Heck said nothing, simply turned away and began making his way back to the jeep. Wilde went with him; there really was nothing to be done, but he would have loathed himself if he hadn’t looked.

They drove on northwards and some way to the west, back towards the Bavarian border. Wilde still couldn’t make sense of what had happened. He couldn’t get away from the gnawing suspicion that either one or both of the truck drivers had been on a mission to kill. He had detected something in the oncoming truck driver’s wide, expressionless eyes, and he wasn’t convinced that the last-second swerve had been done with the finest of motives.

In which case, to hell with the two men.

*

Back at CIC headquarters in Garmisch, the bustling market town and ski resort at which Hitler had hosted the winter Olympics in February 1936, they ate a meal of steak, mushrooms, fried potatoes and tomatoes. Good produce imported from America to feed the conquerors of a starving people. Wilde thought it was the best food he had ever eaten. In the absence of Scotch whisky, he could even appreciate the Kentucky rye that the barman suggested.

‘There’s something up there in Almrosen,’ Heck said. ‘I’m sure of it. That empty house, that woman, the trucks . . .’

Wilde couldn’t disagree. But they were still no nearer their quarry. They might track down August Jaeger sooner or later, but what if he just shrugged his shoulders and feigned ignorance? In fact, why would he say anything else if he had been instrumental in helping the world’s most wanted man to disappear?

The Gestapo might have ways of obtaining information under such circumstances, but Wilde didn’t. And so without inside information, they had nothing.

Hunting for one man in the Alps would be no easier than finding a crow in a crow-black night.

‘If they know something up there, I don’t think they’ll talk,’ Wilde said. ‘And if they don’t know anything, we’ll just be wasting a lot of precious time. We both know what we have to do now. We have to talk to the obvious suspects, the people who were there, the ones who really know something. One of them will break, because conspiracies never hold.’

After their meal and a chance to shower and change clothes, they met Colonel Appache in his office. He had his jacket off and his military shirtsleeves rolled up. He gave his visitors a perfunctory salute, then spread himself out in his leather desk chair and ran his fingers through his crew-cut hair. ‘What happened to you last night? We had a meeting planned.’

Wilde gave him a full report of their visit to Almrosen and the incident of the two lorries. The colonel listened, but he seemed rushed and distracted and soon began tapping his fingers on the desk.

‘Is that it?’ Appache said when the story was finished.