“Many of you have written to me asking why it is that I dislike the Jews so much. Well, I would have thought that would have been self-evident, but in listing my reasons for my dislike of them, I will also expose their underhanded practices, their devious ways. The Jew has a number of reproachable tendencies, tendencies which I will now list in brief, and then expand upon later.

“For a start, the Jew has an incapacity to avoid forming a state within a state. Do not let the Jews tell you that they have been forced into their stinking ghettos, for it is they who chose to live like that, huddled together in a mass, creating their own customs and laws, sitting like a parasite on the skin of their host society.”

He catches the eye of Manfred, his producer, through the glass partition. Manfred smiles, and gives him a thumbs-up. This is going well, he thinks, this will earn him a place in history. When he goes back, back to an England free of Jews, an England cast out of the twilight and back into the bright rays of hope, he will be a hero, one of its saviors. No traitor am I, he thinks, merely just ahead of the game, ahead of time, always ahead of time.

NOVEMBER 1962

Her flat was crammed with papers, books, letters and files. Friends would joke about it, telling Amy that she should just throw the whole lot away, forget about it, get on with her life. It was history, they said, let it go.

But she couldn’t. She was determined to find out the truth, even if her research led her to the conclusion that he had in fact been a traitor. One way or another, she had to find out. It was easy for her friends to tell her to drop it—they knew who their parents were, what they had done, how they had fought. They had that security; she didn’t. Couldn’t they see that it was important? Some could. But there were others who said that she wasn’t getting very far.

The doubters had a point. Despite the time and effort, despite all those piles of paper, she was nowhere near finding an answer. She felt like Sisyphus, eternally pushing his rock to the top of the hill. Just as she felt she had gotten to the summit, something would snatch the rock away from her, and throw it back down.

That something could either be secrecy, bureaucracy or accident.

“Dear Miss Lockhart, we are sorry to inform you that the papers you require are not available to the public….”

“We’re sorry, but we only release such wartime correspondences to bona fide historians….”

“Unfortunately we suffered a fire….”

“Those papers will be released in 2046….”