‘Hell,’ said Carla.

She stood alone in the cloakroom, thinking. She could not even get rid of the little camera without risk. It was in her raincoat, and she could hardly throw it into a hospital rubbish bin. She would have to leave the building with it in her pocket, and try to find a place where she could dispose of it secretly.

But did she want to?

It seemed unlikely that Koch, naive though he was, could be talked into smuggling a copy of a battle plan out of the War Ministry and bringing it to show his inamorata. However, if anyone could persuade him, Maud could.

But Carla was scared. There would be no mercy for her if she were caught. She would be arrested and tortured. She thought of Rudi Rothmann, moaning in the agony of broken bones. She recalled her father after they released him, so brutally beaten that he had died. Her crime would be worse than theirs; her punishment correspondingly bestial. She would be executed, of course – but not for a long time.

She told herself she was willing to risk that.

What she could not accept was the danger that she would help kill her brother.

He was there, on the Eastern Front, Joachim had confirmed it. He would be involved in Case Blue. If Carla enabled the Russians to win that battle, Erik could die as a result. She could not bear that.

She went back to her work. She was distracted and made mistakes, but fortunately the doctors did not notice and the patients could not tell. When at last her shift ended, she hurried away. The camera was burning a hole in her pocket but she did not see a safe place to dump it.

She wondered where Frieda had got it. Frieda had plenty of money, and could easily have bought it, though she would have had to come up with a story about why she needed such a thing. More likely she could have got it from the Russians before they closed their embassy a year ago.

The camera was still in Carla’s coat pocket when she arrived home.

There was no sound from the piano upstairs: Joachim was having his lesson later today. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table. When Carla walked in, Maud beamed and said: ‘Look who’s here!’

It was Erik.

Carla stared at him. He was painfully thin, but apparently uninjured. His uniform was grimy and ripped, but he had washed his face and hands. He stood up and put his arms around her.

She hugged him hard, careless of dirtying her spotless uniform. ‘You’re safe,’ she said. There was so little flesh on him that she could feel his bones, his ribs and hips and shoulders and spine, through the thin material.

‘Safe for the moment,’ he said.

She released her hold. ‘How are you?’

‘Better than most.’

‘You weren’t wearing this flimsy uniform in the Russian winter?’

‘I stole a coat from a dead Russian.’