The Diplomat’s Wife

Thirty-Three

June 1979, Switzerland

They decided to drive straight through Switzerland, through Geneva and Lausanne, and north to the West German border at Basel. Phil found it extraordinarily difficult to concentrate on the driving. In the streets around Geneva, he wanted to speed up, and on the highway which ran around the north shore of Lake Geneva he had to keep telling himself to slow down. Blood was pumping in his ears, and his hands were gripping the steering wheel in a sweaty death clasp.

Death. He knew the image of Kurt and then the man with the gun crumpling to the ground would never leave him. The sight of the red and grey stuff oozing out of the balaclava and the smell of cordite from the guns mixed with the iron in the freshly shed blood would never leave him. Neither would the man’s staring eyes as Phil had lifted his mask.

‘Why was that man there, Grams? Was he looking for Kurt? Was he looking for you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will there be more of them in Berlin waiting for us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has this got something to do with why we’re in Europe?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course you know! It must have. This isn’t some coincidence. These people want to stop you doing whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s obvious!’

‘I suppose it is.’

Emma’s voice was calm, but her face was tense as she stared straight ahead along the road. To their right, Lake Geneva reached into the gloom of the low cloud, its far shore invisible in the murk.

‘So what is it we’re trying to do? Why are we going to Berlin? To find Kay?’

Emma sighed. ‘Yes. To find Kay.’

‘And why are we doing that?’

She didn’t answer. She just stared straight ahead.

‘Are we looking for Lothar?’

Nothing.

After what Swann had told him in the Three Castles, Phil strongly suspected they were.

‘Is that why you had that gun? To use on Kay?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then why did you have it?’

‘In case we needed it. And it turned out we did need it.’

‘So you knew this trip might be dangerous from the beginning?’

‘I didn’t know it. I thought it might be. I didn’t think people would die. I didn’t think Kurt would die. You were very brave back there, Philip.’

‘What choice did I have?’ Phil protested.

‘You could have sneaked back into the lavatory.’

‘And let him kill Kurt and you?’

‘He killed Kurt anyway. And I’m going to die soon in any case.’

‘Oh, Grams!’ Phil tried to get a grip on his frustration. ‘Why are we trying to find Kay? Why can’t you just let it all rest?’

But Emma didn’t answer. She reached into her handbag, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. Her hand was shaking so badly it took her several attempts to light it.

Phil’s anger and frustration were genuine, but they were tinged with guilt. He should have known when he had seen the revolver in his grandmother’s suitcase that whatever reason she had for taking it, she thought there was a chance she might have to use it.

And then there was Swann. Their chat in the pub had added a frisson of excitement to the trip, transforming it from a tame holiday with an older relative into a bit of adventure.

It turned out that that kind of adventure involved bloodshed and death.

Somehow Phil had omitted to ask Swann whether he was likely to watch his grandmother blowing someone’s brains out.

To be fair, that wasn’t Swann’s fault. It was Emma who had got him into this situation; he would be accompanying her now even if he had never met Swann.

They drove through Switzerland in silence. It had started as a silence of anger, but as the TR6 ate up the kilometres, it became a silence of thoughtfulness, each of them trying to make sense of what had just happened and what would happen next.

Phil was unsure what to do. Should he tell Emma about his conversation with the enigmatic Swann? He felt guilty not telling her.

And yet, by her own admission, she had been an ardent communist in the 1930s. She may still be one.

As told by Emma, there had been something heroic about the communism of Hugh and her and Kurt, and the socialism of people like Dick. They were standing up for justice and equality in a world of cruel, broken capitalism.

Yet, now, the communists were the bad guys.

Phil had enjoyed studying history at school, but one of the things he had found hardest to accept was his teacher’s precept that good historians didn’t see history as the battle of the good guys against the bad guys. You weren’t supposed to take sides when you were writing an A-level history essay. Reluctantly, he had grown to understand that the reason why he thought the Protestants were the good guys in the Reformation, and the British the good guys in their empire, was because he was a Protestant Englishman. He was beginning to see that Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Israel were more complicated than they seemed once you dropped the idea that the good guys were the ones who looked most like you.

And yet he wasn’t prepared to give up some judgements just because Mrs Hauser, his history teacher, had told him to. The Nazis were the bad guys in the Second World War. The communists, as personified by the Soviet Union and China, were the bad guys now.

Which meant that his grandmother might be one of the bad guys.

Phil didn’t like that idea at all.

Swann had said something about how if Emma discovered he had asked Phil to look for Lothar, she might do something she would regret.

At the time, Phil had no clue what that might be. He wasn’t sure now, either, but he did see how it might involve the KGB. And, if Swann was correct, it might lead to getting them both killed. He knew Emma had a mind of her own. He knew Emma had been and indeed still might be a Russian spy.

Swann could easily be correct.

He wasn’t going to tell her about Swann. At least not yet.

This was all crazy. A week ago, he had been arguing with his father over a minor traffic accident and whether he could join his grandmother on a staid holiday to Europe’s capitals. Now it turned out that his grandmother was a Russian agent, that MI6 wanted Phil to spy on her, and that two men had died because of her, right in front of Phil’s eyes.

Phil was scared. It was a kind of fear he had never felt before, a fear that there was a realistic chance he and his grandmother might be killed. Soon.

He could easily have lost his life a couple of hours back. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, but maybe he should have crept back into the toilet and left the hit man to kill Kurt and Emma. He didn’t want to die, especially for reasons he didn’t understand, and that Emma refused to explain to him.

But he was glad he had jumped the man in the balaclava. He was glad Emma was still alive, and he had been responsible for saving her. Deliciously mixed up with the fear was excitement. He had faced danger and he had triumphed.

Emma had tried to tell him that, since she was going to die soon anyway, saving her life was pointless. Phil didn’t buy that. He wasn’t sure he had completely come to terms with the fact that she was going to die, but if she was, he would make sure it was in bed, not by a KGB bullet.

He would stick with her.

Thirty-Four

Emma had other ideas.

They drove into West Germany and turned off the autobahn at a small town on the edge of the Black Forest. The town’s only hotel had two free rooms, and they sat in its near-empty restaurant for dinner.

Phil ordered sausages and Emma a trout, together with a bottle of local Riesling.

‘We used to drink this stuff by the gallon, in Berlin,’ she said. ‘Hock, we called it. But it seems to have gone out of fashion now. I don’t know why. I think it’s rather nice.’

‘I like it,’ said Phil.

‘You’d like anything,’ said Emma.

‘Grams, I have a sophisticated palate! It might be just a little too modern for you to understand.’

‘Oh, Philip, you do talk absolute rot sometimes.’

He did. But it made her smile.

‘Philip. I’ve been thinking. Those were perfectly reasonable questions you were asking me in the car. But I just can’t answer them.’

‘Can’t, or won’t?’ said Phil.

‘Both. I really wanted to bring you with me on this trip. I needed your help, I enjoy your company and I was getting you out of a hole rather neatly. Also, I wanted to tell someone my story before I die, and you seemed the best person to choose.’

She smiled at him. ‘And I was right. Mostly. I do like your company. You were useful; I call saving my life pretty damn useful. And you seem genuinely interested in my story.’

‘I am.’

‘But when we set off, I never really thought either us would be in danger of losing our lives. I expected a hint of excitement perhaps, echoes of a dangerous past, but not men with guns killing people.

‘And I thought the story I was telling you was ancient history. I was happy to tell you secrets; I thought in doing that I was keeping the past alive. I didn’t want to take those secrets to the grave. But now I think I must. They are too dangerous.’

‘Why do you think they’re so dangerous?’ Phil asked.

‘I really don’t know,’ said Emma. She smiled wryly. ‘Of course, the answer must lie in the secrets themselves, and I have just said I am not willing now to divulge those. But I truly don’t understand why someone wanted to kill me. Or kill Kurt.’

Phil did. He was pretty sure it must have something to do with Swann’s mole. Emma’s words implied that she didn’t know about the mole. In which case, shouldn’t he tell her? For her own safety.

But could he trust her?

Instinctively, he knew that he could trust her not to deceive him in a way that would do him harm. But she had her own agenda, an agenda she wasn’t willing to share with him. If he told her about Swann and his desire to find Lothar, he had no idea what her response would be, what she would do. Swann had suggested she would put herself in danger. Phil could believe it.

Very well, she had her agenda and he had his. He was unwilling to betray his country. More than that, if there really was a mole in the heart of the British establishment, and Phil could help reveal his identity, he would do so.

‘Philip? You’ve gone quiet.’

‘Yes, I have,’ said Phil. ‘I was thinking about what you were saying.’

‘And?’

‘And I understand it, I think. Or as much of it as you’re willing to tell me.’

‘Good,’ said Emma. ‘So when we get to Berlin, you should leave me. Take a flight back to England.’

‘I can’t abandon you, Grams! It’s not safe!’

‘It isn’t safe, Phil. That’s the whole point. I can choose to put myself in danger. It doesn’t matter much; I haven’t long to live anyway.’

‘I do wish you’d stop saying that!’

‘I do wish you’d let me say it!’

That brought Phil up short. He was beginning to understand his grandmother. She was coming to terms with her death — and her life. His job was to help her do that.

He nodded, lowering his eyes. ‘OK. I’m sorry. You can talk about your death as much as you like with me. I get that. You should just understand that I’ll be sorry to see you go.’ Phil could feel moisture seeping into his right eyelid. He blinked quickly, and was relieved not to feel a tear run down his cheek. Get a grip!

‘I know you will, darling,’ said Emma with one of her warmest smiles. ‘I know you will.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But there’s absolutely no point me telling you all this stuff if you go and get yourself killed right away, is there?’

‘No, Grams.’

‘Good. That’s settled, then.’

But Phil wasn’t entirely sure it was settled.

After dinner, going up the stairs to their rooms, Emma stumbled and fell backwards. Phil was right behind her and caught her. Emma glanced at her grandson with gratitude and also a hint of fear, fear of the thing growing within her brain.

No. It wasn’t settled.

It was a long drive to West Berlin the following day. They passed within a few kilometres of Braunschweig on the way to the East German border at Helmstedt. Phil wondered whether Heike was back home yet, but he didn’t suggest stopping to find out. Maybe on the return journey, if Emma didn’t succeed in putting him on a plane back to London.

An autobahn corridor led 170 kilometres from Helmstedt through East Germany to West Berlin. At the border, the West German police and then the East Germans checked all the drivers. The two control points were large complexes, capable of processing the thousands of vehicles that made the trip each day. Phil had made sure the TR6’s tank was full of petrol, but that was the least of his worries.

What if the East German authorities realized that Emma had killed one of their agents in Annecy — or if not one of theirs, then an agent of one of their allies? Might they not arrest Emma and him? Why hadn’t he thought of this before?

He glanced across at his grandmother’s tense face. She had thought of it.

He needed to keep his wits about him in this last day or two he was with her if he wasn’t to make a mistake or to fail to catch her making one.

He considered refusing to go ahead. They were several cars back in the queue. She would understand. But she would continue regardless, drive the car herself into whatever trouble was waiting for her.

He took a deep breath. He would stick with her.

The West German police waved them through with a cursory glance at their papers, which showed at least that Interpol wasn’t on to them yet. The young East German border guard studied Emma’s passport carefully.

‘Any guns or ammunition?’ he asked Phil in German.

‘No,’ Phil said, very glad that Emma no longer had that stupid revolver in her bag. The border guard looked as if he was quite capable of taking the car apart. But instead, he asked them to wait, and disappeared through a door, clutching both their passports.

Phil resisted the temptation to exchange glances with Emma. He thought he was doing a better job of looking casual than he had at the crossing into Switzerland, but his heart was pounding.

The young guard returned, handed their passports back to Phil, freshly stamped with transit visas, and told him to drive on.

Phil waited a minute until turning to his grandmother. He meant to chastise her for not anticipating the risk that they would be arrested at the border, but when he caught her eye, they both burst out laughing.

There was no trouble at the checkpoint into West Berlin at the other end of the corridor.

Emma navigated Phil through the suburbs of Berlin with the aid of a map she had brought with her from England, as, unlike Paris, the layout of the city had changed in unpredictable ways since before the war. It had been obliterated by the combined efforts of the RAF and the Red Army. Totally destroyed, and then rebuilt.

He found driving in Berlin much easier than driving in Paris had been. He didn’t know whether it was because the drivers were stereotypically more disciplined, or whether he was just getting used to it. Emma guided them to the Kurfürstendamm, the glitzy shopping street in the heart of the western city.

‘Let’s try here.’

It was the Hotel Bristol, a grand hotel with a modern, curved facade of white stone on the corner of the Kurfürstendamm and Fasanenstrasse, a bright café with a red awning on its first floor facing the main shopping street. Yes, they had rooms for Lady Meeke and her grandson, and the TR6 was once again whisked away by a white-gloved lackey.

‘The Bristol used to be on Unter den Linden when I was last here,’ Emma said as they waited for the reception clerk to summon a porter. ‘Or at least its ancestor was. Unter den Linden is now in East Berlin.’

‘I know,’ said Phil.

‘Your Hitch-Hiker’s Guide told you?’

‘It did,’ said Phil proudly.

‘Bet it didn’t mention the Bristol.’

‘No. But there’s a good youth hostel in Bayernallee we can try if this doesn’t work out. It’s expensive though. Fifteen marks a night.’

‘That is expensive,’ said Emma. ‘I think we’ll have to slum it here.’

Phil dreaded to think how much his room cost at the Bristol. Probably half his entire holiday budget.

At breakfast the next morning, they discussed plans for the day. Emma wanted to go to the British Airways office to book Phil’s flight.

‘I tell you what, Grams,’ Phil said. ‘Before we do that, can you show me around Berlin a bit? Like you did in Paris. And tell me what you can about your time here.’

Emma was about to protest when Phil stopped her. ‘I know there are things you can’t tell me. But I’d like to hear what you have to say; I want to hear more of the story.’

There may not be another chance for you to tell me, Phil wanted to say, but didn’t. Emma heard the thought, though.

‘Yes, Philip,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

They picked up a taxi from the hotel and passed along the road that ran beside the Tiergarten, a large wild park in the centre of the city.

‘Roland and I had a flat just down there,’ said Emma, pointing to a construction site. ‘It’s all changed now, of course. But it was a good spot. Handy for the park.’

They got out of the taxi and walked into the park, under the scornful marble eye of a gentleman whose narrow beard was slung beneath his thrusting chin, rather like a necklace. He sat high up on a marble plinth, his clothes and a sheaf of marble paper flowing about him.

‘Richard Wagner,’ said Emma. ‘Very popular back before the war.’

‘I bet.’

Emma seemed to know her way now, and led Phil along a bewildering network of paths until they arrived at a small garden surrounded by a thick hedge. Roses predominated, but carefully ordered beds of bright flowers, whose names Emma no doubt knew, rivalled them for the attention of the bees, tirelessly toiling at knee height.

‘There used to be a giant statue in the middle of this garden,’ Emma said. ‘An empress in a long dress and a big hat watching over the nannies who used to take their charges here. And me taking your mother, who was nearly two at the time. Otherwise, it hasn’t changed much.’

They sat on a bench, letting the sun caress their faces.

‘This was where Lothar told me to go for my first meet in Berlin.’

Thirty-Five

November 1938, Berlin

Roland was posted to the Berlin embassy in October 1938, as first secretary. The embassy had had a tough time, working flat out in the weeks culminating in the Munich agreement that September, when the British and the French had allowed the Germans to take the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia in return for a guarantee of peace. Not our finest hour, and something Roland and many of his fellow diplomats were furious about.

But not the ambassador, Nevile Henderson. He wasn’t just pro-appeasement, he was pro-German, which was why he had been sent to Berlin in the first place. But right after Munich, he was diagnosed with cancer and sent back to London for treatment. Which was lucky, because Roland couldn’t stand the man. Personally, he was fine — charming, considerate, even honest in his own way — but professionally he was a disaster.

My last meeting with Lothar had been in Paris, that September. Lothar had just been recalled to Moscow, and I had learned Roland and I were moving to Berlin. Lothar had hastily come up with a plan for me to establish contact with a new handler in Berlin. I was supposed to turn up at the Rose Garden every Wednesday at 3.30 p.m., and I had the usual idiotic phrases to remember, something about the weather being colder this year than last.

And it was. Colder, I mean. Nobody met me the first two weeks, so Caroline and I had to hang about in the October damp for an hour, waiting. I brought Caroline along as an alibi, on the theory that a young mother looks much less suspicious than a single woman hanging about alone on a miserable October afternoon.

Lots of suspicious things went on in the Tiergarten before the war. In the 1920s and early thirties it was the place for prostitutes and drug dealers to meet their clients and do their business. By the time Roland and I arrived in Berlin that had all stopped, to be replaced by a different kind of furtive behaviour.

Everyone in Berlin assumed that nowhere indoors was safe from prying ears, either electronic or human, so the Tiergarten became the natural place for diplomats to meet. And not just diplomats: German government ministers and soldiers could be seen walking or riding together, deep in mysterious conversation. So why not spies like me?

I persevered. My third attempt was in early November.

I was sitting on a bench, trying to keep Caroline entertained, when I heard a familiar voice.

‘Hi there.’

I looked up. ‘Kay? Kay! I wasn’t expecting you here.’

She grinned. I don’t know whether it was my nervousness at meeting the new Lothar, or the general underlying anxiety permeating Berlin at that time, but it felt very good to see a familiar face. I stood up and hugged her. Then I introduced her to Caroline.

‘Shouldn’t we be discussing last year’s weather?’ I said.

‘Consider it discussed. And thank you for showing up. This must be the fourth week you’ve been here?’

‘Third.’

‘Well, I’ve just moved here from Paris. Arrived last Friday. And I’ve been promoted! It’s now my job to look after you.’ I had continued to meet Lothar at Kay’s flat in the Marais for the last two years. Sometimes Kay and I would meet briefly there, or at readings at Shakespeare and Company, but it was always Lothar I reported everything to.

‘That’s marvellous,’ I said.

‘Sure is. Since I’m American, it’s easier for me to operate here than for some of the others. I’m planning on enrolling at the Friedrich Wilhelm University on a language course. And it’s Kay Macdonald now.’

‘Scottish?’

‘Still American. But it sounds a whole lot less Jewish than Lesser. According to my new passport I was born in 1905 in San Francisco and my father was a pastor — also not very Jewish. San Francisco is a fine place to be born in, by the way. All the birth records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, so the FBI can’t check on me.’

‘Well, Miss Macdonald, it’s a pleasure to meet you. How’s Lothar?’

Kay became more subdued. ‘He’s back in Moscow. He has been reassigned to a different department.’

‘Still in the Comintern?’

‘I have no idea. They don’t tell me that kind of thing.’

‘Kay?’ I said. ‘Is the Comintern really so separate from the Russian secret service?’

‘Sure,’ Kay said. ‘It’s entirely separate. I mean, obviously we are based in Moscow and we get help and funds from the Soviet Union, but we are working for international communism, not just for Russia, I can promise you that.’

I wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t argue. At that point, Russia was the only communist state in the world, and given the recent spinelessness shown by the British and the French at Munich, the only country that could be relied upon to stand up against the Fascists in Germany, Spain and Italy.

‘What kind of stuff do you want from me?’ I asked her.

‘The same you gave Lothar in Paris,’ said Kay. ‘Seems it goes down very well with Moscow. Especially the information from your husband. They tell me the low-down you gave Lothar about the Munich negotiations was dynamite.’

