The line went dead. Lockhart kept the receiver held up to his ear, allowing the crackling, purring sound to soothe him. After a couple of minutes, he put it back down, absentmindedly missing the cradle. He looked at his watch—ten past eleven. He got up, walked to the door, and took his coat off the hook. If they wanted to court-martial him for getting drunk on duty, then fine, but nothing was going to stop him. He knew it was pointless—pathetic even—but he had to escape, just for a few hours. For the moment, the reality was too dreadful to face in a small sober office.

AUGUST 1974

In a perfect world, Amy said to herself, she would have known the truth before Louise was born. There would have been something neat about that. She could have closed one door before opening another, left that part of her life behind, as Hugh had so often asked her to do. Of course Louise was a joy, and her priorities changed as soon as she first held her.

But she knew, even then, that one day Louise would ask her about her grandfather. And what would she be able to tell her? That he was a traitor? That he was the only British officer to have joined the SS, the most hated and feared organization of this—or any—century? That he was a member of the organization that carried out the Holocaust? She would have to tell Louise the truth as it stood, because that would be the truth she would hear in the outside world. She wouldn’t be able to lie to her.

What haunted Amy most was the possibility that the accepted truth was in fact a huge lie. She knew in her heart that Louise did not have a traitor for a grandfather. Her priorities might have changed, but her enthusiasm for clearing her father’s memory had doubled. There was now someone else who needed to know, another generation that was owed the truth.

Chapter Eight

That evening, “Fräulein Hoffman” booked into a seedy guesthouse on the outskirts of Hildesheim, using a forged identity card supplied by the GRU. She and Lockhart had decided that to continue as normal would be madness; that to go back to Kitty’s would be as good as suicide. They just had to hope that the SD assumed that she and the arrest party had perished as a result of the air raid. It would take weeks before their bullet-riddled corpses were discovered, and Lockhart said that that should be enough time. Stay in your room as much as possible, he warned her; the last thing they wanted was for Strasser to spot her.