She didn’t really care if Bahlow and Tilsner overheard the conversation. But to give at least a semblance of privacy, she stepped out of the car with the handset. While she would try to do what she could to honour Arnold Southwick’s last wishes, her real priority lay in getting Jannika and Johannes to safety as soon as possible, now she knew the full extent of what was going on at their special sports school. The trouble was, Jäger was intimately involved in that too – he knew everything she knew.

So when he said, ‘I need to meet you, Karin,’ she knew she would.

‘Where, and what’s it about?’

‘I can’t discuss what it’s about on an open line. Just take it from me, it’s in your interests.’

‘Where?’ she repeated.

‘At the Basteibrücke. Do you know where that is?’

‘Yes. Near Rathen. Above the Elbe Valley. But it seems a little inconvenient. Can’t we meet in Dresden?’

‘No, Karin, we can’t. Where are you at the moment?’

‘In the western part of Dresden.’

‘In an hour’s time, then. That should give you plenty of time. And if Southwick handed you any documents before he died, or indicated to you where they were hidden, make sure you bring them with you.’

*

Instead of driving to the spa town of Rathen, and then walking, Müller approached her rendezvous with Jäger from the high sandstone plateau above the Elbe Valley. The decision meant she was soon driving through low cloud as the Wartburg climbed up towards the rear of the tourist attraction. Once she’d parked in the near-empty car park, and began walking past the hotel and restaurant – both of which looked closed for the season – to the bridge itself, she found she was trudging through an incessant fine drizzle, with visibility reduced to a hundred metres or so.

Behind the greyness, there ought to be magnificent vistas of the Elbe Valley itself, as well as the strange rock shapes for which the area – Saxon Switzerland – was famed. But in this weather, she wasn’t sure she would see anything. All that was visible through the mist here were the darker, diffuse outlines of the surrounding trees.

The only sounds were her own footsteps on the track and the doleful drips of water from the tree canopy and closed buildings.

According to her map, there were just a few metres to go. And yet still she could see little or nothing.

As she got to the very edge of the high plateau, the grey veil of mist suddenly lifted. Below her, the crenelated pedestrian viaduct that was the famed Bastei Bridge, surrounded by gnarled, giant figures of rocks – hewn and weathered by nature over hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.