I was pleased to hear it. Relations between Roland and me had settled down over the previous couple of years. We never argued; I was unfailingly polite to him. We now shared a bedroom, although we slept in separate beds. The apartment in Berlin only had two bedrooms, and it seemed right that Caroline should have one of her own. But I never let him touch me. Although I smiled, laughed with him even, I knew he could feel my disgust. Yet he seemed to understand it. Respect it.

We did have long conversations, though. Many of them were about politics and the international situation, all good information for Lothar. But, truthfully, I enjoyed those conversations for their own sake; Roland enjoyed them too. I even found myself looking forward to his return to the flat after a day at the embassy.

At that point the Foreign Office was split. On the one hand were those who wanted to take a tougher line on Germany, like Roland but also Vansittart, recently demoted from the post of permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, and Ogilvie-Forbes, the new chargé d’affaires in Berlin who was standing in for Nevile Henderson. On the other stood those who believed appeasing Hitler was the only way to preserve peace, like Henderson, and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and Roland’s bête noire, Horace Wilson, the Prime Minister’s right-hand man. The appeasers were gaining the upper hand, but it wasn’t always clear-cut. Although the new Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, had supported the Munich agreement, he had done so reluctantly, and Roland thought he could be persuaded to take a harder line against the Nazis.

Some British diplomats had made their feelings clear in a typically obscure manner. Their dress, which in Paris some had thought quintessentially English but others just ridiculous, comprised black homburg hat, starched white collar, striped sponge-bag trousers and a furled umbrella. After Munich and Chamberlain’s famous brandishing of his umbrella in celebration of peace with Hitler, many diplomats no longer carried theirs as a sign of protest. Even when it threatened to rain. Roland was one of these brave souls.

It was all terribly complicated, and Roland enjoyed working it through in his mind with me.

I enjoyed it too, for two reasons.

Firstly, I knew Roland treated my intellect seriously, and he increasingly valued my opinion.

Secondly, I passed it all on to Lothar. I still hated my husband for what he had done to me. Revenge, especially revenge in a good cause, which I believed this was, still tasted sweet. And it made living with him bearable.

I did hate him, didn’t I? Sometimes I wondered. Sometimes, when we were at home at the apartment in the Rue de Bourgogne or at our new place in Berlin and he was telling me about some particularly ludicrous episode between the ambassador and his wife, or the Nazi popinjays with whom he now had to deal, I found myself smiling and meaning it. And when he complimented me on my suggestions for how he should deal with the appeasers in the Foreign Office I would occasionally feel a warm glow of pleasure run through me.

No. Of course I hated him. After what he had done to me, how could I not?

‘More of that please,’ said Kay. ‘Also, they’ve asked for any information you can get on British attempts to undermine Russia — in particular, to support a coup against Stalin.’

‘I haven’t heard of any,’ I said. ‘My understanding is that the British government is a lot less suspicious of Russia than they were a few years ago.’

‘That’s not the way it is. The Munich agreement shows how the British government is willing to ally with the Germans against the Soviet Union.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. ‘In fact, I think that’s wrong.’

‘It’s true,’ Kay said. ‘It’s just well hidden. Which is why we would be real happy for you to find evidence of it.’

‘All right,’ I conceded. ‘I’ll see what I can unearth. Where do we meet?’

‘I’ve gotten a flat in Kreuzberg. We meet there.’ She gave me the address and a date and time the following week. ‘By then, I’ll figure out fall-back procedures and so on.’

‘I’ve started going to the Staatsbibliothek,’ I said. ‘It’s right next to the university. We can work something out there.’

Kay grinned. ‘Trust you to find a library. But it’s a good idea. I’ll see you next week. And be sure to get your husband to tell you something about the plans to undermine the Soviet Union.’

Thirty-Six

I took the U-Bahn to meet Kay. It was a relief to get underground. Above ground, on the streets, groups of men and some women were gathering. In the distance I could hear shouts. There was trouble in the air.

I had expected to see signs of anti-Semitism when I arrived in Berlin, and I saw plenty of them. Graffiti on Jewish businesses in the shopping streets. Signs of the petty bureaucracy which was designed to entrap Berlin’s substantial Jewish population at every turn: the yellow benches for Jews only in the Tiergarten, the special number plates on Jewish-owned cars. It was with some discomfort that I had learned we were renting our flat from a Jewish lawyer who had decamped with his family to Amsterdam. But in the month that I had been in Berlin, I hadn’t seen any attacks on Jews directly.

I had a feeling that was about to change.

Two days before, an angry seventeen-year-old German — Jewish student had marched into the German Embassy in Paris and shot the ambassador’s private secretary, a young man named vom Rath. I hadn’t met him myself, but Roland knew him. I assumed Kurt Lohmüller would have known him well.

Germany was in uproar, goaded by Goebbels’ propaganda machine. The newspapers were full of demands that something must be done about the ‘Jewish question’. It seemed that the gangs I saw roaming the street near our flat were planning to do just that.

Things were quieter in Kreuzberg, just south of the city centre where Kay lived. It was a neighbourhood full of numerous small shopkeepers who displayed their wares on the pavements: greengrocers, butchers, bakers, coal and potato sellers as well as tailors and cobblers. Bed linen hung out to air from apartment windows higher up. Kay’s place was three floors above a printer’s shop: in those days most of Berlin’s newspapers were located in the area. She welcomed me in. The flat was small and clean, but devoid of any personal touches: no books at all, apart from a large German — English dictionary. A scuffed wireless set stood to attention in the centre of the room.

I was pleased to see her, but also worried about her. Did she look Jewish? It was hard to tell. She didn’t conform to the grotesque stereotypes that the Nazi posters proclaimed: the hooked noses, the grasping hands, the greedy leers. But then her hair was dark. Yet so was mine.

I hoped her American accent and passport and her Scottish name would protect her.

We got down to business straight away. I had arranged for the daughter of a French diplomat to look after Caroline three afternoons a week, and I intended to spend most of those at the library, which Kay had now joined. We agreed that if I left two pencils crossed on my desk, that meant I needed to contact her. Similarly, if she left her pencils crossed, she needed to contact me. Three pencils lined up meant that we were blown and shouldn’t contact each other.

I liked Kay, but she wasn’t the same as Lothar. Lothar had managed to instil in me a feeling of reliability and trust. We would often talk about the subtleties of international politics, or of my relationship with Roland. It had felt like I was working for Lothar personally, that he was the one who decided what was important, and that I was earning his approval when I provided it. I knew that there must be people behind him in Moscow, but somehow they seemed subservient to him, rather than the other way around.

It quickly became very clear that things were different with Kay. Although there was no doubting her sincerity, or her devotion to the cause, she was following instructions, and those instructions were to dig up dirt on British operations against Russia.

The trouble was, there weren’t any, or none that Roland knew of, and he knew a lot. I had had two conversations with him about Russia, which had seemed natural enough since he knew of my fondness for the country. He assured me that the British no longer saw the Soviet Union as a threat, and became impatient when I pushed it.

Kay became equally impatient when I told her I needed to be careful about pushing it further. Lothar would have understood immediately. For him, protecting me from suspicion, especially Roland’s suspicion, was his top priority. But Kay was insistent. Someone was leaning on her from Moscow.

In the end, I had to agree to question Roland again, a promise I intended to ignore, at least for a while.

It was dark by the time Kay and I finished. We could hear shouts outside.

‘Be careful out there,’ Kay said. ‘How did you get here?’

‘U-Bahn.’

‘Well, take a taxi back.’

So I did. My taxi driver was a jovial fellow with a fine walrus moustache, and a couple of folds of skin at the back of his neck.

‘Are you English? Or American?’ he asked when he heard my accent.

‘I’m English.’

‘And what are you doing in Berlin?’

‘My husband works at the British Embassy.’

‘Oh, interesting. He must have been very busy recently?’

‘I believe they were. But we arrived from Paris just after the agreement was signed.’

‘Thank God you British agreed to peace at Munich,’ the driver said. I recognized his classic Berlin accent — the ‘g’s became ‘y’ sounds. ‘For a couple of days there, I thought we were going to be at war.’

‘So did I.’

‘Well, I am very glad we are not, gnädige Frau.’ He turned as he was driving and gave me a huge grin, the tips of his moustache pointing upwards. It was quite charming.

‘Me too.’

‘Notabene, no one in Berlin wants to fight the English,’ he said. ‘We are too similar. All we want is to bring Germans back into the Fatherland. It’s good your Herr Chamberlain understands that. Of course, the golden pheasants may feel differently; they want a war.’

‘The golden pheasants?’

‘The Nazis. The ones who love to dress up and push people around. I was in the last war; I know what it’s like, not like these popinjays with their fancy uniforms. Uniforms should be for fighting in, not for preening yourself on the Kurfürstendamm.’

‘We don’t want to fight you either,’ I said, even though I was afraid we might have to.

‘The Sudetenland is like if Cornwall was occupied by the French and they were all forced to eat snails and brush their teeth with garlic. That wouldn’t be right. Do they really eat snails in Paris?’

‘They do. And they like garlic. I’m not sure they brush their teeth with it.’

‘Anyway, now we have brought the Rhineland and Austria back into Germany and reunited the Sudetenland, we can live in peace with our neighbours.’

I prayed he was right. It was good to hear that that was what at least one Berliner thought.

The car slowed as a group of young men crossed the road in front of us. The driver raised his hand over the horn and then thought better of it. A moment later we heard the sound of shattering glass.

I peered out of the taxi, and in the light from the streetlamps I saw a man holding a broomstick and thrusting it at the window of a greengrocer. The word Juden was scrawled on the wall beside the shop. A group of about a dozen men cheered, and began chanting something I couldn’t make out.

‘Where are the police?’ I asked.

‘In their police station playing cards.’

‘Won’t they stop this?’

‘The Jews have it coming to them. You read about how they assassinated that German diplomat?’

‘I did.’

‘Well, then? It’s only going to get worse unless we do something about them.’

‘But you can’t let people roam the streets and destroy other people’s property!’

‘Why not? The Jews do it. Of course they are much craftier about it. They take your money without you even noticing. It’s the Germans who do all the work, and the Jews who take all the money. It’s always been like that.’

I knew it was pointless to get into an argument with a taxi driver, but I couldn’t let it pass. I think it was because he had seemed such a genial soul that I wanted him to change his mind. I wanted to believe in the good of the Berliners.

‘There are plenty of Aryan businessmen,’ I said. ‘They are just as wealthy.’

‘But they don’t go around shooting German diplomats,’ said the driver. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t have as many of them in your country as we do. But you should learn from us. Look around you. See what they are doing. Do something about it.’

We both heard the crash of another window shattering.

‘Like those guys. They are doing something.’

I’d had enough. ‘Stop the car,’ I said. ‘I’d like to get out.’

‘I wouldn’t recommend that, madam. It’s only another kilometre to your house.’

‘I’ll walk.’

The driver sighed. ‘Suit yourself.’

As I opened the car door he called out to me. ‘Gnädige Frau!’ He smiled. ‘You don’t understand. You’ll see, I’m right. We have to do something to stop them.’

I scrambled out of the taxi and slammed the door.

Out on the street, the noise was louder. The shouting, the yelling, the sound of breaking glass. There was even laughter and jeering. And to the west, above the rooftops, an orange glow flickered.

I moved towards it.

I wasn’t sure what it was, but I thought there was a synagogue in that direction. I resolved to see for myself.

A couple of years before, there had been incidents where British and American nationals had been arrested, usually for not performing the Nazi salute when troops marched past. This had proved a problem for all concerned, both the Berlin authorities and the foreign consular officials, so a tacit agreement had been reached. The authorities would try not to arrest foreign nationals, and the foreign nationals would try to avoid putting themselves in a situation where they were in public and expected to salute. Diplomats and their families were warned to walk away from Nazi trouble rather than towards it.

But I headed towards that orange glow. The wind was blowing from that direction, and I could smell it. Burning. Burning wood. And something more acrid.

I was walking along a short residential street between two larger thoroughfares. Towards the end of the road, a group of about half a dozen people were crowded on the pavement. I stopped and watched; partly I was nervous about passing them, partly I was curious. A small blond-haired man of about twenty was hammering on the door of an apartment building, a woman of about his own age urging him on. I noticed an arrow painted in red on the pavement pointing to the house, a letter ‘J’ scrawled above it.

There was no reply. The man hurled himself at the door in an attempt to bust it open, but bounced back into the street and hit the ground with a cry, amidst some laughter. Then one of his mates, a bigger man, pushed past with a crowbar. After a few seconds of tussling with the door, it split with a loud crack, and then swung open. Three of the crowd ran in, and a minute later they emerged with a young woman and an old man, to cheers from those waiting for them on the pavement.

I backed away as they started pushing and shoving the two terrified people. A third, much smaller person ran out yelling ‘Mama’, but he couldn’t get through the crowd.

The old man and the young woman were pushed to the ground. I couldn’t see clearly what was happening, but I could see from the way the crowd was stooping and jerking that they were kicking the silent bodies.

The boy stood a couple of yards back from the crowd, unsure whether to run forward to his mother and grandfather, or to run away. He was about five years old, wearing shorts. Under a pool of yellow light from the street lamp, I could see his chubby face stricken with incomprehension, horror and fear, his mouth open, his brows knitted. No one took any notice of him, even when he filled his lungs and wailed.

I should have stepped forward and tried to comfort him. Perhaps I should even have tried to stop them, however fruitless an effort it might have been.

But I didn’t do that. I turned and ran all the way home, up the stairs to our flat where Roland was waiting for me home early from work, his face full of concern at where I had been, and I flung myself at him and I held him tight, so tight.

That little boy is with me still.

Thirty-Seven

June 1979, West Berlin

The offices of the Detektei Pöpel detective agency were above a launderette on a street only a couple of hundred yards from the Wall. Emma and Phil climbed narrow wooden stairs to a cramped cubbyhole, where a young secretary asked them to wait for Herr Pöpel on a sofa only a few feet from her desk.

After ten minutes Herr Pöpel called them into his office. He was a small man, whose face bore the marks of decades of exhaustion. A cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth, a scrappy moustache sagged on his upper lip, and enormous bags underpinned his small eyes.

He ushered them into an office almost overwhelmed with paper. After instructing Trudi to get them both cups of coffee, and offering them each a cigarette, he sat down.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked, his Berliner accent so strong Phil struggled to understand his words.

‘It’s quite simple, really,’ Emma said. ‘We would like you to find the address of a woman named Kay Ortmann. She lives in East Berlin.’

‘And of all the private investigators in Berlin, why pick me?’

Herr Pöpel looked suspicious. Which, Phil supposed, was what you wanted in a private detective.

‘You are the second detective we have seen today,’ Emma said. ‘I offered a fee to the first man to recommend someone who could help us, half up front, and half payable when we had found Kay Ortmann. That way he would only recommend someone who he thought was capable of the task.’

Herr Pöpel’s lugubrious face cracked into a laugh. ‘I like that. Smart. Well, whoever you spoke to chose well. I make it a bit of a speciality to deal with the Ossis. I have contacts there.’

‘So you can find Kay?’ said Emma. ‘I realize Ortmann is a fairly common name, and I don’t know her husband’s initial.’

‘I’m sure I can help you,’ said Herr Pöpel. ‘Whether I will help you is something else. And it depends largely on how you answer the following question. Is there anything I should know about this Kay Ortmann?’

Phil wondered what story Emma would trot out, and was a little surprised when she opted for the truth.

‘We suspect she worked for the Stasi. We know her husband did. He may still. She is in her seventies, by the way.’

Pöpel nodded. ‘I have heard of Klaus Ortmann. A colonel in the Stasi. Mostly worked overseas. Not a nice man, but by no means the worst. Why do you want to find this woman?’

‘I knew her before the war. She’s an old friend. I’d like to see her again.’

Pöpel stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. ‘I have my reputation to protect, so I will be discreet. Where I can. But I also need to keep my licence. In cases like this, you should know that if the authorities ask me about your enquiry, I will tell them everything they want to know. Is that all right with you?’

‘That’s fine,’ said Emma.

‘Good. Give me any other clues you can, and I should have an answer for you tomorrow morning.’

When they left Herr Pöpel’s office it was nearly lunchtime.

‘Shall we take a look at the Wall?’ Emma suggested.

It wasn’t far. They turned a corner and it was right there, a ten-foot-high barrier of white concrete topped with smooth concrete piping. Layers of graffiti had been scrawled on every surface, the words an indistinct jumble.

As they walked parallel to the wall, they passed a row of tacky tourist shops selling Berlin Wall tat, and an observation deck, which was open to the public.

From there they could look over the barrier to a flat strip of tarmac and grass two hundred yards wide, on the far side of which stood another wall. Watchtowers gave the East German border guards a clear sight over the no-man’s-land; tall posts planted at regular intervals bore powerful lights to illuminate the ground after dark. Phil shuddered at the thought of desperate East Berliners trying to creep or run between the walls and being gunned down. And all in the middle of one of the largest cities in Europe.

‘That death strip used to be the Potsdamer Platz,’ said Emma. ‘The heart of the city, with shops and restaurants and hotels. The busiest junction in Europe. The first traffic lights in the world were installed here. And now look at it.’

Phil looked. The Nazi Germany on the eve of Kristallnacht that Emma had just described had sounded deeply unsettling, but then so was this.

‘There’s the Brandenburg Gate,’ said Emma, pointing to the north.

The mighty columns of the gate stood alone and proud, penned in on the western side by the outer wall, which flexed outwards into the woods of the Tiergarten at that point. On the eastern side there was nothing.

‘The Adlon Hotel, the smartest place in Berlin, was right there,’ said Emma, pointing to the emptiness behind the monument. ‘And behind that, the British Embassy on Wilhelmstrasse, where many of the government buildings were, including the Reich Chancellery. Now there’s nothing except a car park.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s strange. Paris is almost exactly the same as it was when I lived there. But Berlin? Berlin is totally different.’

They took a taxi back to the Kurfürstendamm and had lunch at the Café Kranzler, which overlooked the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, or the ‘Hollow-Tooth Church’ as the locals apparently called it. Like every other building in the city, the church had been badly bombed in the war, but the tower had been left standing, its spire snapped off with a jagged break halfway up. The nave had been replaced by a modern honeycomb block of concrete and glass.

‘Café Kranzler used to be on Unter den Linden too,’ said Emma as she examined the menu. ‘Just down from the Russian Embassy. I used to go there quite often for a cup of tea on my way back from the Staatsbibliothek.’

‘Did you stay in Berlin all the way up to the outbreak of war, Grams?’

Emma’s dark eyes examined her grandson. He knew she was trying to decide whether to tell him more. Then she smiled.

‘Yes, I did. Those last few months were... interesting.’

‘Tell me.’

Thirty-Eight

June 1939, Berlin

I hadn’t seen Dick for nearly three years, since his stint in Paris writing his novel on the Île Saint-Louis. We met for coffee and cakes at the Café Kranzler, in its old incarnation in Unter den Linden. He hadn’t changed over the three years. I suspected I had. Motherhood and the strain of leading a double life had aged me. My waist had thickened slightly, and lines were laying down permanent foundations above my brows and around my mouth. I was still only twenty-four.

