene with astonishment and horror. His hand went to the shoulder holster, concealed beneath his jacket, and his fingers gripped the butt of the pistol. Then he changed his mind and slid the weapon back.

He turned to Colonel Appache at his side. ‘What was that?’

‘That was Lieutenant Heck shooting someone.’

They were twenty yards from the unfolding incident and Wilde watched with incredulity. Now he was moving forward. He pushed past the man with the smoking pistol and knelt beside the injured man. He was screaming and groaning, clutching the remains of his shattered arm as blood flowed into the dust.

‘Get help, Colonel.’

Appache hesitated as though he balked at the thought of being ordered about by a college professor, but then he nodded and bustled away. Wilde bunched up the injured man’s shirt and tied it as a tourniquet around his upper arm to staunch the blood. There was little more he could do. ‘Hang on, Mister,’ he said in German. ‘Help’s on its way.’

He was in the shadow of the gunman, Lieutenant Heck, and turned to get a proper look at him. Heck had the darkest, thickest eyebrows – eyebrow – that Wilde had ever seen. It ranged across his brow like an unbroken hedge of black foliage. He was looking down at them, the gun held casually in his right hand. He was grinning.

‘You’re Heck?’

‘I guess you’re Wilde.’

It was not an auspicious meeting.

‘What in the name of all that’s holy have you done here?’

‘This man—’ he waved his weapon in the direction of the crumpled bleeding mess of Rothstein ‘—was posing as a refugee, but he is SS. He was trying to escape so I shot him. He had an SS blood tattoo, so I removed it for him. Anyone would have done the same.’

The whole scene had a surreal quality. On a dusty patch not fifty yards away, a group of boys were playing football and didn’t bother to stop at the sound of gunfire. Men, women and children strolled past going about their business without taking any heed of a man bleeding and groaning in pain. Not far away, a woman squatted down to piss without even lifting her skirt, let alone find somewhere private.

Wilde couldn’t take it all in. He had come here to this camp with Colonel Appache from the nearby Counter Intelligence Corps base in Garmisch, having flown from RAF Northolt to the US-held airfield at Schongau. It now seemed that this man with the smoking gun and the insane eyebrow was the one he was supposed to team up with.

Mozes Heck stepped forward and gave the bleeding man a casual kick in the ribs.

‘Have you lost your mind, Lieutenant?’

Colonel Appache appeared at the corner of the building. Two men were with him, carrying a stretcher, and they immediately took charge, assessing the wounded man and then gently easing him onto the canvas and raising him up.