His next mission took him to another town by the banks of the Elbe – but one some forty or so kilometres to the south-east. The town of Bad Schandau.

In many ways, the town – or large village, he’d never been sure which it was – had changed little. It still had the same feeling of being crammed in – the precipitous valley between the Elbe itself and the sandstone plateau that rose on both banks to too narrow a space for a settlement.

Before making his way to Lotti’s parents’ bed and breakfast hotel, he drove a little further along the road towards Czechoslovakia, just so that he could be reminded of the cliff lift. He recalled his parents saying it was nothing special – just like the cliff lifts in Scarborough. But to him it was special. Not least because it always reminded him of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz – the book version, of course; when they’d visited in 1938, at the height of Hitler’s power, the film had not yet been released.

And there he was. The Tin Man. Arm outstretched to the left, as though helping to prop up the cliff itself.

What had ever possessed him to go along with Lotti and Frau Whatever-her-name-was and give a Hitler salute, together with the ‘Sieg Heil’ shout? Surely, he knew even as a twelve-year-old how wrong that was? But perhaps his memory was coloured by the war itself and later events. There had been plenty of British adults, even in the late 1930s, who had been ready and willing to kowtow to the Nazi leader.

*

He experienced a strange feeling when he parked in front of Pension Schönblick. Almost like an out of body experience – as though he was a ghost visiting his past, and that that past had lost some of its colour, its vibrance. It was similar to the way colour photos – especially instant ones like Polaroids – tended to fade, so that reds became muddy, yellows turned to greens, greens to browns and nothing was quite as you remembered it. And that you were almost apologising to yourself for coming back and spoiling the memory. Because Pension Schönblick had certainly faded in the intervening forty-four years, as had Bad Schandau itself. Some of the changes were, of course, welcome. No swastikas hanging from the windows for a start. But the little hotel looked like it needed more than just a lick of paint. The front door looked part rotten, as did many of the window frames and shutters. Arnie wasn’t even sure it was open, even though they were approaching the peak summer season.

He rang on the bell, then stepped back, feeling as though he was about to invade his own past.