We took one of the white tables outside on the pavement, a good spot for watching Berliners going about their business. Comfortable, stout middle-aged men with their facial hair arranged in a multitude of different styles: large moustaches waxed or left to grow thick, pointed beards, and yes, the occasional toothbrush above the upper lip. Stout middle-aged women with bags of shopping, much less stylish than their slimmer Parisian counterparts. And then the younger generation, lean, purposeful, in a hurry. A sausage seller at his brightly coloured cart yelled at all of them, cheerfully indifferent to their indifference. Yellow trams and motor cars thundered past, marshalled by a tall traffic policeman in a blue uniform with white gloves. There were all kinds of uniforms mingling with the pedestrians on Unter den Linden: the brown of the SA, the grey and green of the army, the blue of the Luftwaffe and the sinister black of the SS.

‘How long have you been in Berlin?’ I asked him.

‘Just since yesterday afternoon. I’m off to Dresden tomorrow.’

‘To interview whom? Your letter was vague.’

Dick grinned. ‘I wanted to be careful. I doubt the Nazis would be bothered to read a letter from me to you, but I didn’t want to take any chances.’

‘Very wise.’

‘Have you heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer?’

‘The Confessing Church pastor? Yes, I have. No wonder you were careful. I don’t think the Nazis like him very much.’

‘They don’t. He was chucked out of Berlin last year. He is going around the country setting up seminaries for future pastors. I believe he’s in a town near Dresden now. I want to interview him about his new book. For the New Statesman.’

The Confessing Church had split away from the official German Evangelical Church, promoting the modern heresy in the Third Reich that the leader of the Church was Jesus not Hitler. The Gestapo didn’t like that much; the Confessing Church’s day of reckoning would come soon. Like the trades unions, the Communist Party, the homosexuals and now the Jews.

‘I’ll be curious what he tells you,’ I said. ‘You’re writing magazine articles now? No more novels?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Thanks for sending me Capital Palais, by the way.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Not really. You laid on the politics a bit thick, I thought. I felt like I was being lectured to. You use the word “furthermore” much too much, did you know that? And the title is idiotic.’

Dick pursed his lips; too late, I saw that I had hurt him. But then he relaxed, smiling. ‘You haven’t changed much, have you, Emma?’

‘Haven’t I?’

‘You do say what you think.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘That was a bit cruel.’

‘The cruel thing is you are right.’

‘Didn’t it sell?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ I searched for something good to say. ‘I did like the scene in the bistro with the aristocratic young English lady. That wasn’t me, was it?’

‘Of course not,’ Dick said, reddening. ‘No resemblance to any person living or dead.’

‘Because there seemed to be quite a lot of intimacy between her and Leonard.’ Leonard was the young hero of the book.

‘Hmm,’ said Dick. ‘I suppose there was, rather. I tried not to be too explicit.’

‘You did,’ I said with a wicked grin. ‘You left just the right amount to the imagination. I rather liked those bits. Leonard seemed frightfully keen on her.’

‘Yes, he was.’ Dick cleared his throat. ‘Has Roland read it?’

‘Not his cup of tea.’

‘That’s probably for the best.’

A small squad of boys, no more than ten years old, marched past in brown shirts and black shorts, looking as serious and grown-up as they could. I hated the way the state was grabbing the youth of the country and moulding them into little Nazis.

‘Do you think they play conkers in Germany?’ I said, remembering Hugh at that age.

‘I have no idea,’ said Dick. ‘Why? Do you think that’s the SS Conkers Battalion?’

I laughed. ‘German conkers are probably bigger and more modern than ours.’

‘But not as plucky.’ Dick sipped his coffee. ‘You are still with Roland, I take it?’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘Are you surprised?’

‘I suppose I am. But you have your daughter to think of. He is a frightful cad. You may have forgiven him, but I can’t.’

‘That’s sweet of you,’ I said, and I meant it. I was suddenly overwhelmed by an absurd sense of gratitude to Dick. I realized I needed someone to agree with me about how appalling Roland’s behaviour had been; it was even better that Dick had volunteered his opinion without me asking for it.

Roland was a frightful cad.

‘I don’t know whether there is very much stigma to divorce these days,’ Dick said. ‘If you left him, people would understand.’

‘Perhaps. But I’ve decided to stay.’

I could see Dick wanted to ask me why. And frankly, I wanted to tell him. But I couldn’t do that without explaining that I was spying for the Comintern, and that I couldn’t do.

Just like Hugh.

Dick had disapproved of the idea that Hugh was a spy.

‘Have you joined the party?’ I asked.

‘The Communist Party?’ said Dick, surprised. ‘Oh, no. I suppose you could say I’m still a socialist, but I’m nowhere near as left-wing as Freddie.’

‘Do you still see him? What’s he up to?’

‘Occasionally he invites me to some deeply outrageous parties in London. He likes to shock in politics and in other things. How do you find Berlin compared to Paris?’

‘Totally different. It’s disconcerting living in a police state with uniforms everywhere telling everyone what to do. In France no one seemed to obey anyone; here everyone does.’

I grimaced. ‘I was here for Kristallnacht last November. I saw not just windows broken, but Jews badly beaten up, and the state encouraging it. And it just gets worse. In Paris the Cagoulards would start the odd scuffle and sometimes the police would look the other way, but in Berlin it’s much nastier.’ I shuddered. ‘It’s terrifying how this can happen in a country that seems on the surface so civilized.

‘A friend of ours at the university just lost his job. He’s a lecturer in English Literature. He wrote an article about George Bernard Shaw several years ago — I think it was before Hitler had even come to power. A colleague of his sneaked on him: told the Ministry of Propaganda that it was a socialist tract. So Christoph was out, and he can’t get a job anywhere else. He swears the article was nothing about politics at all, just a criticism of St Joan. I looked it up in the Staatsbibliothek. It had gone.’

‘Presumably it would have been worse if he was Jewish?’

‘Much worse.’ I sighed. ‘I do feel as if I am on the diplomatic front line.’

‘And from the diplomatic front line, do you think there will be war?’

‘Probably. The British government has more or less decided it’s inevitable since the Germans took the rest of Czecho in March. The ambassador here still believes in appeasement; he’s desperately trying to find things we can give away to the Germans for more empty promises of peace.’

Nevile Henderson had recovered from his cancer and returned to Berlin as ambassador in February, changing the tone at the embassy and putting Roland in a tricky position. A couple of junior diplomats from the embassy had resigned in protest, but Roland felt his duty was to stay and do what he could to encourage his country to stand up to Germany. And his umbrella remained resolutely in its stand by the front door of our apartment.

‘I agree appeasement hasn’t worked, but it was worth a try,’ Dick said.

‘You think so?’

‘Anything is worth a try if it’s going to stop a war. Now all we can hope for is that we stand firm enough to force Hitler to back down from a war he thinks he can’t win.’

‘The trouble is, he thinks he can win,’ I said. ‘That’s the gossip here. Some of the generals aren’t so sure, but Hitler seems pretty determined. Danzig is next. And then Poland.’

‘So I’ll be wearing a uniform too this time next year,’ said Dick.

‘I fear you will. Probably by Christmas.’

A stray thought struck me unawares. Hugh would have looked very handsome in uniform.

Thirty-Nine

Roland and I had been invited to a reception at the American Embassy. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and we decided to walk from our flat along the edge of the Tiergarten: the embassy was in Pariser Platz right next to the Brandenburg Gate. It had been a warm day, but a gentle breeze of the famous Berliner Luft, the brisk Berlin air, rustled the trees and cooled the temperature. An unseen multitude of birds in the park discussed the day’s events. While the cars still hurtled along the Tiergartenstrasse, the pedestrians seemed less hurried than usual, under the spell of the soothing evening sunshine.

‘I saw Dick Loxton today,’ I said. I thought it best to be open with Roland; I had secrets I needed to keep from him, but the fewer the better.

‘Oh, really? Nice chap. What’s he doing in Germany?’

I explained Dick’s plan to interview Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Roland frowned. ‘Bonhoeffer is definitely persona non grata. He would have been locked up long ago if it wasn’t for his Prussian Junker friends. Hitler is still wary of tussling with them. You should tell Loxton to be very careful.’

‘Too late,’ I said. ‘He’s off to Dresden tomorrow. But I will see him when he comes back here.’

‘I wish him luck,’ said Roland. ‘I doubt very much Bonhoeffer will tell him anything interesting. He won’t want to get arrested himself.’

We walked in silence. Two girls passed us. One of them, a tall woman trailing thick blonde plaits like sledgehammers, flashed her striking blue eyes at Roland, allowing them to linger there before she saw me staring at her.

I glanced at my darkly handsome husband. He was indeed attractive, and as he reached his middle thirties, his attractiveness was, if anything, growing.

And I was impressed with what he was doing in Berlin. He talked a lot about his work with me now. Somehow he managed to tread what seemed an impossible path working for an ambassador hell-bent on grovelling to the Germans, yet still putting forward the revised policy of the British government, which was now to persuade Germany that Britain really, really would stand behind Poland if Germany attacked her, honest.

He was working hard. And his reputation was rising; I knew his colleagues thought a lot of him, as did the diplomats from the other embassies in Berlin. He was going places, my husband, and I would be there to tell the Comintern all about it. At that moment the British were conducting tortuous secret negotiations with Russia to form an alliance against Germany. Being in Berlin, Roland wasn’t directly involved, but he was aware of what was going on, and he found in me a receptive audience for his thoughts on the matter.

Kay told me her bosses were very interested in Roland’s thoughts, reflecting as they did the position of the British officials with whom the Soviet diplomats were negotiating.

I don’t know whether Roland had noticed me noticing the girls noticing him, but he turned to me.

‘You know, Emma, you are looking lovely this evening.’

He had that smile. Roland had many smiles, which had varying degrees of superficiality and charm, but this was my smile. It was just for me.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, blushing. I couldn’t help it. This handsome man genuinely found me attractive. He wasn’t pretending: he meant it.

‘I’m not being silly.’ His fingers reached for mine. I clasped them.

I felt good. I felt happy. I almost felt loved.

I wondered whom Roland was having sex with. Not with me. And not, I thought, with anyone I knew. Berlin differed a little from Paris; diplomats here were more likely to have mistresses among the showgirls and hostesses in all those clubs they frequented, rather than wayward aristocratic ladies or their friends’ wives.

Who knew? Maybe he even paid for it, as I had told him to.

I let his fingers go.

Sex was too important to Roland for him to ignore.

Yet he was a patient man. I knew that his patience was one of the reasons my relationship with him was tolerable.

Whereas there was none between me and my mother; our split was dramatic. She had seen her granddaughter only twice since Caroline had been born. Between the two of us, we managed to ensure that she was in London whenever Roland and I visited Chaddington.

Over the last couple of years, I had learned the insult in Italian — and Spanish and Portuguese for that matter: figlio di puttana. Son of a whore.

Well, I was the daughter of a whore. Why wasn’t there a phrase for that?

I was getting better at being a diplomat’s wife. Lothar had encouraged me to pass on diplomatic gossip, and to be able to do that I needed to cultivate a group of people willing to gossip with me beyond just Kurt. I had built up a group of confidants in Paris, and I was doing well building up a similar crowd in Berlin.

Most diplomats thought it absurd that a twenty-four-year-old girl could have any views on politics worth listening to, but a minority found my bluntness bracing and my unorthodox ideas intriguing. Foolishly, some of them appeared to believe they could trust me with indiscretions that they would never have shared with a fellow diplomat. They could come from any country and be any age: a fifty-five-year-old first secretary from the Brazilian Embassy was an incorrigible gossip about diplomatic life in Berlin, and was also one of my best sources.

I was speaking to him about the scandalous love life of the daughter of a previous American ambassador when I recognized a familiar face.

‘Kurt! How wonderful to see you!’

Kurt clicked his heels and bowed, his familiar smile transforming his stiff demeanour. I introduced him to my Brazilian friend, who did the tactful thing and withdrew to let us talk.

‘Are you on home leave?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no,’ said Kurt. ‘I was transferred back to the Foreign Ministry here in March. Working for Herr Brickendrop, as you English call him so disrespectfully.’

I smiled, recognizing the nickname of the Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, who had earned it in London during his stint as German ambassador there.

‘I haven’t seen you about the place?’

‘I’m not in that kind of department,’ Kurt said. ‘But I wangled an invitation to this evening’s reception in the hope that I would bump into you.’

‘I’m flattered.’

Kurt bowed. ‘It is nice to see you, but I have something rather important to discuss with you.’

‘This is where I have to keep smiling and nodding,’ I said, smiling and nodding, but intrigued.

‘Yes, but not here. Perhaps we could bump into each other in the Tiergarten tomorrow afternoon? Around one o’clock?’

‘The Rose Garden?’

‘That would be perfect. Until tomorrow.’ Kurt bowed, clicked his heels, and withdrew.

It was much nicer hanging around in the Rose Garden with Caroline in June than in November. The giant statue of the Empress Auguste Viktoria looked over the mothers and the nannies and their charges with the benign attentiveness of a headmistress of a small but strict elementary school. Her husband had arguably started the First World War, and there were certainly echoes in the Third Reich of the militarism of Wilhelmine Germany. But in her long Edwardian dress, she seemed a symbol of a more civilized time.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kurt stroll past, enjoying the lunchtime sunshine, puffing on a thin cigar. He noticed me, stopped and raised his hat. ‘Mrs Meeke? How nice to see you! May I join you for a couple of minutes before I return to my office?’

‘Of course you may, Kurt,’ I said, attempting an expression of polite surprise.

He made immediate friends with Caroline.

‘Don’t you miss Paris, Kurt? I do.’

‘Berlin is dreadful. It’s very tough on poor Martine.’ Martine was Kurt’s bubbly French wife. They had been married just over a year.

‘We were at a dinner party last week, and the butler refused to serve one of the other guests! Claimed she was Jewish — he had somehow found out her maiden name was Goldstein. Afterwards our hostess said she couldn’t sack him because he knew things about her.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘She didn’t say. My guess is she’s part-Jewish too.’

‘Why do you put up with it, Kurt?’

Kurt shook his head. He reached down and chucked Caroline’s chin. ‘What choice do I have?’

‘Can’t you resign?’

‘And then what would I do?’ He sighed. ‘I’ve always hated things that are unfair, even as a child. Especially as a child — I drove my parents mad. That’s why I became a lawyer, to sort out all the unfair stuff. And it’s why I became a socialist. Society is unfair. It’s not fair that some people are rich and powerful and some people are poor and starving. At university I learned how to phrase all this in terms of jurisprudence and justice, but, basically, it’s just not fair. It’s wrong.’

‘And yet you ended up working for a Nazi government,’ I said.

Kurt gave me half a smile. ‘There are some little things I can do.’

I understood. ‘What do you have to tell me?’

‘You remember how you passed on my message about your friend Cyril Ashcott in Paris?’

‘I do.’

‘I have a similar request. Once again, I would rather you didn’t tell your husband if you can. From what I know of your current ambassador, he will want to squash what I have to say. Ideally, you should find a way of getting my message directly to the right people in London.’

‘I understand,’ I said. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to do that. It would depend on the nature of the message, but I would find a way.

‘This may shock you. It certainly shocked me. It’s about a country that I know is close to both our hearts.’

‘France?’

‘No.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘Russia.’

Forty

Bernadette, the French babysitter, was due to look after Caroline that afternoon anyway, so I was able to visit the Stabi, as the Staatsbibliothek was affectionately known by those who toiled in her. I had become interested in the nineteenth-century writer Heinrich von Kleist, who had sought solace from a life plan he had drawn up for himself at the age of twenty-one, but from which he had diverged when he had shot himself and his terminally ill girlfriend at the age of thirty-four. I found him fascinating, and his stories wonderful. I had ordered up a biography and a couple of pieces of literary criticism.

I had difficulty concentrating on the words as I turned the pages, one pencil lying across the other on my desk, waiting for Kay to stroll past and spot the signal. My habitual desk was located in one of the many crannies off the large octagonal central reading room, which, while partially hidden, was easy for Kay to pass naturally.

She didn’t come in every day, but she usually visited the library two or three times a week to check on me. Presumably there were other spies she dealt with in Berlin other than just me. I probably had equivalents from other countries — France, maybe, or America.

She strolled past my desk shortly after four. She took a book out from a nearby shelf, and ten minutes later she replaced it. I waited ten minutes and then removed the same book. Inside, I found a scrap of paper with two numbers. I subtracted three from the first number to get that day’s date, and added six to the second number to get eight. Eight o’clock at her flat that evening.

Roland and I were due to see Coriolanus as the guest of an official in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Shakespeare had always been popular in Germany, and in recent years Coriolanus had become the Nazis’ favourite play. All those opportunities for Roman salutes.

I telephoned Roland at the Chancery to tell him that I couldn’t come because I would be out with a friend from the American Women’s Club, and bribed Bernadette to babysit Caroline. Kay had suggested that I join the Women’s Club — there were also a small number of British women members — as a cover for making her acquaintance. They gave occasional literary talks, which I found interesting, as well as the odd concert. I left the teas and bridge to others.

Roland wasn’t happy about me chucking him and his Nazi friend at such short notice, but I told him that was the kind of diplomatic incident he was qualified to deal with. Inconsistency and unpredictability were still my watchwords in my dealings with him.

At five past seven I set off on my roundabout route to Kreuzberg, as certain as I could be that I wasn’t being followed.

‘What have you got for me?’ asked Kay.

‘Russia and Germany are in talks about an alliance.’

‘What?’ Kay frowned. ‘You’re kidding me, Emma. The Russians are negotiating with the British and the French, you know that. Comrade Stalin’s greatest enemy is Hitler. Who told you this?’

‘Kurt Lohmüller. He was a second secretary at the German Embassy in Paris. Now he works for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. He’s reliable. He’s also upset. He can’t believe that the Soviet Union would ally with Germany.’

‘And why does that upset him? Because he’s a Nazi?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think he’s a communist. He’s certainly a socialist. That’s why we know each other. That’s why I trust him.’

‘OK,’ said Kay. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing in this, but I’m going to have to report it to Moscow. Give me the details.’

So I told her what Kurt had told me. That Litvinov, Russia’s Jewish and profoundly anti-Fascist foreign minister, had been sacked at the beginning of May and replaced by Molotov. That Molotov had severe doubts about an alliance with France and Britain, but seemed to like the idea of cooperation with Germany. That the German government believed that they could persuade the Russians to look the other way when they invaded Poland, in return for the Russians helping themselves to Polish territory and maybe the Baltic States.

‘How advanced are these talks?’ Kay asked.

‘They are just at the initial stages, Kurt says.’

‘I can’t imagine Hitler doing a deal with Stalin,’ said Kay.

‘It bothers me more that Stalin would even contemplate doing a deal with Hitler. I mean, Nazi Germany is the enemy! You live here. You see what they do to the Jews. And the communists. They are evil, so much more evil than the capitalist West. The idea that the Soviet Union would overlook Fascist crimes just for a chunk of other countries’ territory fills me with disgust. As it does Kurt. That’s why he told me. He wants me to tell the British government.’

I remembered Kristallnacht. I remembered that boy watching the crowd of thugs kick his mother and his grandfather on the ground.

It was easy enough to hate Fascism when reading The Times in the library at Chaddington. But it was impossible not to loathe Fascism when living in Berlin. It was bad for the British to negotiate with Hitler. For the Russians to do so was to betray the whole point of communism.

‘I’ll check with Moscow first whether you should,’ said Kay. ‘If there’s nothing in this rumour, they may not want you to confuse the British.’

I had known this would have been Kay’s response.

‘I think I’ll do what Kurt asked.’

‘You can’t,’ said Kay. ‘Not without Moscow’s permission. It’s impossible for you or me to have the big picture. We’re individual agents. For world socialism to succeed, there must be discipline. Discipline from people like the both of us.’

‘If it’s true, if the Soviets are doing a deal with the Nazis, then Moscow won’t give me permission.’

‘Of course it’s not true. I strongly advise you do as instructed. Otherwise, Moscow may have to enforce discipline.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

Kay had become a good friend over the last seven months. I trusted her. We had been through a lot together: both loving and then losing Hugh, my using her flat as a rendezvous with Lothar in Paris, and now these sessions where I discussed with her what I had heard from Roland and the diplomatic circuit, and where I passed on the occasional film of documents I had photographed for developing. I didn’t trust Kay in the same way I had trusted Lothar. It was more that, despite our very different backgrounds, I saw in her a kindred spirit.

‘I don’t want to threaten you, Emma. But I do need to tell you about consequences. This is just baloney.’

‘Is it?’

I looked directly at Kay.

‘Is it?’ I repeated.

Kay didn’t answer. She was thinking. Hard.

‘Can you contact Lothar somehow?’ I said. ‘Ask him what he thinks?’

Kay swallowed. ‘Lothar’s dead.’

‘What?’

Kay got up and went to a cupboard next to her empty bookshelf. She extracted a bottle of vodka, grabbed two glasses, and filled each.

She knocked hers back in one. She winced. ‘I learned that in Moscow.’

‘At spy school?’

‘Spy university.’

‘So what about Lothar?’ I said, sipping my own vodka and wincing. I was unused to neat spirits.

Kay collapsed into her armchair, holding on to her glass.

‘You know he was recalled to Moscow last September?’

‘Yes.’

‘He wasn’t the first. He told me three other NKVD illegals that he knew of had been recalled over the previous year. And they had all been arrested when they returned. Lothar knew one of them had been shot for sure; he suspected they all had.’

‘Yet he went anyway?’

Kay sighed and took a gulp of vodka. ‘I tried to persuade him not to go. But he said they were his orders. He had always put his own life behind the cause, and he wasn’t going to change now. He said he knew that one day he would die for world communism.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! Why would they execute him anyway?’

‘Comrade Stalin is sore. You may have read about the show trials of the last few years? Zinoviev, Kamenev, other Trotskyites, the generals? Well, there was a parallel purge of the NKVD. Those are the people you and I work for — the Comintern is nothing any more. There were a couple of executions in Paris when I was there: Trotsky’s son went into a White Russian hospital with appendicitis and never came out, and another guy was found floating in the Seine. Without his head. Stalin is convinced they were all planning to overthrow him, helped by the British. That was why I have been asking you all year for evidence that the British secret service is conspiring against the Politburo. That’s all Moscow is interested in these days.’

‘But there’s nothing there! I keep telling you!’

‘And I keep telling them. But they don’t believe me. And they don’t believe you. Some of them think you are a double agent working for the British.’

‘That’s insane!’

‘It sure is,’ said Kay, staring into her glass.

‘Will they recall you?’ I asked. And execute you too, I could have added.

‘They might. I’m hoping that I’m too unimportant for them to notice. But telling them what you’ve just told me won’t help.’

‘My source is a good one,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. I know that.’

A thought struck me. ‘Do you know Kurt?”

Kay hesitated, and then nodded.

‘In the same way you know me?’

Kay nodded again. ‘You put us on to him. I made contact and Lothar recruited him. Lothar handled him in Paris, and I’ve taken over handling him here in Berlin.’

I had known that Kurt had communist sympathies, but I hadn’t realized they were that strong. As strong as mine.

‘And did he tell you about the Soviet — German talks?’

‘No,’ said Kay. ‘No, he didn’t. Which poses its own problems.’

‘You mean because he told me rather than you?’

‘Precisely. It suggests he doesn’t trust us any more. Which is hardly surprising if the Soviets really are in secret negotiations with the Nazis.’

‘I trusted you,’ I said. But there was regret in my voice. Perhaps I had made a mistake. Had I got Kurt into trouble with the Russians?

But Kay smiled. ‘You did. And I trust you. We both trusted Lothar. But Moscow? I’m not so sure.’

She looked up at me. ‘I had heard about these talks from another source. Not Kurt. I’ve already told Moscow and they denied it. They suggested my other source was a double agent spreading disinformation.’

I considered this. ‘If you tell them that Kurt warned me of these talks, they are not going to be happy, are they? With any of us?’

‘No,’ said Kay. ‘I was thinking that. They will say that you are lying. They’ll say that Kurt has turned to the British by talking to you. And they might decide that I’m working for the British, just because that’s the way they think. And then they will recall me to Moscow and it will all be over.’

She exhaled. ‘I need another drink. Want one?’

She topped up our glasses. My head was beginning to feel woozy — from the vodka, and from what Kay was telling me.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to believe it might be best not to tell Moscow any of this. What do you think?’

‘I think that sounds about right,’ I said carefully.

We were silent. I was trying to make sense of what I had just heard. Lothar’s recall to Moscow to be executed. Kurt working for the Russians just like me. The mistrust that the people in charge in Moscow felt towards all of us: me, Lothar, Kay, Kurt. That made me angry. We were all putting our lives on the line for the cause of the international proletariat, and this was how they thanked us. With distrust. With death.

‘It might be true, mightn’t it?’ I said, quietly.

‘That the Soviets are speaking to the Nazis? Who knows?’ She sighed. ‘Yes, it might be true.’

‘At least Hugh didn’t see any of this.’

Kay winced. An unexpected tear leaked from her left eye. I was surprised; Kay didn’t seem the weeping type. I reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘You miss him, don’t you?’

Kay put her hand to her mouth. ‘It’s not that. I do, but it’s not that.’

‘What is it?’

‘Hugh knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘Knew that the Russians were not to be trusted.’

‘Then why did he decide to spy for them?’

‘He didn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I haven’t been straight with you, Emma,’ Kay said. ‘Hugh didn’t work for us.’

She blinked.

‘He wasn’t a Russian spy.’

Forty-One

I stared at her blankly. That didn’t make any sense. The whole point was that Hugh was a Russian spy. That he had agreed to work for Lothar. That that was why he had denied his communism to me and his friends.

That was why he had been killed.

That was why I had agreed to spy for the Comintern for the last three years.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘I recruited Hugh. I told you that, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘It wasn’t easy, but I persuaded him. I had gotten to know him on that Moscow trip, and he was very taken with the Soviet Union. But he had second thoughts: I think Dick had gotten to him. Dick had a professor at Oxford who was from the Ukraine and told him baloney about famines and the Russians locking up counter-revolutionaries. At least, I thought it was baloney then. But Hugh believed him. And he was reluctant to betray his country.’

I listened. It was possible.

‘So he told me and Lothar he wanted out. He tried to persuade me that I should stop working for Lothar too, but I refused. I was angry with him; we were both angry with each other. Hugh had just asked me to marry him, like I told you, but after he decided to back out, it was over between us. The irony is, a few days later the British killed him anyway.’

She winced. ‘I wish we had had a chance to make up before he died. Although I’m not sure we ever would have.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ I demanded. ‘I would never have started working for you if you had told me.’

‘I know,’ Kay said. ‘That was exactly why I didn’t tell you. I’m a spy. I lie. I lie all the time.’ She looked at me with regret.

I felt an intense surge of fury rise up in my chest. Fury that I had been led to believe a lie about my brother. Fury that when I thought I was walking in his footsteps, he had actually turned around and faced the other way. Fury that Kay hadn’t told me any of this, had manipulated me shamelessly. And Hugh, probably. No doubt she had been sent on that Intourist trip to Moscow to entrap promising young Englishmen, and Hugh had been her victim.

Kay opened up her hands and shrugged. ‘You know why I lied to you. What’s stranger is that I’m telling you the truth now.’

The anger evaporated, or rather it retired, waiting for a new target. Yes, I had been misled. But so had Kay. Both of us had been misused, drawn to betray our countries on the basis of false promises. As had Lothar. Who was now dead.

Hugh had seen sense, right at the end.

I had a thought. ‘Was it the Russians who killed Hugh? When they realized he wasn’t going to spy for them?’

‘No,’ said Kay. ‘It was the British. Lothar told me.’

‘And you trust him?’

‘Yes, I trust him. He and I were very close.’

I understood. Oddly, my first response was a flash of jealousy: Lothar was an attractive man, and he had earned my trust. Then suspicion: had she been Lothar’s lover and Hugh’s at the same time?

Kay read my expression. ‘It was in Paris. Just for a few months and just before he was recalled. I barely knew Lothar when Hugh and I were together.’

Everything was falling apart. Everything.

‘So what do we do now?’ I said.

Kay picked up the bottle of vodka. ‘We deal with it the Russian way. We get plastered.’

I didn’t get home till after midnight.

Roland had waited up for me, and he was furious. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I told you,’ I said, kicking off my shoes. ‘I’ve been to see an American friend.’

‘Oh yes? And what was her name?’

I had no idea what her name was. I tried to scramble my brain into some kind of order. Nothing.

‘Frances,’ I said.

Roland frowned. ‘Wasn’t Frances the name of your American friend in Paris?’

Oops. I nodded wisely. ‘Yes. So’s this one. It turns out heaps of American women are called Frances.’

‘Are you tight?’

I nodded again. ‘Me and... Frances had a little drink. To celebrate.’

‘Celebrate what?’

Roland’s tone was sharp. He was rarely angry with me; that wasn’t the way we behaved to each other.

I didn’t know what we had been celebrating, and I couldn’t be bothered to make something up.

‘Don’t be so bloody, Roland!’

He opened his mouth to say something, and thought better of it, turning away from me. I stumbled off to our bedroom and wriggled sloppily out of my clothes. There was a knock at the door.

‘Yes?’

Roland’s anger was gone, replaced with what looked like fear.

‘Emma?’

I tried to focus on him, but the room was spinning. He was spinning.

‘Yes?’

‘I thought they’d got you. I thought the Gestapo had got you.’

Forty-Two

June 1979, West Berlin

‘So Hugh never spied for the Russians after all?’ Phil stared at his grandmother wide-eyed over their empty lunch plates. The café was bustling.

‘No. He didn’t.’

‘I’m sort of glad to hear that.’

‘You might be now. I was furious. I had lived three years of my life on the understanding that my brother had worked for the Comintern. I had become a traitor to my country because I thought he had been. And he hadn’t.’ Emma shook her head. ‘It was all a lie.’

Phil winced. ‘Yes, I can see that must have been a bit upsetting.’

‘More than a bit, Philip.’

Phil drained his beer, thinking through what he had just heard.

‘So, who did kill Hugh?’

Emma took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know. But I mean to find out.’

After lunch, Emma suggested they take a swift look at the Hollow-Tooth Church just up the street, before going to the British Airways office. It was a unique site, encapsulating the drama of West Berlin over the previous ninety years. The tower itself exuded the late-nineteenth-century assertiveness of the Wilhelmine Empire, ostentatious brickwork on the outside, dramatic murals decorated with gold leaf on the inside. Yet its tower was broken, snapped in two by the war, and the brickwork was blackened by fire. And next to it was the modern, geometric hall, a concrete skeleton with small glass scales.

‘What do you think, Philip?’ asked Emma.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Phil. ‘It’s ugly, but there’s something striking about it.’

They entered the hall. Phil corrected himself. ‘No. It’s beautiful.’

Inside, the brutal concrete has been transformed into a delicate blue net of stained glass, illuminating the vast, simple interior, all focused on a dramatic golden figure of Christ on the cross suspended above the altar.

They sat down. Phil studied the glass around him, noticing the little patches of red, green and yellow glass dotted amongst the blue. He said a quick, silent prayer along the lines of: ‘Please God, get me out of this alive.’ His grandmother, he knew, was an atheist. Was she a communist still? After what she had just told him, he wasn’t sure.

He took advantage of the peace to try to process what he had just heard, to see if it made sense of what had happened in Annecy. Emma had been betrayed: not just by Roland, but also by Kay and Lothar and the Russian communists. So had her brother Hugh, probably. In turn, Emma had betrayed her country and her husband. It was clear she had unfinished business from that time. It was also clear that was why she and Phil were in West Berlin. Now it seemed that Lothar was dead, it was not clear what that unfinished business was.

It wasn’t unfinished business just for Emma. There was also the mole that Swann was trying to track down. And it was no doubt the unfinished business that the KGB or the Stasi were trying to finish to their own satisfaction.

Finding the mole was going to be a lot harder now they knew Lothar was no longer alive. But at least now Phil would be able to tell Swann where Lothar was. Six feet under the ground somewhere in Moscow.

A small blonde girl walked down the aisle and sat in a chair near the front of the hall. It looked just like Heike. It was Heike.

Phil’s heart beat fast.

‘Grams? Will you excuse me a sec?’

Phil walked as coolly and casually as he could down the aisle. ‘Heike?’

She turned and then smiled her brilliant smile, her blue eyes sparkling. ‘Phil! I’m so pleased to see you.’

‘May I join you?’

‘Of course.’ She shuffled along to the next chair to make room for him.

‘What are you doing in Berlin?’

‘I was going to travel south from Paris to Avignon. But then I decided to see a bit of my own country. I came to Berlin with my parents as a kid, but I decided to take another look. So here I am. What have you been up to? Did you go to the lake?’

‘We did.’

‘How was it?’

Phil desperately wanted to tell Heike all about it, but he was aware of his grandmother a few rows behind, no doubt watching them closely.

‘It was disappointing,’ he said.

‘Sorry to hear that. What do you think of Berlin?’

‘Fascinating. We saw the Wall this morning. It’s seriously weird.’

‘I know. It’s even weirder if you’re German. Knowing that the people on the other side of it are just like you, but are only there because of an accident of geography. And of history, I suppose. Whether they were liberated by the Russians, or the British and Americans.’

Phil thought the use of the word ‘liberated’ was interesting. The Germans had lost the war: weren’t they ‘occupied’?

‘Let me introduce you to my grandmother. Just don’t tell her I said anything to you about her or why we’re here.’

‘Have you figured out why you’re here?’

Phil shook his head. ‘Not really. I’m getting a few more clues, but it’s still a mystery.’

He led Heike back and introduced her to Emma. Fortunately, his grandmother didn’t act weird, but gave Heike one of her charming smiles.

‘What a coincidence!’ she said.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Heike. ‘Extraordinary.’

Emma raised her eyebrows.

Heike noticed, and blushed. She glanced at Phil. ‘OK. I admit it. I was rather hoping I would bump into your grandson.’

‘Is that why you came to Berlin?’ Phil blurted, astonished.

Heike looked sheepish. ‘I enjoyed your company. After that arsehole of a boyfriend. Oh! Pardon my language, Frau... I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

Emma grinned. ‘It’s Meeke. But please call me Emma. I think your interest in my grandson shows extreme good taste.’

Heike smiled with shame and relief. ‘Yes. Well. I’m really embarrassed, now. My plan was to play it cool.’

Emma laughed. ‘I too tend to embarrass easily. Embarrass other people, that is. It’s one of my sins, don’t you agree, Philip?’

‘I do agree.’

‘We’re just on our way to the travel agent to get Philip his flight back to London. Would you join us for a cup of coffee?’

‘I’d love to,’ said Heike.

They dropped into a café on Tauentzienstrasse, one of the streets leading from the Hollow-Tooth Church. Heike did an excellent job of charming Emma, and put up with Emma’s interrogation of her about Brunswick and her engineering course at Bonn University. Phil was not at all surprised by how much Emma knew about civil engineering, but it delighted Heike.

Phil arranged to meet Heike at seven that evening, in front of the Hollow-Tooth church.

‘What a charming girl,’ said Emma as they parted from Heike. ‘And she’s very pretty.’

‘I know,’ said Phil, grinning with pleasure. ‘I can’t understand what she sees in me.’

‘No,’ said Emma, frowning.

Jesus! thought Phil. Sometimes his grandmother could be so blunt. But he could handle it. He was just looking forward to seeing Heike that evening.

‘You haven’t told Heike anything about why we are here, have you, Philip?’

‘Oh, no, Grams. Certainly not.’

Phil felt slightly guilty as he said this. He was no doubt misleading his grandmother, but compared to the wholesale deceit she was describing to him, it was nothing.

And besides, what threat could a twenty-year-old engineering student pose?

Forty-Three

They bought Phil’s one-way British Airways ticket back to London and returned to the Bristol. Emma had a word with the concierge about finding a way to get the TR6 back to England, now Phil wouldn’t be around to drive it. The concierge seemed undaunted by the task, and promised to work on it.

There was a message in reception that someone was waiting for them in the bar.

Phil was almost expecting to see Dick, but the man who climbed to his feet when he saw Emma entering the room was much larger. His thinning grey hair was brushed back above a fleshy face and impressive jowls. A three-piece suit fitted snugly over a large stomach, a gold watch chain adorning the waistcoat and a patterned pink silk handkerchief brightening up the jacket. Two pink spots flashed on the man’s cheeks as he grinned.

‘Emma!’

‘Well, Freddie. What a surprise!’

‘A nice one, I trust?’

‘Oh, a very nice one. This is my grandson, Philip.’

The large man ordered gin and tonics for Phil and himself. Emma stuck to sparkling water.

‘Since I found myself in Berlin, I thought I’d drop in on you.’

‘Found yourself?’ said Emma. ‘You don’t expect me to believe this is a coincidence?’

Freddie laughed. He had a deep, fruity voice, with just a hint of Irish about it.

‘I would travel the length and breadth of Europe for you, Emma.’

‘I’m flattered. How are you finding the opposition benches? What is it, a month now?’

‘I can’t stand that bloody woman,’ muttered Freddie. ‘I do hope you didn’t vote for her.’

‘Of course not. But I fear Philip did.’

Freddie looked at Phil. ‘I can’t understand the young people of today. What happened to the hippies and free love? What was wrong with that? Sounded fun to me. Now look at you — short hair and thin ties, and you all vote for Margaret Thatcher.’

Phil quite enjoyed being teased by an MP. ‘Someone’s got to drag our country out of the mess it’s in. I’m comfortable to stand by my vote.’

‘Leave my grandson alone,’ said Emma. ‘If he wants to vote like a moron, I’ll fight to the death for his right to do it.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Freddie, raising his glass. He examined Phil. ‘I say. He does look rather a lot like Hugh, doesn’t he? A good-looking lad too.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Emma, with a small smile of affection. ‘I’m glad you see it as well.’

‘I never knew Hugh existed, that I had a great-uncle at all,’ said Phil, ignoring the attached compliment. ‘Grams has been telling me about him; I think I would have liked him. You were friends at school?’

‘Yes. We were rebels together. School was quite barbaric in those days. Beating and buggery. We tried to inject a bit of civilization. It’s all changed now, thank God. Where did you go?’

‘The local grammar school,’ said Phil.

This seemed to temporarily nonplus Freddie. ‘Ah. Jolly good too. Anyway, Hugh and I published a little magazine. Complaining about the patriotic teaching of history, compulsory Officer Training Corps, precocious criticism of modern poetry and art. It was banned eventually, much to our joy. Then we both went up to Cambridge together: he went to King’s, I went to Trinity.’

‘And you both became communists?’

Freddie glanced at Emma.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘He needed to know. I needed to tell him.’

Freddie hesitated, but decided to answer Phil’s question. ‘Yes, we did. There was a lot of it about then. And it made some sense. Capitalism had failed the working classes. As far as I am concerned, it still has. I joined the party, and Hugh chose not to. As a matter of fact, it looked as if he was drifting away from communism altogether just before he died.’

It was interesting to Phil to see how Freddie was corroborating Emma’s story.

‘It’s always a tragedy when a young person dies,’ Freddie went on. ‘But it was a damn shame about Hugh. He was a brilliant man. He could have been a great leader of something. Business, maybe, or even politics. He was applying for the Foreign Office, but he was always a man of independent thought, not someone else’s mouthpiece like a diplomat has to be.’

He caught Emma’s eye. ‘Here’s to Hugh.’

‘To Hugh,’ she said, sipping her water, and Phil raised his glass.

‘We saw Dick in Paris,’ said Emma. ‘I hadn’t seen him for years.’

‘I bump into him occasionally,’ said Freddie. ‘Or I did when I was a minister in the MOD. Dick does a lot of work for defence contractors all around the world. He’s well thought of: he’s rather good at the management consultancy, which surprises me a little. He was always a clever chap, but I thought writing was more his thing.’

Emma winced. ‘Did you ever read his novel?’

‘Yes,’ said Freddie with a grin. ‘Enough said.’ He sipped his gin. ‘And you saw Cyril?’

‘Yes. I wanted to show Philip the embassy. You have been checking up on me.’ Emma hesitated. ‘Did you know Cyril? Back then?’

‘Oh, you mean because he and I are confirmed bachelors? Or he was then.’

‘Yes. I rather thought you all knew each other.’

‘We did bump into each other once or twice,’ Freddie admitted. ‘Cyril was a good-looking young man. Always elegant.’

‘Did you hear about his indiscretions in Paris?’

‘Darling, we all have indiscretions in Paris. That’s what Paris is for. Berlin too, in the good old days before the Nazis.’

‘These were spectacularly indiscreet indiscretions.’

‘Blackmail?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘The Russians?’

‘The Germans.’

Freddie winced. ‘I’m surprised Cyril recovered from that.’

‘I believe he redeemed himself during the war,’ said Emma.

‘Good for him,’ said Freddie. ‘We all do our best to redeem ourselves. I know I have.’ He looked at Emma closely. ‘Is that what you are trying to do now? Redeem yourself?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Emma.

Freddie didn’t answer the question. ‘I heard about Kurt Lohmüller,’ he said.

‘Kurt?’ Emma was watchful.

‘He died,’ said Freddie. ‘In Annecy. After you came to see me in London to talk about old times before the war. And after you set off to Europe with young Philip here.’

‘Have you been sent here to ask me about him?’

‘I have.’

‘By whom? MI6? C?’

Freddie grimaced, glancing at Phil. Emma was clearly talking secret stuff Phil wasn’t supposed to be hearing. Freddie decided to ignore her question.

‘The French police don’t know about you. Yet.’

‘Will they find out?’

‘That depends. Lohmüller was found shot. With a KGB agent, also killed. Were you there? An Englishwoman and a young Englishman were seen the day before, asking about him.’

‘We did go and see him. We asked him where we could find Kay Lesser in East Berlin.’

‘Did he tell you?’

‘He was going to. But he never got the chance.’

‘Because he was shot?’

Emma didn’t answer.

‘Did you see him the day he was killed? You know he was killed?’

‘I can’t talk about it.’

‘Why not?’ said Freddie.

‘Because it’s not wise.’

‘What about you?’ Freddie asked Phil.

‘Same here,’ said Phil.

‘I see.’ Freddie sipped his drink. ‘You realize you may have to tell me? Or someone from MI6? Or the French police?’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘We don’t. We won’t.’

Freddie raised his eyebrows at Phil.

‘And neither will I,’ he said, surprised at his own conviction.

Freddie considered this information, but decided not to push them further. ‘Next stop East Berlin to look for Kay Lesser?’

‘For me,’ said Emma. ‘Philip is flying back tomorrow.’

‘Is East Berlin safe?’

‘Probably not. That’s why Philip is leaving me.’

‘You are a brave woman,’ said Freddie. ‘You always were.’

Emma went up to her room to rest. Phil opened War and Peace in his own bedroom, but he found it impossible to concentrate on the doings of Pierre, Prince Andrei and Natasha.

He had questions for his grandmother.

He gave her an hour and then walked down the hotel corridor to Emma’s room, and knocked. She let him in.

Phil sat in one of two armchairs in the room; Emma took the other. Outside, traffic on the Kurfürstendamm rumbled.

‘Thank you for backing me up with Freddie,’ she said. ‘It was good of you not to tell him what you know.’

Phil smiled. ‘If you can be stubborn, I can be stubborn too.’

‘You are my grandson.’ There was a note of pride in Emma’s voice, which Phil rather liked.

‘Was Freddie a spy for the Russians like you?’ he asked. ‘And how come he is an MP?’

‘I don’t think he ever was a spy,’ said Emma. ‘Although I can’t be certain. The NKVD made sure that their spies didn’t know of each other’s existence. We never met each other, at least not knowingly. Kay broke all the rules when she told me about Kurt.’

‘So he could have been a spy?’

‘I do know Freddie was a friend of Guy Burgess. And he knew Kim Philby a bit too, at Cambridge; they were both Apostles as well. When Burgess and Maclean fled to Russia, Freddie helped MI5. I think he helped them with Philby. Redeemed himself, as he put it.’

‘I get confused,’ Phil said. ‘What’s the difference between MI5 and MI6?’

‘MI6 is abroad — they do the spying. MI5 is domestic — they find enemies’ spies.’

‘And when the enemy’s spies turn out to be your spies?’

‘Turf war,’ said Emma. ‘It was because I knew that Freddie was so well plugged into the intelligence services that I spoke to him earlier this year.’

‘About Lothar?’

‘About my time in Paris and Berlin. He wasn’t particularly helpful.’

‘Who’s “C”?’ Phil asked. ‘The head of MI6? Or MI5?’ It sounded rather like a cross between Ian Fleming’s ‘M’ and John le Carré’s ‘Control’.

‘MI6. I got the definite impression that Freddie had been talking to C. Which surprises me, a little.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t understand why MI6 would care so much what I was up to.’

So it was Freddie who had tipped off Swann! That was why Swann had approached Phil. Freddie had known what Emma was up to all along.

Phil knew why MI6 cared.

‘You’re definitely going to East Berlin tomorrow, Grams?’

‘Yes. I just got a message from Herr Pöpel; Kay Ortmann lives in Prenzlauer Berg. I’ve got her address.’

‘And you’re sure I can’t come with you? I’m worried about you.’

‘Quite sure, Philip.’

Phil took a deep breath. No point in arguing.

‘There’s a chance I might not see you again, Grams. After tomorrow. What with one thing and another.’ Like you either might die of a brain tumour or the KGB might blow your brains out.

Emma reached out for his hand. ‘Yes, I know, darling. It’s been wonderful travelling with you this last week. I don’t know how I can thank you. Actually, I did have a little idea. I’ve written a letter to my lawyer telling him that I want you to have the TR6 when I’m gone.’

Phil grinned. The thought made him sad, but happy at the same time. He wanted Emma to see his happiness.

‘Dad won’t like that,’ he said.

Emma laughed. ‘I know.’

‘Grams. I know you want to be careful about what you tell me, and I understand why. But you have to finish your story. There’s so much I don’t know, stuff that someone needs to know once you’re gone. Like did you continue spying for the Russians? What happened between you and Grandpa?’ And why we are looking for Kay, he wanted to add, but didn’t. He understood now she wasn’t going to tell him that.

And besides. He had a little plan.

Emma studied her grandson for a moment. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll finish the story. But promise me you won’t tell anyone else about it. And certainly not your friend Heike.’

‘I promise,’ said Phil.

Forty-Four

June 1939, Berlin

I got to the restaurant first. It was the Taverne, a perpetually crowded Italian restaurant in Kurfürstenstrasse, near the Memorial Church. Ostensibly Italian, but actually it was run by a large German man and his small Belgian wife. It was late, nearly ten o’clock, and I recognized a couple of the American journalists who used to gather there after they had filed their copy to gossip. Gossip in which I had occasionally joined.

I had told Roland where I was going, and whom I was meeting. But I hadn’t told my husband what I was going to say.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ said Dick. ‘My train just got in half an hour ago. They are not always as punctual as they claim, these Germans, are they?’

‘The economy is at full war production, and troops are shuttling around everywhere,’ I said. ‘Even the famous Deutsche Reichsbahn is stretched.’

We ordered veal, and a bottle of Italian wine.

‘How was your pastor?’ I asked.

‘Wary about any direct questions to do with present-day Germany. But fascinating about his book: The Cost of Discipleship. You should read it. I only just caught him — turns out he is on his way to America next week.’

Dick talked animatedly about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the article he was going to write about him.

‘I didn’t get a chance to tell you, because you had already left,’ I said. ‘Roland warned me you should be careful. Bonhoeffer is on the Gestapo’s naughty list.’

‘I didn’t see any signs of trouble,’ said Dick. ‘As I say, he was very circumspect. Looks like I made it out safely. My train to the Hook of Holland is tomorrow morning.’

I sipped my red wine. It was good. The journalists’ Stammtisch was filling up, and the noise levels were rising. I recognized Sigrid Schulz from the Chicago Tribune, Bill Shirer from CBS and Selkirk Panton from the Daily Express, as well as one of the editors of a German newspaper. Sigrid caught my eye and gave me a quick smile. I liked her; ordinarily I would have introduced Dick to the journalists, people were always coming and going at their table eager to share gossip, but I wanted him to myself that evening.

I glanced over my shoulder, the classic deutsche Blick, checking for others overhearing us. The tables were crammed close together, but the noise level was high. I knew the Gestapo employed lip-readers, presumably even lip-readers who spoke English, but I doubted they would be bothered to go to that effort for Dick and me. There was something I had to tell him.

‘You know Kay told me Hugh was a Russian spy?’

‘In Paris? I remember. I found it hard to believe,’ Dick said.

‘It turns out you were right. Or half right.’

‘What do you mean?’ Dick leaned forward, interested. I paused for the waiter to serve us our veal.

‘Hugh did agree to spy for the Russians, just like Kay said. Or the Comintern. That was why he applied for the Foreign Office. And that was why he told everyone he had changed his mind about communism. He didn’t want to arouse suspicions.’

‘Right.’

‘But the thing is, Hugh really did change his mind. Just before he died. And Kay thinks you and your Ukrainian tutor persuaded him.’

‘Really?’

‘Kay and Hugh had a big fight about it. Hugh wanted to stop working for the Comintern, and he wanted her to give up as well.’

‘But she wouldn’t?’

‘No.’

‘And then Hugh died?’

‘Yes.’

Dick’s food lay untouched in front of him. He attacked it as he considered what I had been saying. He looked irritated. ‘I told you I never thought he could be a Russian spy.’

‘And I thought he was,’ I said. And became one myself, I wanted to add, but didn’t. ‘It’s awful. I thought I knew Hugh so well, but even now I’m struggling to discover who he really was. Especially around the time he died.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Dick. ‘It’s very frustrating. If what you say is true, we were both wrong. The poor chap must have been so confused. I wish he had confided in me. Or you.’

‘He confided in Kay,’ I said.

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I saw Kay recently. She’s moved to Berlin.’

‘I say,’ Dick said. ‘You never took her up on her offer, did you?’

‘To work for the Russians? Oh no, of course not. Although I did consider it back in Paris when I was so angry.’ I had no intention of telling Dick the truth: that I was working for the Russians and had been for three years. He didn’t need to know that; no one did.

And I didn’t want to lose him as a friend. If he hadn’t approved of Hugh becoming a spy, he certainly wouldn’t approve of me doing so too.

‘But you still see her?’

‘I like her,’ I said. ‘I was unsure of her at first, as you may remember. But in some ways she is a bit like me. And we both loved Hugh.’

‘Does she still think Hugh was killed by the British secret service?’

‘She does.’

‘Couldn’t it have been the Russians? I mean, if he changed his mind about spying for them...’

‘I know. I asked about that. But she insisted they didn’t.’

‘And you believe her?’

‘I think so. She was very frank with me about everything else. I think she would have told me.’

The alternative was too horrible to contemplate. Not only that both Kay and Lothar had lied to me. Not only that I had spent three years spying for Russia on the assumption that my brother had too.

But that I had spied for the man who had killed him.

A man who was now dead. Shot by the people he worked for.

I wanted to believe Kay. But how could I be certain she was telling me the truth this time?

‘Do you think it was just an accident after all?’ Dick said.

‘Maybe it was. I suppose I’ll never know for sure.’

Dick shook his head. ‘This is all very messy. Poor Hugh.’

‘It is. I wish he were here so we could talk to him about it.’

Dick nodded. ‘So do I.’

‘Where are you staying?’ I asked after Dick had paid the bill.

‘A little hotel in Augsburger Strasse. I think it’s quite close.’

‘It is,’ I said. ‘Walking distance. I could walk with you. I’ve got a favour to ask.’

‘Certainly.’

Dick had come to the Taverne straight from the station, so he retrieved his small suitcase from the cloakroom and we headed out into the night. It was spitting lightly, but the cool air felt good after the crowded restaurant.

He lit his pipe. ‘What’s your favour?’

‘I have a message I would like you to deliver. To a man named Heaton-Smith. This is his number.’

I reeled off the Sloane telephone number Heaton-Smith had given me in Paris, which I still remembered three years on.

‘Can you memorize that?’ I said. ‘Don’t write it down.’

He repeated it a couple of times. In those days phone numbers were just the exchange plus four digits.

‘Make sure you speak to him face to face,’ I said.

‘And what do I tell him?’

‘Give him this.’ I handed Dick a sealed envelope.

Dick looked at it. It was unaddressed.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, I might be searched.’

‘When?’

‘At the Dutch border. They didn’t search me coming into the country, but you never know. They may well know I spoke to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Perhaps you should just tell me what’s in it, and I can tell this Heaton-Smith?’

I felt such an idiot. It was basic tradecraft. Three years of meeting with Lothar and now Kay should have made me more careful.

‘Of course. You’re right. Give me that back.’ Dick handed the envelope back to me and I stuffed it in my handbag.

We were on a side street not far from Augsburger Strasse. ‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell you. It’s about Russia. And Germany.’

I repeated what Kurt had told me. I didn’t give Dick Kurt’s name, but I did tell him to let Heaton-Smith know my information came from the same source as Paris. Heaton-Smith would realize that meant Kurt.

Dick listened closely, taking it all in. At the end, I asked him to repeat the telephone number, which he did correctly.

‘Why don’t you tell your husband?’ he asked. ‘Surely this is something he would be very interested in.’

‘Because he would have to tell the ambassador,’ I replied. ‘And Henderson will want to either suppress the information or pooh-pooh it, and Roland will have to follow his ambassador’s instructions. Whereas Heaton-Smith will know whom to tell who will actually do something. He has proved himself before.’

We arrived at Dick’s hotel.

I didn’t want to let him go. I was leading a ridiculous life with a husband whom I didn’t love and who had betrayed me horribly. I was betraying my own country for a group of people whom I had trusted and shouldn’t have.

I still didn’t know what had happened to Hugh and why.

There was no one I could trust. Kay perhaps, but who was to say that Kay wasn’t lying to me now?

Just the tall man with the kind blue eyes standing in front of me now.

I threw myself into his arms. He pulled me close and squeezed. It was immensely comforting.

I looked up into his face, which was full of concern for me.

I wanted to kiss him. But what if he rejected me? I couldn’t bear that. My life was too complicated as it was.

So I pushed myself away from him, turned and walked rapidly up the street.

It had felt so good, those few seconds when I had been enveloped in his arms. It was years since anyone had held me like that, and that had been Roland.

I shuddered.

Why should I let my marriage to Roland stop me from having the comfort I craved? Even the love I craved?

Dick might reject me. But I would take the risk. I had to take the risk.

I took several deep breaths and turned back towards the hotel.

Three men in raincoats were walking purposefully into the building. I had been in Berlin long enough to know who they were.

Gestapo.

I stepped away from the yellow glow of the lamppost into the shadow of a doorway, and watched.

A couple of minutes later, the three men appeared. One was carrying a suitcase, the other two leading someone between them. I couldn’t see clearly, but I could tell from his height and build and the shape of his hat who the man they were escorting was.

Dick.

Forty-Five

I waved down a passing taxi and went straight home. Roland had gone to bed, but I woke him.

‘Emma! What’s the matter?’

‘It’s Dick. He’s been arrested.’

‘By the Gestapo?’

‘Looked like it. Men in raincoats.’

‘Did he see Bonhoeffer?’

‘Yes, he did.’

Roland swung his legs out of bed and quickly flung on some clothes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Gestapo headquarters.’

I changed into my pyjamas, but I couldn’t go to sleep. Usually it was the consul’s job to spring errant Englishmen from jail, not the first secretary’s, but I knew Roland was formidable with bureaucrats, even Nazi ones.

But why had Dick been arrested? Presumably it had been because of his interview with the clergyman. Was there any way that the Gestapo could have suspected what I had told him about Kurt and the German talks with Russia? Were they on to Kurt too?

If they had somehow got wind of that, then they would beat it out of Dick, or at least try to. I was confident Dick would keep quiet, at least for a while. Although the Gestapo’s interrogation methods were notorious in Germany, Dick was a British citizen, and Roland would be there to protect him.

I was so glad that Dick had refused to accept the envelope I had thrust in his hands. Whatever reason the Gestapo had for arresting him, they would have been sure to read any correspondence on his person and to have been very interested in the contents. Not only that, but it would also have immediately condemned Dick as a spy. And me, for that matter.

It had been about midnight when I returned home and woke Roland. It was four fifteen when the telephone rang.

‘It’s me,’ said Roland. He sounded exhausted.

‘How is he?’ I asked.

‘He’s all right. They haven’t touched him. I think they just wanted to put the wind up him for meeting Bonhoeffer. To discourage other English journalists from coming here and trying similar tricks. They didn’t expect anyone from the embassy to turn up so quickly.’

‘Have they released him?’

‘They will. I’m waiting for him now. Don’t worry — I won’t leave here without him. I’ve negotiated that we go straight to Zoo Station from here. I’ll put him on the train to the Hook of Holland.’

‘Thank God for that.’

Three days later, I received a telegram from Dick from London: FLOWERS DELIVERED SAFELY. PLS THK ROLAND. DICK.

I thanked Roland.

Two months after that, on 23 August, the Molotov — Ribbentrop Pact was signed. Initially it seemed that the pact simply pledged that the Soviet Union and Germany would not attack each other. On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. On 4 September, Roland, Caroline, I and the rest of the embassy staff left Berlin by train to the Hague, and from there we were packed on to a boat to Gravesend and another train to Victoria.

On 17 September, as anticipated in a secret protocol of the pact, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland and grabbed a large chunk of their territory. On 30 November Russia attacked Finland, and in June 1940 she invaded Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

As Kurt had warned me, the Soviet Union had teamed up with the Nazis to carve up north-eastern Europe, and everything I had done for them over the last three years was betrayed.

Forty-Six

September 1939, London

Roland, Caroline and I took up residence in my family’s town house in Mayfair; Mama had scarpered to Devon. A heady mixture of fear, panic and excitement overcame London. The population was diligent in taping up windows, digging up parks, carrying around gas masks and preparing for the hail of bombs that never came. Children were carried off to the countryside and soldiers were transported in aimless circles around the country. Newspapers were read from cover to cover and every story was discussed at breakfast tables, St James’s clubs and pubs. The blackout was imposed and London’s first casualties of the war were sustained: cars pranged into lampposts and pedestrians flattened.

Kay had given me instructions to meet a new handler in London involving park benches in Regent’s Park, but I had no intention of following them, and Kay knew it. She said that the London branch of the Comintern was a shambles since all its controllers had been recalled to Moscow to be liquidated. I had continued to give Kay snippets of embassy gossip in Berlin, mostly relating to Britain’s pointless negotiations with Russia. We agreed it was best for the long-term health of both of us if Moscow continued to see me providing Kay with information, and Kay passing it on.

Kay was in real danger of being recalled to Moscow and suffering Lothar’s fate. Since meeting Lothar in the Bois de Boulogne, I had been very aware of the danger to myself from the British secret service and even the French and German authorities. To them was now added the Comintern, or rather the NKVD, the very people for whom I was doing all this.

After what I had learned about Hugh and Lothar, and following the signature of the Molotov — Ribbentrop pact, I was finished with spying for Russia. I knew it and Kay knew it, but neither of us said anything about it. War was coming, and with it, my time in Berlin would come to a natural end. What Kay would do, I didn’t know and we didn’t discuss.

I was looking forward to returning to England for many reasons. It was only when I arrived in London that I realized which was the most pressing. To see Dick again.

We had corresponded after his return, but only a few times, and our letters were friendly but more restrained than I would have liked. Dick had attempted to join the RAF but failed, due to some minor problem with his eyes. His next stop was the army, but he had received a summons from the new Ministry of Information, where a clique of his friends was gathering. He wrote to me that he was in two minds about accepting it. On the one hand, he wanted to fight for his country against the Nazis. On the other, he thought of himself as a pacifist who believed war was wrong. Fighting with words was a compromise. I could tell he wasn’t really happy about it, though.

I read and reread his letters to me in Berlin, until I knew every word by heart. They were full of friendship and affection.

By now I knew I wanted more.

The day after we arrived at the house in Hill Street, I sent him a note asking him to telephone me. This he did. We arranged to have dinner the following week at Simpson’s in Piccadilly.

I didn’t tell Roland.

Dick seemed pleased to see me, and in good spirits all around. He described how he had passed my message on to the mysterious Mr Heaton-Smith at a pub in Pimlico. Heaton-Smith had been duly grateful, but we agreed it didn’t seem to have made a blind bit of difference to Britain’s diplomacy. It probably hadn’t been believed. After subtle probing on my part, Roland had revealed that the Foreign Office hadn’t received any warning as early as the end of June when Dick had met the MI6 officer. I wondered whether I should have told Roland myself; perhaps he could have found a way around the ambassador after all. But then Kurt had made me promise I wouldn’t, and, strangely, I trusted that German diplomat more than the British.

Dick and I agreed that the Soviet Union had proved herself utterly untrustworthy.

Dick regaled me with stories of the hapless Ministry of Information, which was based at the University of London in Bloomsbury. He mentioned a number of names I had heard of, writers whose books I had read or whom I had seen reviewed. But I could tell there was something wrong.

‘You would like to be fighting, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dick. ‘Maybe. I am jealous of all those other fellows who are putting on uniforms and square bashing. Oh, I know war isn’t glorious. But this time, we are truly fighting against evil. Or they are. I’m coming up with slogans about potatoes.’

‘Can you leave?’

‘Not right away. I’ll give it a couple of months and see.’

Simpson’s was crowded, and the menu was still pretty good. We had both ordered partridge: it was shooting season in the fields and copses of the country’s estates, estates like Chaddington, even if it wasn’t in France. Yet.

‘It’s good to see you,’ Dick said.

The time had come to say what I was going to say. I assumed lots of women, married women perhaps especially, would know exactly how to proposition a young man. I was sure that my mother, for example, was an expert at it. But if there were such things as ‘feminine wiles’, I didn’t have any.

‘Dick?’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you think we could find a hotel after dinner?’

I had expected one of two reactions. A smile of happiness, perhaps a complicit good-humoured laugh, and then an equally good-humoured discussion of the practicalities. That’s what I had hoped for, and what over the previous week I had persuaded myself I was most likely to receive. But I also knew there was a chance of a kind, gentle but firm rejection. If that happened, I would accept it, and Dick and I would remain good friends.

What I got was something quite different. A look combining shock and surprise. Dick’s mouth opened, and then he closed it again.

I felt instantly humiliated. What had I been thinking? I had assumed that Dick would be a man of the world like all the other men of the world I knew, or at least like Roland.

But Dick wasn’t a man of the world.

‘But I thought...’ he stammered. ‘I thought you had decided to stay with Roland. That’s what you told me in Berlin.’

‘Yes, I know. And I have. But... It seemed... Everyone else...’ I was floundering badly.

‘Oh, Emma. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

‘No, it’s I who should be sorry.’

‘Emma, I’m engaged.’

‘Engaged? To be married? To whom?’ This was an eventuality that hadn’t occurred to me.

‘To Frances.’

‘Frances? American Frances? The one I introduced you to in Paris?’

‘That’s right. We’ve been writing to each other. She came over here for the summer to stay with an aunt.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m telling you now.’

‘But why not before?’

‘We only got engaged last week. It was either that or she was going to have to go back to Philadelphia.’

‘But... Oh! I’ve made such a chump of myself!’

‘No, you haven’t. I’m sorry if I have led you on.’

‘Oh, Dick! You have been a perfect gentleman — always. It’s me making an idiot of myself. I always make an idiot of myself.’

‘Here. Don’t worry about it. Have some more wine.’

He reached for the bottle. But the humiliation was boiling up inside me. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t bottle it up. I couldn’t take back what I had said.

‘I’m sorry, Dick. I have to leave.’

To my surprise, Roland was home when I got back. I had expected him to be at the Travellers.

‘You’re early,’ he said.

I ignored him and rushed up to my room. It was my bedroom, the one I had used as a child whenever the family decamped to Hill Street. Roland was in my parents’ bedroom, alone.

I slammed the door, threw myself on to my bed and wept.

How could I have been so stupid! To throw myself at Dick like that. To give all those secrets to a foreign country, betraying my own. For someone who considered herself to be reasonably intelligent, I was a chump. A perfect chump.

There was a knock on the bedroom door.

I ignored it.

Another knock.

‘Go away, Roland!’

The door opened.

‘I said go away!’

But he sat on the bed next to me. My face was buried in my pillow, but I could feel his weight.

‘Were you seeing a man?’ Roland said.

I had simply told him I was having dinner with a friend. I hadn’t specified the sex. For the first time, it occurred to me that part of me had wanted to make Roland jealous. What was the point of that? Idiot!

I nodded, my head moving up and down deep in the pillow.

‘And it didn’t go well?’

I nodded again.

‘Move over,’ he said, tapping my knees.

I bunched them up, and he shifted to the end of my bed.

I sat up. It was ridiculous. Me sitting at one end of my childhood bed, crying, and my husband at the other. My husband whom I hated.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I love you.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

But I looked up at him. Those deep, dark brown eyes were gazing at me with something that looked to me a lot like love.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Well, it’s true. And it’s a problem.’

‘Oh. Because I don’t love you,’ I said sarcastically.

‘Don’t you?’

‘Of course not.’

Roland gazed at me steadily. ‘I think you do.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I loved you from the moment I saw you. Or pretty soon afterwards.’

‘You definitely are mad.’ But I was watching him closely, my chin on my raised knees.

‘Over the last five years, I have got to know you really well, and the more I see of you, and the more I know you, the more I love you.’

Why is he doing this? I thought. Why is he going all out with his seduction technique? But I listened.

‘I love your enthusiasm for life, I love your intelligence, I love the way you think, I love your sense of humour, I love your kindness. And I love your eyes. Your smile. Your body.’

‘Don’t you say this to all your women?’

‘No, Emma. No, I don’t. Because I didn’t love any of them. Extraordinary as it may seem, you are the only woman I have ever loved. Sometimes I think you are the only woman I ever can love. Which, as I say, is a bit of a problem.’

‘I’ll say,’ I said. But then the obvious question flashed in my mind. ‘Even...?’

Roland nodded. ‘Even her. Oh, I was infatuated with her. At the time I thought I loved her, but I didn’t really. I know that now. Because of you.’

Golly, Roland was good at this stuff. I could feel myself slipping.

I shored up my defences. ‘What about the other women?’

‘There haven’t been any other women.’

I stayed silent.

Roland looked away. Then he looked straight at me. ‘Not for two years. And not her. Not since you found out about us. Not her.’

‘And the other women? More than two years ago. Who were they?’

‘I paid for them. Like you suggested.’

‘And then you stopped?’

‘I stopped. I was ashamed. All those affairs with married women I had in my twenties. I don’t know what I was doing, what I was looking for. But I do know what I am looking for now. I wanted to win you back. And I knew it would take some time. But the time is now.’

‘You want me to take you back? But don’t we live together anyway? Isn’t that good enough?’

‘Not as man and wife. Yes, at first I wanted you to take me back. But now I realize what I want is for you to answer that question.’

‘What question?’

‘Do you love me?’

I had forbidden myself from asking myself that question ever since Kay had told me that Roland was having an affair with my mother. But over the years I had grown used to Roland. He had been considerate. He had been respectful. He had been understanding. He had even been affectionate in as open a way as I would let him, which was not very open. He was reliable. I trusted him. Grudgingly, I admired him. He was always there. Despite myself, I loved our conversations.

I remembered the flash of jealousy I had felt when that blonde German girl had stared at him.

He was very good-looking.

I remembered how he had sent my heart into palpitations when I had first met him. I remembered the ride up to Dartmoor, the way he had treated me so seriously. Later, I had assumed that was all for show. But I knew some of it, at least, was real.

Now I was no longer spying for the Russians, there was no reason to remain with Roland. I could walk out and leave him tomorrow.

Or I could stay.

‘Don’t ask me to forgive you,’ I said.

‘I’m not asking you to forgive me. I hope you will one day, but I’m not asking you.’

‘Because I can never forgive you.’

Roland swallowed. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But do you love me?’

The dam was cracked. The dam of my justified suspicion and mistrust, which I had shored up over the last three years, broke.

‘Yes, Roland.’ I smiled. ‘Yes. I love you.’

I said it not because he had sweet-talked me into saying it, but because I knew it was true, and I couldn’t hide it from myself any more, and I didn’t want to hide it from him.

He leaned over and kissed me — gently at first.

Then I grabbed him, and he was mine and I was his.

Forty-Seven

June 1979, West Berlin

‘So, you and Grandpa got back together?’

‘Yes, we did,’ said Emma with a smile. ‘You were right. It’s important I told you about that. I know you liked him.’

‘I did. I was very fond of him.’

‘So was I,’ said Emma. ‘Oh, I don’t want to say it was all plain sailing, especially at first. I found it very hard to trust him; I had second thoughts a couple of weeks later and we parted for a bit before I had third thoughts and we got back together. I always found it hard to forgive him what he did with my mother. But I did love him.’ She smiled. ‘And he loved me. I know he did.’

‘But no more children?’

‘No. At first I didn’t want any more. It took me a while to believe that Roland would always be around. And then... Then it just didn’t happen.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We had Caroline. The rest you know. Roland became a successful career diplomat and I was a dutiful diplomat’s wife. Roland was knighted; we retired to Cornwall; you and Mel came on the scene.’ She paused. ‘Roland died. And now I’m going to die.’

Phil resisted the urge to contradict his grandmother. She was going to die. Soon.

‘One last thing you need to know about Roland,’ Emma said with a wicked smile. ‘The sex was good. Very good.’

‘Grams! Did I really need to know that?’ Phil protested.

‘Someone did. And like it or not, that someone is you. Now be off with you! But don’t tell Heike any of this — you promise?’

‘I promise.’

Phil knew, as soon as they sat down in the Turkish restaurant in Kreuzberg, that Heike wanted to sleep with him.

It was the way she talked, the way her eyes flashed, the way she touched his hand unnecessarily. There was an enthusiasm about her, a determination, that she hadn’t displayed before.

It made Phil nervous. Nervous that he would screw it up and put her off. Nervous that he wouldn’t put her off, and then screw it up.

It also made him excited.

She talked a lot, very fast, and Phil struggled to keep up with her German, but she was patient when he admitted defeat, repeating things slowly for his benefit. She was funny; he was funny, or at least she seemed to think so. They drank a bottle of Turkish red wine and then ordered another. The food was delicious — skewers of lamb on a stick, known as a kebap. Phil had never been to a Turkish restaurant before. Apparently there were loads of Turkish guest workers in West Berlin, and Kreuzberg was where many of them lived.

‘My grandmother was telling me about coming here before the war,’ Phil said. ‘She had a friend who lived around here somewhere. Above a printer’s shop.’

‘I’d have thought this would have been a bit scruffy for diplomats, even then,’ said Heike.

‘Oh, her friend wasn’t a diplomat.’

‘What was she?’

Phil didn’t want to sound evasive, although remembering his promise to his grandmother, he didn’t want to say too much. ‘She was American. A student, I think. Not much money, at any rate. Grams had known her in Paris.’

‘Oh. Was that the woman you mentioned before? The one who asked your Oma to spy for the Russians?’

Phil hesitated before answering. ‘It may be,’ he said, with an attempt at indifference. He had forgotten how much he had told Heike in Paris.

‘Your grandfather was a diplomat in the British Embassy here?’

‘Yes. Just for a year. Until war broke out.’

‘It must have been wild then. All those Nazis.’ Heike shuddered. ‘Not our greatest moment.’

‘No.’ But Phil didn’t want to refight the war with Heike. ‘West Germany seems to me to have done an excellent job of becoming a democracy.’

‘I suppose we have,’ said Heike. ‘But I sometimes wish we had chosen a more socialist path. You said your grandmother actually spied for the Russians?’

Phil remembered he had said that. He couldn’t deny it now, no matter what he had promised Emma.

‘That’s what she told me.’

‘She can’t have been happy living here with the Nazis?’

‘No. I don’t think many British people were then. Apart from the ambassador at the time. He liked them, apparently.’

‘You know, my grandfather was killed by the Nazis? In Dachau in 1938.’

‘I didn’t realize you were Jewish?’ Phil said.

‘It wasn’t only the Jews who died in the concentration camps,’ said Heike. ‘My grandfather was a member of the KPD, the German Communist Party. The Nazis locked him up. He was only forty when he died. They said he fell over and hit his head, but of course nobody believes that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘He was a very brave man; I would have liked to have met him.’ Heike sighed. ‘I wonder if I had been alive then whether I would have looked to the Soviet Union for support against Hitler. Like your grandmother did. I like to think I would. I can’t believe I wouldn’t have seen through him.’

Phil was severely tempted to tell Heike all about Emma’s flirtation with communism, and he couldn’t for the life of him see what harm it would do. But he had promised.

‘I think she thought Russia was just as bad,’ he said. ‘She saw through Stalin.’ Eventually.

‘I liked her,’ Heike said. ‘She is really smart, isn’t she? You can almost see her brain fizzing.’

‘I know.’ Phil laughed. ‘She certainly keeps me on my toes.’

‘Are you going to East Berlin?’

‘She is. I’m going home tomorrow.’

‘That’s a shame.’ Heike’s eyes betrayed disappointment. But also something else.

Desire.

‘Yes,’ said Phil. ‘That is a shame.’

Heike was staying in a friend’s squat close by. Apparently Kreuzberg was full of squats. Phil had never seen a squat before, and yes, he would like to see Heike’s friend’s place.

It was the ground floor of what had once been a workshop of some kind, perhaps even a print shop. The walls were covered in graffiti, the windows draped with makeshift curtains of blankets and even newspaper.

The interior design was open-plan: sleeping bags on the floor. After briefly introducing Phil to a couple of long-haired guys sharing a joint, Heike took him through to a small room at the back of the space in which lay two mattresses. On one of them, a pretty dark-haired girl was reading a book by the light of an Anglepoise lamp resting on the floor.

‘Hi,’ she said, giving Phil a friendly smile, and without another word, she gathered up her book and left them.

‘That was nice of her,’ said Phil.

‘She’s a nice girl,’ said Heike.

Then she reached up and kissed him.

Two hours later, Heike flicked the edge of the blanket that acted as a curtain and watched the English boy’s silhouette as it disappeared down the pavement. She couldn’t help smiling to herself when she saw him take a little skip.

Naked, she lit a cigarette and sat on the mattress.

She never liked doing this kind of stuff. In many ways this had been so much better than the last time she had slept with an Englishman — a forty-five-year-old married RAF officer who turned out to have a well-suppressed fetish for blonde German women, the SS and whips. That had been deeply unpleasant.

Yet in some ways this had been harder. In her job, it was better not to become emotionally involved. That had been dead easy with the RAF officer. But it was difficult to seduce someone like Phil without opening up something of yourself, without becoming emotionally involved. She had known it would be his first time, and it was. He was overenthusiastic, but he had a certain natural talent. Heike grinned to herself.

He hadn’t told her very much, at least not at first. Nothing about Annecy at all. It wasn’t even clear whether Phil and his grandmother had come across the dead bodies of Marko and Kurt Lohmüller. The KGB didn’t know what had happened. They assumed that there had been some kind of shootout between Lohmüller and Marko, although how Marko had managed to get himself into that situation with a target in his seventies was beyond Heike. That guy really had been incompetent.

His replacement as Heike’s boss, Rozhkov, was older and tougher. Heike was happier with that; she knew where she was with men like him. She knew she shouldn’t care, but she hoped that Phil wouldn’t end up dead like Marko. She had no doubt that Rozhkov would order his killing if necessary; she just hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

And she liked the sound of Phil’s grandmother. A woman who had understood that, with capitalism broken and Fascism on the rampage in Europe, communism was the only way to go. Heike had been telling the truth about her grandfather dying in Dachau; she had hoped to tempt Phil into opening up about his grandmother. It had nearly worked, she was sure.

Her grandfather was really why she was doing all this, lying on her back for the cause. Her father had clung to his own father’s beliefs during the war, and afterwards, in the Russian sector of Berlin. Her mother was convinced that the West had rejected solidarity with the poor and the working classes, and that that would eventually destroy them. Heike was seeing a lot more of the West than her parents had ever done, and although she found some of the wealth and the good things seductive, she knew those were only available for the rich. She was glad she lived on the right side of the Wall: the side where the people took priority over the rich and powerful.

It was her cause, her family’s cause, her country’s cause, and she would continue to do what was necessary for it.

She had a report to make, and it couldn’t wait. She made a quick phone call: unlike a real squat, this building still had a phone line. She pulled on some clothes and let herself out into the dark street, searching for a passing cab to take her to Rozhkov’s apartment.

She had something to report. Finally, she had broken down Phil’s defences. After the sex, she had playfully talked about Phil’s grandmother spying again, and whether she was going to East Berlin to meet an agent, but Phil had steadfastly refused to rise to the bait. He had explained that he had promised Emma that he wouldn’t repeat any of what she had told him about her time as a spy to Heike. He was feeling bad about what he had already said.

Heike had withdrawn, offended, muttering something about how ridiculous that was. Phil had touched her thigh, but she had stiffened and he had removed his hand.

Then she had made her breakthrough.

‘Of course, she didn’t say anything about not telling you things she knows nothing about,’ he had said.

Heike turned to face him. ‘Like what?’

‘Like a strange man in a pub back in England asking me to look out for a mole.’

‘What’s a mole?’ Phil had used the German word, Maulwurf.

‘It’s spy slang for an agent who burrows into an enemy country’s intelligence agency or government. Kim Philby was a famous one, but there were others in Britain. I don’t know about West Germany.’

‘That’s exciting!’ said Heike, touching him. ‘Have you found this mole?’

‘No. I was told not to ask Grams directly. I hoped that it would become clear through her stories.’

‘And has it?’

‘Not really. Maybe Grams will find something out tomorrow, in East Berlin.’

‘But you won’t be there.’

Phil hadn’t answered her. Just before he had walked off into the night, she had asked him if there was any way he could stay in Berlin instead of flying back to London. She wanted to see him again.

He had smiled. ‘Maybe. Do you have a phone here?’

She had given him the number, resolving to ensure someone stayed at the squat for the next couple of days to be there to take a message if he called.

‘I might call you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I have a little idea.’

Forty-Eight

Phil struggled to wake up the following morning. Emma was quiet at breakfast in the Hotel Bristol. She asked cursorily whether he had had a good time last night. She was thoughtful; she seemed anxious, scared even. And well she should.

Her fear made Phil feel happier with the decision he had taken on his way back to the Bristol the night before, although that decision made it more difficult to say goodbye. He went upstairs to his room to pack; he stuffed the clothes he had originally brought with him into his rucksack and rolled the new clothes they had bought together in Paris into a couple of laundry bags for Emma to add to her luggage. Her plan was that he should check out and take a taxi for the airport, and then she would set out for a day trip to East Berlin to meet Kay, returning to the Hotel Bristol that evening.

Phil had a different plan.

They stood together in the lobby, Emma having paid Phil’s room bill.

‘Thank you so much for coming with me, Philip,’ she said, her face stern, her tone matter-of-fact, despite her words. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She hesitated. ‘You saved my life. I shall miss you.’

‘I shall miss you too, Grams,’ Phil repeated, somewhat lamely.

Then her reserve crumbled, and she threw herself at him, burying her head in his chest. He put his arms around her.

After a little while she stepped back. ‘All right. Have a good trip back. And give my love to your mother and your sister. Oh, and your father.’ This with a smile.

‘Bye, Grams.’

Phil turned and left the hotel. Emma had got the doorman to procure a taxi, and it was waiting for him.

‘Tegel?’ asked the driver.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Phil. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Where is a good place I can store this rucksack for the day?’

‘Zoo Station has left luggage.’

Zoo Station was only a couple of minutes away. The taxi driver waited while Phil dumped his rucksack, and then took him eastwards to Friedrichstrasse and the Wall.

The Wall actually ran west to east at this point, Friedrichstrasse bisecting it south to north. Checkpoint Charlie was the crossing place for foreigners entering East Berlin; it was situated between the American sector and the southern edge of Mitte, the former city centre around Unter den Linden, which was now in the Russian sector. On the Allied side, the checkpoint comprised a hut, some sandbags and two signs: one declaring ‘Allied Checkpoint’ and another announcing ‘You are leaving the American sector’ in English and then repeated in Russian, French and German. An American military policeman waved Phil through.

He walked past a red-and-white-striped barrier and over the narrow strip of no-man’s-land to the more extensive obstacles on the other side. Watchtowers overlooked a large shed where the border formalities took much longer. An East German border guard in a forbidding grey-green uniform took Phil’s passport. The guard checked him for guns, ammunition and printed papers; the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide had warned him of this, and so Phil had reluctantly left the book with his rucksack at the station, having memorized all it had to say about East Berlin. He was required to change six Deutschmarks fifty for a similar number of flimsier East German marks. The five-mark note he received bore a picture of some sixteenth-century preacher in a floppy hat: not very communist, although on the back a combine harvester did its stuff for agrarian productivity. Tourists were supposed to spend all their currency during the day — it could not be exchanged on return to the West.

Phil then spent forty minutes hanging around the northern, East German section of Friedrichstrasse, waiting for Emma and avoiding the occasional suspicious glance from the border guards. If someone was watching him more discreetly, he couldn’t tell.

Eventually he saw her tall figure marching along the street towards him. She hailed a taxi, and Phil moved quickly. The taxi was tiny, with no rear doors, so as Emma climbed in over the passenger seat, Phil bundled in after her.

‘Philip!’ she said.

‘That’s me,’ said Phil, grinning.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she demanded.

‘I couldn’t let you do this by yourself,’ Phil said.

‘But I expressly forbade you from coming with me. It’s not safe, Philip!’

‘I know. That’s why I’m here, Grams. I can help. You know I can help.’

‘But I don’t want you to!’ said Emma, genuinely angry now. ‘I insist you get out of this taxi.’

‘No,’ said Phil. ‘I’m with you on this, Grams. Wherever it takes you.’ He smiled. ‘You’d have done the same when you were my age. You can’t deny it.’

‘Excuse me, comrades,’ said the driver in German. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘One moment,’ said Emma. She looked at Phil. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. She smiled back at him, reluctantly at first, but then resorted to a full beam of relief. ‘Prenzlauer Berg,’ she said to the driver. ‘And take us along Unter den Linden.’

The taxi was tiny, with an engine that sounded like a lawnmower. The driver was large and spoke with the by-now recognizable Berliner accent.

‘Is this car made of plastic?’ Phil said, tapping the roof. It was very different from the Mercedes in which he had arrived at Checkpoint Charlie. The little vehicle was, however, identical to almost every other car on the road.

In a couple of minutes they turned right on to a grand, broad street of old imperial buildings interspersed with more modern structures. And a dual line of small trees running down its centre — lindens, no doubt. Above and a little to the left rose a tall needle with a large ball two-thirds of the way up. A TV tower, Phil remembered from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide.

‘That’s the Stabi,’ Emma said, pointing to an imposing grey stone facade, through whose arches Phil could just see a courtyard with a fountain.

Phil looked around eagerly. He had never been in a communist country before. Some things were different: the modern, dreary blocks, the tiny cars, the TV tower watching over everything as if monitoring the movements of the East Berliners below. But the people appeared pretty much the same, although very few wore jeans. And, frankly, a lot of the modern architecture in West Berlin was pretty dire too.

‘It’s not that different to West Berlin,’ Phil said.

‘It’s very different from Berlin in 1939, believe me,’ said Emma. ‘Then there were giant red swastika flags hanging from the buildings, and men in uniform marching everywhere. And no trees.’

‘No trees?’

‘Hitler tore them down to build the S-Bahn.’

That explained why the new lindens were so small.

They passed through a large square, Alexanderplatz, which had become the centre of East Berlin. A group of workers in hard hats beamed down on them with unbridled joy from a massive poster. The address Emma had given the driver turned out to be a five-storey block of flats, built since the war, opposite a row of older tenement buildings that had survived the bombing and the Red Army.

A column of buzzers guarded the door to the building.

Emma hesitated. ‘I don’t want you to listen to this.’

‘Too late,’ Phil said.

‘I will have to talk about things I have kept from you up till now. Things which will be dangerous for you to know.’ Emma paused, relief at his presence mixing with worry for her grandson. ‘She might not even let us in.’

‘Then we’ll think of another way to talk to her.’

‘All right.’ Emma pressed the buzzer.

‘Hallo?’

‘Oh, hello, Kay,’ Emma replied in English. ‘It’s Emma. Can I come in?’

‘Emma Meeke?’

‘Yes.’

There was silence, or rather a hum of static. It seemed to go on forever, but Emma waited. Whether to let these strangers from the West in was a difficult decision for a former agent of the Stasi.

Phil checked the short street for watchers; it seemed to him to be empty now their taxi had driven off. You could still see the tall needle of the TV tower from Prenzlauer Berg. There was a distinct smell of cabbage in the air.

He realized that he would have no chance of spotting professional surveillance in a strange city.

‘I’ve come a long way,’ Emma said.

‘OK,’ said the voice. ‘Come on up. Fourth floor. Apartment twenty-seven.’

Forty-Nine

Kay’s apartment turned out to be the third floor, but then Kay was American, Phil remembered.

Number 27 was opened by a tall, striking woman with silver hair cut short above her ears. She was wearing a necklace of heavy green stones and large hooped earrings. She didn’t look happy to see Emma.

‘Hello, Kay,’ Emma said. ‘Can I come in?’

Kay hesitated, and then let them into the small apartment, which had a dreary view over the tenements opposite. The bookshelves were groaning with titles, mostly in German. A large black-and-white framed photograph of skyscrapers dominated one wall. Chicago, presumably. But that was the only hint that one of the occupants was American, not East German.

‘You are lucky that my husband isn’t here,’ she said. ‘He’s just left for lunch with some of his old colleagues from the Stasi.’

‘I assume he’s retired?’ Emma said, as if discussing a bank manager.

‘Oh, yes. But you know what they say? Once a secret policeman, always a secret policeman.’ Her accent was American, but with a certain clipped Germanic tinge.

It seemed to Phil that Kay wasn’t exactly being friendly. He remembered what Herr Pöpel had said about the reputation of her husband: Not a nice man, but by no means the worst. And Emma was trusting his wife?

‘And you?’ said Emma, taking a seat on a brown sofa. ‘Have you retired?’

Kay permitted herself a wry smile. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘But you were still working when we met in Brussels in 1965?’

Phil tried not to show surprise; he hadn’t realized Emma had met Kay since the war. One of those pieces of information Emma had omitted to tell him that were now coming out. He anticipated more.

‘Only a little. Helping my husband, who was a commercial attaché at the East German Embassy. I was a diplomatic wife then. A bit like you.’

‘I heard you were also stationed in Budapest? Kurt Lohmüller told me he met you there a few years ago.’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Kay. ‘How is Kurt?’

It seemed to Phil that Kay’s ignorance of Kurt’s fate was genuine, but then presumably Kay was an experienced and skilful liar.

As was his grandmother, it turned out. ‘He’s quite frail at the moment,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure he has long to live.’

‘That’s a shame. I liked him,’ said Kay in her first sign of unbending.

‘It’s good to see you, Kay,’ said Emma.

Kay gave a quick smile but didn’t repeat the sentiment.

‘Why are you here?’ she said. ‘You know I will have to report your visit? I doubt it will reflect well on me.’

‘Oh, yes. I am sorry, Kay. I’m here to talk to you about Lothar. Do you know where he is?’

‘Lothar? But he’s dead.’

That’s what Phil thought too.

Emma frowned. ‘But you told me in Brussels that you had seen him. On an operation in Geneva a few years before. Must have been the early sixties. You said he was an art dealer operating under an assumed name.’

‘Ah, yes, I did, didn’t I? But I was mistaken.’

‘How could you be mistaken about that?’

‘Easily. This man looked a lot like Lothar, or what you might expect Lothar to look like in his sixties. We learned later it wasn’t him. It was just an Austrian art dealer.’

‘I don’t believe you, Kay.’

Kay shrugged. It was a shrug that said: I don’t care what you believe. I may be lying to you, but so what?

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Lothar recently,’ said Emma. ‘And about Hugh.’

Kay listened.

‘It makes no sense at all that the British government would have killed Hugh, even if they suspected him of being a spy. That’s just not the way they behave. They might have arrested him, or they might have tried to turn him, or they might simply have watched him, but they wouldn’t have executed him.’

‘How can you know?’ Kay asked.

‘I was a senior diplomat’s wife. Over the years I have met people I can ask. I asked them, not specifying Hugh of course. And they all said the same thing. The British didn’t kill spies on their own territory. They didn’t kill Hugh.’

Kay didn’t reply.

‘Which means Lothar did,’ said Emma. ‘Or if not Lothar, then someone working for him. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Lothar didn’t kill Hugh,’ Kay said. ‘I am one hundred per cent certain.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Like you, I have had contact with people in Lothar’s line of business over the years. And they have confirmed that Lothar didn’t kill Hugh.’

Phil could see Emma trying to contain her frustration.

‘You and I were good friends, Kay,’ Emma said. ‘Back in 1939. You were my one reliable ally when everyone else was letting me down. I know you were as upset as I was about the Russians’ pact with the Nazis. I know how fond you were of Hugh. What happened back then was wrong.’

Kay listened impassively.

‘I don’t have long to live,’ Emma said.

‘I guess none of us do,’ said Kay.

‘No, I mean I have very little time to live.’ Emma tapped her forehead. ‘There’s something growing in here, and it’s going to kill me. But before it does, I want to see Lothar. Confront him with what he did to Hugh. I need to do this before I die.’

So that was what all this was about, thought Phil. But as a plan it did rather rely on Lothar still being alive, and as far as he could tell, that wasn’t the case.

Kay and Emma stared at each other. They both had equally intense brown eyes. Something was passing between them, Phil thought. Not just memories of fleeting meetings in pre-war Europe, but their lives since. What had been important to them then. What was important to them now.

Then Kay raised her index finger slowly. She moved it in front of her lips in a shush signal.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Emma. But I really can’t help you. Lothar is dead.’

Emma kept quiet.

‘But it is good to see you. Let’s have some coffee, and you can tell me what you have been up to. Philip, can you help me?’

Phil followed Kay through to the kitchen, where she prepared a metal pot of coffee and stuck it on the stove. ‘Can you get the cups, please, Philip?’ she said, pointing to a cupboard.

Then she picked up a notepad on the kitchen counter, and a pen. Holding a finger to her lips, she began scribbling as they waited for the coffee to brew, its gentle gurgling hiding the scratch of pen on paper. Phil read over her shoulder as she scrawled left-handed, with spiky, backward sloping letters.

Fifty

The coffee pot emitted a triumphant final gurgle, and Kay poured out three cups, asking Phil to take them through to the living room. She handed the notepad with her scribblings to Emma.

As Emma read, Kay spoke.

‘I apologize for the lousy quality of the coffee. It’s never been very good here, but it’s gotten a lot worse in the last year or two. They call this Kaffee-Mix. I dread to think what it’s mixed with; it’s only fifty per cent genuine. Think of it as an experience.’

Phil sipped the brown liquid: unpleasant, with a strong taste of chicory. He was watching Emma for her reaction to Kay’s note. Her eyebrows rose as she read. She glanced quickly at Kay and then Phil, her face setting in determination.

She began scribbling a response. Phil could read the words from where he was sitting.

‘So, Philip,’ Kay said, reading the note. ‘Tell me about yourself. Are you at university?’

‘I’m going to Edinburgh in September,’ Phil said.

Kay made a circling motion with her hand, urging him to continue talking as she wrote. Which Phil did, with Emma making occasional proud grandmotherly interjections to keep him going.

Kay hesitated. Emma mouthed the word ‘Please.’ Kay took a breath and began to write as Phil gave a blow-by-blow account of his A-level papers.

Emma wrote:

Kay scribbled:

Phil started talking about hockey.

Kay hesitated.

Kay quickly asked Phil whether he had been to West Germany before, and how he liked it. She began writing again:

Emma glanced at her sharply.

Kay wrote:

Emma nodded. Kay glared at Phil, who nodded also.

Then Kay wrote two more words:

Emma put down her cup, which was still almost full of the dark brown liquid. ‘Thank you for the coffee. As you say, an experience.’

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you with Lothar,’ Kay said. ‘He’s dead, Emma. You just have to accept that.’

‘I find that difficult,’ said Emma stiffly.

As they moved to the door, Kay grabbed Emma and pulled her into an embrace. They stayed like that for several seconds.

‘So Lothar’s still alive,’ Phil said as they emerged from the building entrance out into the street.

‘And he killed Hugh. I knew it! I spent three years of my life spying for the filthy murderer!’ Emma glared at her grandson, her eyes alight with fury. ‘I tell you, Philip, it makes me so angry I could...’

‘You could what, Grams?’

Emma shook her head. ‘Nothing. Let’s find a bus back to Friedrichstrasse.’

But Phil couldn’t help thinking once again of the gun in Emma’s suitcase, the gun that was now safely out of reach in the woods above Lake Annecy.

Fifty-One

Back at the Bristol, Phil followed Emma to her room while the hotel was getting a new one ready for him. She sank into an armchair and closed her eyes. She looked exhausted.

‘Do you think they were following us?’ Phil asked. ‘The Stasi?’

Emma sighed. ‘Probably. I expect they were on the lookout for us when we crossed at Checkpoint Charlie.’

‘And was Kay’s flat really bugged?’

Emma opened her eyes, suddenly alert. ‘I doubt it.’

‘But...’ Phil was stopped in his tracks by Emma raising a finger to her mouth in exactly the same way Kay had. Phil realized what she meant, and let his gaze wander around the room, examining the telephone, the nightstand, the ceiling.

He nodded to show he understood.

‘I fancy a cup of coffee in the bar,’ he said. ‘Do you want to join me?’

‘I’m tired,’ said Emma.

‘Please, Grams. I have some questions I need to ask you. We could discuss them here?’ He looked around the room meaningfully.

‘Oh, all right. Let’s go downstairs.’

It was early afternoon, and the bar was emptying of those having coffee after lunch. They found a quiet corner, and spoke in tones barely above a whisper.

‘So you think your room might be bugged?’

‘It might,’ said Emma. ‘I suspect bugging a West Berlin hotel is easy for the East Berlin secret police. Best to assume it is.’

Once they had crossed back into the West, Phil had believed they were safe. Wrong.

‘Kay said they warned her we might visit, didn’t she?’ Phil said. ‘They could have arrested us on the other side, or worse, if they wanted to.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder why they didn’t?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Emma.

‘Now we know Lothar is alive, we are looking for him, right?’

‘Right.’ Emma examined her grandson. ‘Are you coming with me to Spain?’

‘I am,’ said Phil. ‘Even if you don’t want me to.’

Emma closed her eyes. Phil wasn’t sure whether she was thinking or resting. She smiled, and then opened them. ‘Thank you. I shouldn’t let you do it, but I am grateful. I need your help.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Phil. ‘But I really would like to know what’s going on.’

Emma nodded. ‘I owe you an explanation.’

She took a deep breath and paused for the waiter to serve them their coffee. ‘During the war and afterwards I came to believe that Lothar must have had Hugh killed, or done it himself. But I also believed that Lothar had been executed by Stalin in 1938. So when I met Kay in Brussels fifteen years ago, and she told me she thought Lothar was still alive, it brought everything back.

‘Of course, there was nothing I could do about it, so I just tried to forget it. Roland retired, we moved to Cornwall, Roland died. And then I got this diagnosis. I am going to die. I asked myself, what do I want to do before I go?

‘My thoughts kept on coming back to Hugh, and what had happened to him. I didn’t want to die and him to be erased from history. I wanted to revisit the places I had lived just before the war, when I was trying to make sense of his death, and do something about it. And then Dick sent me that postcard from Crete.’

Emma sipped her coffee. ‘I realized I might have a chance of finding Lothar — if I could find Kurt and Kurt knew where Kay was. I hoped Kay would confirm what I suspected: that Lothar had killed Hugh.

‘Once I’d had that thought, it wouldn’t go away. I knew Dick was coming to Paris on business, and I thought I could perhaps meet him there. I wasn’t confident of finding Kay by myself, especially with the tumour, but I also wasn’t sure I could ask Dick to help me. I was dithering about what to do.

‘Then, at Sunday lunch at your house, you mentioned you had had to cancel your hitch-hiking holiday in Europe, and I realized I could go after all if you went with me. I liked the idea of passing on what had happened to Hugh and to me to the next generation. That is to you. So I asked you to join me.’

‘To help you find Lothar?’

‘To find Lothar.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me all this?’

‘I intended to tell you most of it. Bit by bit as we travelled around Europe. But then when Kurt was killed so horribly... well, I realized it was a lot more dangerous than I had thought, and I should keep you out of it.’

‘What do you think the KGB have to do with this?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Emma. ‘Presumably Lothar has managed to evade them for decades, and they still want to find him.’

‘Why?’

‘He still has secrets. He may have been the one who recruited Burgess, or Philby, or any of the other Englishmen who spied for the Russians. Or if he didn’t recruit them directly, he might know about them.’

Like Swann’s mole, Phil thought. It seemed unfair that Emma didn’t have the knowledge that there was still another mole burrowing underneath the British establishment and that MI6 thought Lothar knew his identity. Phil considered telling her right then. But he wasn’t sure, yet. Swann had been adamant that he shouldn’t.

He would wait and see.

‘What are you planning to do if we find Lothar?’ Phil asked.

‘Look him in the eye and ask him whether he killed my brother.’ There was iron in Emma’s voice.

‘And when he denies it? He’ll deny it.’

‘I’ll know,’ said Emma.

She sounded certain. But...

‘Is that why you brought that gun with you, Grams?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘To shoot Lothar.’

Emma was about to deny it but then decided not to.

‘I don’t have the gun any more,’ she said. ‘You made me throw it away.’

Thank God for that, Phil thought. ‘So. Spain next?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘Do you think they’ll follow us? The Stasi or the KGB or whoever they are?’

‘Let’s hope they don’t know what Kay told us. In which case they might not. But, yes, I think they probably will try to follow us. And we will try to lose them. We have a whole continent to do it in.’

‘As long as they don’t decide to stop messing about and just kill us.’

Emma frowned. ‘I know. You can still back out, Philip. In some ways, I wish you would.’

She lifted her eyes to Phil, her expression a mixture of fear, hope and pleading.

Phil grinned as reassuringly as he could. ‘No, Grams. I’m coming too.’

Emma gave a small smile of relief. ‘Philip?’

‘Yes?’

‘Promise me you won’t be in touch with Heike before we go?’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m sorry to say this, but I fear she might be working for the East Germans. For the Stasi.’

‘But she’s only twenty!’

‘She’s older than that, Philip. She’s twenty-five at least.’

‘No she’s not.’

‘And it was quite a coincidence she found you at the Hollow-Tooth Church yesterday.’

‘She said she was looking for me,’ Phil said. ‘She likes me.’

Emma raised her eyebrows. ‘I wonder why a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old German woman would travel across Europe to meet an eighteen-year-old schoolboy.’

That hurt. That hurt a lot. It was true that Heike was way out of Phil’s league, but he felt that he and she had had a real connection. She understood him. And she wasn’t twenty-five, she was twenty. And why did his grandmother have to be so bloody offensive, when Phil had done so much for her?

‘You just don’t understand, Grams,’ Phil muttered, getting to his feet. ‘I’ll see you at dinner.’

Fifty-Two

Phil was fuming as he went down to reception to get the key to his new room. He knew he had only met Heike a couple of times, but he really really liked her. They understood each other. Sure, she was a couple of years older than him, but she got him. It was nice to talk to a girl like that. And there was the sex. He wanted more of that. He just did.

There was a message waiting for him in an envelope. He opened it as soon as he got up to his room. Inside, there was a note, handwritten on the headed paper of another Berlin hotel, the Hotel Zoo.

So Freddie was in cahoots with Swann after all. No surprise there.

It did surprise him that Freddie knew he had joined Emma in the east. It turned out the Stasi were not the only people watching them.

But what to tell Freddie? Phil did have something to report, that Lothar was alive and living in a town in Spain. But to do that would be to betray his grandmother. Yet wasn’t he betraying his grandmother already by omitting to tell her about Swann’s interest in her?

Could he trust Freddie? Sure, Freddie had been a government minister, but he had also been a communist. As had Emma, for that matter.

Shouldn’t he, in fact, be telling Emma about Swann?

The truth was, Phil didn’t know whom he could trust.

He decided to see Freddie and play it by ear. If Freddie could convince him that he really did know Swann and would pass on Phil’s message to him, then Phil would tell him about Lothar. It would be useful to have British intelligence on their side in the next couple of days. But if Phil’s doubts remained, he would keep quiet for now.

So he rang the number of the Hotel Zoo, which he had noticed stood a little further up the Kurfürstendamm, and asked to be put through to Freddie. There was no reply from Freddie’s room, so Phil left a message that he would meet Freddie in the hotel bar at 6.30 p.m. He didn’t leave his own name.

He was sitting on his bed, staring at the phone, still wrestling with the problem of what to say, when it rang.

He picked it up. ‘Hello?’

‘Phil! You’re still here!’

Phil couldn’t help smiling at the sound of Heike’s voice.

‘I am.’

‘You hinted you might not be going back to London after all, so I thought I would call you at your hotel on the off-chance. What happened?’

‘I decided to stay.’

‘And did you go to the east?’

‘I did. I actually surprised my grandmother in a taxi on the other side.’

‘How did she take that?’

‘She was a bit pissed off, but then she seemed happy.’

‘Great. Look, can we meet up this evening?’

‘I’d like to.’ Once again, Phil wasn’t sure what to do. He had promised to see Emma for dinner and it would be hard to ditch that, especially if he said he was meeting Heike. He could sneak out of the hotel afterwards. Or he could see Heike for a quick drink before he met Freddie.

‘Tell you what, I have to see someone at the Hotel Zoo at six thirty. Can you meet me before then?’

‘I can do that,’ said Heike. ‘How about that café in Tauentzienstrasse where your grandmother took us before? Half past five?’

‘That’s good. See you then.’

Fifty-Three

Phil had time to pick up his rucksack from the left luggage office at Zoo Station before he met Heike, all the time stewing over what his grandmother had said about her.

Heike was waiting for him at the café, wearing a yellow Atomkraft? Nein Danke T-shirt and tight black jeans. She looked gorgeous. Images of her naked in the dim light of the squat the previous night slid their way to the forefront of Phil’s brain.

She didn’t look anything like the men in hats and raincoats of the classic spy film, or even the pneumatic women with enormous breasts and tight-fitting dresses of the Bond films.

But she didn’t look twenty. Phil’s friend Mike’s older sister Rachel was twenty-one, and Heike looked older than her.

They kissed each other hesitantly, a quick brush on the lips. Phil ordered a beer, and Heike a glass of wine. She did seem pleased to see him.

She asked all about his trip to East Berlin, and he admitted he had seen Kay, the woman he had told her about in Paris and Berlin before the war. He told Heike Emma had asked Kay about the man who had ‘handled’ her on behalf of the Russians, but Kay had insisted the man was dead.

Naturally enough, Heike was fascinated. It was a fascinating story.

‘So are you staying in Berlin?’

‘No. We’re off tomorrow.’

‘Where?’

‘Grams discovered from someone else where this guy is. And we’re going to see him tomorrow. It’s going to be a very long drive.’

‘Really? Where are you going?’

Phil strolled past the Hollow-Tooth Church down the Kurfürstendamm to the Hotel Zoo, which was a flashy hotel only half a block from the Bristol. He was five minutes late, but Freddie was not in the bar.

Phil sat down, somewhat uncomfortably. He felt what he was, a scruffy boy in a hotel for international jet-setters. After he had twice turned down a disapproving waiter trying to offer him drinks, he left the bar and headed for the front desk in the hotel lobby. Something was up: a ripple of suppressed anxiety surrounded the half-dozen men and women conferring behind the desk.

Phil stood politely next to the desk while they ignored him. Finally, a woman came over and smiled stiffly.

‘I’m waiting for a guest in your hotel. Herr Pelham-Walsh,’ Phil stated in German. ‘Can I telephone his room, please?’

The smile disappeared. ‘One moment.’ She turned to the group of staff. ‘Herr Klauber? This gentleman is supposed to be meeting Herr Pelham-Walsh.’

An immaculate man of about fifty, with perfectly groomed hair and a neatly trimmed moustache, instantly detached himself from the group and introduced himself as the manager.

He led Phil through to the recesses of an office behind the desk and bade Phil sit down.

‘I am sorry to say that Herr Pelham-Walsh was killed this afternoon in a road accident,’ the man said in English. ‘Just a couple of blocks from here. It was a hit-and-run.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Is he a relative of yours?’

‘No. No.’

‘A friend perhaps?’

Phil’s brain fizzed. He wasn’t going to waste time speculating whether Freddie had been killed by accident; the MP had been run down deliberately, probably by the Stasi or the KGB. Possibly to stop Phil talking to him right now. Phil couldn’t think through all the implications of this immediately, but his instinct was that it would be better if the West German authorities didn’t know who he really was.

‘Godfather.’

‘And you were supposed to meet him?’

‘Yes. He contacted me to say he was staying in Berlin for a couple of days and he knew I was here, and could I meet him this evening? So I said yes I would.’

‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

Phil realized he should be looking sad. He also realized he was probably looking as stunned as he felt, which would do fine.

‘We understand that Mr Pelham-Walsh was an important man in Britain? A member of parliament?’

‘Not just that. A government minister. Or he used to be.’

The hotel manager absorbed the information, no doubt ratcheting up the problem a notch.

‘We have been in touch with the British Embassy. Do you have his wife’s contact details, perhaps? Or his home phone number?’

‘Freddie wasn’t married,’ Phil said, with some degree of confidence. ‘And my address book is back at my hotel.’

‘I see. I am sure the police or someone from the embassy will be here shortly. Would you mind waiting until they arrive?’

‘Not at all,’ said Phil.

‘Thank you, sir.’ The manager got to his feet. ‘Oh, forgive me, sir. What is your name?’

‘Oh. Um. Eustace. Eustace Parsons.’

Eustace? His French teacher Eustace? Get a grip, Phil told himself. But the truth was his brain was tumbling. First Kurt, and now Freddie.

Who next?

Phil had an uncomfortable feeling it might be him. Or Emma. Or both of them.

Fear was seeping into his brain, seizing it up, preventing rational thought.

Get a grip.

‘Thank you.’ The manager scribbled the name down on a piece of paper. ‘And where are you staying?’

‘The youth hostel in Bayernallee.’ Better.

The manager’s nose remained unwrinkled as he wrote this down. ‘And your home address?’

Phil spelled out a random address in Marlow, the closest town to Wittingcombe.

The manager floated off, and Phil hung around in the lobby, doing his best to overcome his agitation.

He did mind waiting for the police or a man from the embassy, actually. Once he got himself ensnared with the authorities, it would be impossible for him and Emma to get away to Spain.

So, while the bodies behind the reception desk were conferring, he slipped unnoticed out of the front entrance and hurried down the street towards his own hotel.

Heike was strolling along Tauentzienstrasse when a battered green BMW pulled up beside her. She jumped in. Rozhkov was in the driver’s seat.

‘What happened to the other car?’ she asked. Rozhkov had been driving an equally battered grey Mercedes.

‘I had to get rid of it.’

‘Pelham-Walsh?’

‘Yes. I got him on a side street. Only possible witness was a young woman with two children, and I’m sure she was looking at them, not me.’

‘Dead?’

‘Dead.’

Traffic accidents were better than more blatant liquidations, especially for high-profile targets like Pelham-Walsh. A shooting would have stirred up a hornets’ nest. The problem was, hit-and-runs weren’t always reliable; at least this one had been successful.

‘How did it go with young Phil?’ Rozhkov asked.

‘Well. He confirmed he and Emma saw Kay Ortmann yesterday.’

‘We know that. But the surveillance tapes show she didn’t tell them anything.’

‘That’s true. But Phil said Emma knows where Lothar is.’

‘Did he say how she knows?’

‘No. But he did tell me where. They are planning to track Lothar down tomorrow.’

Heike was glad Phil had spilled the beans about Lothar’s whereabouts. After the debacle in Annecy, the plan had changed, at Rozhkov’s suggestion. The idea now was to let Phil and Emma lead them to Lothar, and then kill him. And them. And the agent buried deep within the British establishment for the last forty years would remain safely buried, as would the couple of others still in place that he had recruited in turn.

She really must do a better job of dealing with Phil. He was going to die — she knew it, and she should be able to handle it if she was to be the professional agent she aspired to be. She had done a lot for her country; there was a lot more she could do.

She was glad she hadn’t had to sleep with him again that night. Phil had declined her suggestion, saying he had a long drive the following day.

As, therefore, did she and Rozhkov.

‘Well done,’ said Rozhkov. ‘So where are they leading us tomorrow?’

Heike told him.

Fifty-Four

Phil’s tiny travelling alarm clock went off at 4 a.m. He was in a deep sleep, and it took all his willpower to drag himself out of bed and stand under a shower for five minutes. He was supposed to be meeting Emma in the hotel lobby at 4.30 a.m.

As soon as he had returned to the Bristol the evening before he had knocked on Emma’s door and forced her out and down to the bar for a drink. He was more inclined than ever to believe that her room was bugged. She had seen from his face that something important was up, and under the murmur of the cocktail-hour crowd, Phil had explained that Freddie had summoned him to his hotel, and that he was now dead, run over on a side street.

A succession of emotions swept across Emma’s face: shock, sadness, fear and then resolution.

‘It was the KGB, wasn’t it?’ Phil said.

‘Must have been. Do you know why Freddie wanted to talk to you?’

‘No idea,’ Phil lied.

‘We need to leave this city,’ Emma said.

Phil heartily agreed. Freddie’s death had badly shaken him; he didn’t want to spend a moment longer than he had to in Berlin. ‘Shall we go right now?’

‘Yes.’ Then Emma hesitated. ‘Maybe not right now. We’re both tired and we have a very long journey ahead of us.’ That’s when she came up with the plan of getting up at four in the morning.

Emma was waiting for him in the lobby, looking as resolute as ever. She had summoned the TR6 to the hotel entrance. It was already light outside, but the Kurfürstendamm was quiet. Out on the street the sun was rising behind the broken spire of the church, painting stripes of rose and gold along the upper floors of the buildings along the street.

The roads were empty. But as they approached the western suburb of Zehlendorf, and the checkpoint from West Berlin back on to the autobahn corridor through East Germany, a number of lorries began to accumulate.

It was here that they were most likely to be stopped, either by the West German authorities if they had realized Phil knew something about Freddie’s death, or by the East German border guards. Phil and Emma had discussed this, and decided that if the East Germans had been happy to follow them to visit Kay without arresting them, they would be likely to allow them out of Berlin.

The reasoning sounded plausible. But it could be wrong. The only way they would know was when they were safely driving along the corridor itself.

Both sets of border guards let them through, the East German taking longer than his western counterpart, but that in itself wasn’t suspicious. And then they were off on the autobahn, heading to Helmstedt, Braunschweig and Hanover.

Emma and Phil were wrapped up in their own thoughts. It was too early to talk. On the open road, with no speed limit, Phil put his foot down, nudging the speedometer past a ton.

He checked his grandmother, who caught his eye and grinned. The sun hung low behind them, urging them on.

It appeared that giving a false name to the manager at the Hotel Zoo had worked, at least for a little bit. Swann would hear of Freddie’s death soon enough. The British Embassy had already been told, and presumably the news would spread around Whitehall to reach him. Phil had considered trying to telephone him, reverse charges, the night before, and telling him that Lothar was in Spain.

But Phil was cautious. The safest choice seemed to be to keep as low a profile as they could until they actually found Lothar. Then he would telephone Swann.

Who was this damn mole anyway? Of course, it could easily be someone Emma had never met, someone who hadn’t been part of her story yet — someone like Denis Healey — or more likely someone of whom Phil hadn’t even heard. In which case there was no point in Phil trying to speculate.

But if it was someone Emma knew from the 1930s, then that would explain Swann’s insistence Phil keep their conversation from her.

If the mole was a friend of Emma’s.

Or if Emma had recruited the mole herself.

That would mean Emma had not been completely open in the stories she had told Phil; she had held things back.

It was possible. In fact, she had always admitted she was holding information back, information that it would be dangerous for Phil to know.

So if Emma knew the mole, who might it be?

Kurt would have been a good guess. He had risen in the ranks of the West German Foreign Ministry. But he was dead; almost certainly killed by the KGB.

What about Roland? Had Emma recruited Roland at some point, maybe after their reconciliation?

But Roland, too, was dead. It sounded as if Swann was looking for a mole that was still burrowing.

There was another obvious possibility.

‘Grams?

‘Yes.’

‘You know you said Freddie spied for the Russians before the war?’

‘Yes, darling.’

‘Do you think he might still have been working for them?’

Even as he was driving, Phil could feel Emma’s sharp brown eyes studying him closely.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I was trying to figure out why he was killed.’

‘You mean, you think it might have been the British? Because he was a Russian spy?’

‘I don’t know, Grams,’ Phil said. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of this.’

‘I suppose he might have been working for the KGB. But I think it unlikely. He did help MI5 track down Burgess and Maclean, and I think Philby.’ She sighed. ‘That’s the problem with this spying business. You never really know. Even when it’s your own brother.’

A tear crept down her cheek. ‘Freddie was exasperating, but I liked him.’

‘I’m sorry, Grams,’ said Phil.

But his mind continued to roam. ‘What about Cyril?’

‘Cyril?’

‘Do you think he has anything to do with Kurt’s death?’ Phil asked. ‘Kurt did know Cyril was a spy, after all.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Emma hesitantly. But it was clear the idea hadn’t occurred to her.

Emma was thinking too.

‘If you’re looking for a spy, I don’t think you need look much further than Heike.’

Phil glanced at Emma and swallowed. ‘I saw her last night, Grams.’

‘You what?’

‘I slipped out to see her for a drink. Just before I went to meet Freddie at the Hotel Zoo.’

‘But I told you to stay clear of her!’

‘I know you did. But I thought you were wrong; I was sure you were wrong.’

‘You fool, Philip!’

‘Until I was with her. Then I realized you were right. She’s not twenty. And if she’s not twenty, she probably isn’t a student at the University of Bonn. And much as it pains me to admit it, she probably doesn’t fancy me. And when she quickly turned the conversation to where we were going today, I knew for sure why she was interested in me.’

‘You didn’t tell her?’

‘I did tell her.’

‘Phil!’

‘I told her Lothar was on a Greek island. Skiathos. It was the destination we planned to head for when we were hitching across Europe. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide is very complimentary about it.’

Emma grinned. ‘Did she believe you?’

‘I think so.’

‘Maybe you’re not such a fool after all.’

Phil smiled. ‘Maybe I’m not.’

Emma touched his arm. ‘I’m sorry. I know you liked her. It must be awful to know you were being deceived all along.’

There was something in her touch, in the tone of her voice, that made Phil realize this sixty-four-year-old woman did understand. And then he realized that at about his age she too had slept with someone who was deceiving her.

‘All right,’ said Emma. ‘We need a plan.’

‘Don’t we have a plan? We’re driving to Spain.’

‘The KGB will be watching us. Following us. They will be expecting us to head towards Greece. Which we will do. Until we lose them.’

‘How are we going to do that?’

‘I’ll think of something.’ Emma pulled out her road atlas and studied it closely.

They had no problem at the border and stopped for breakfast at a service station on the other side. They sped past Braunschweig, both of them ignoring the signs, and then turned south on an autobahn heading to Munich and Austria, and ultimately Yugoslavia and Greece.

Half an hour south of Nuremberg, in Bavaria, Emma announced it was time for lunch. They pulled off the autobahn and stopped at a garage with a little shop which sold sandwiches and local maps. They bought both.

Phil had been looking out for cars following him, but couldn’t spot any. More accurately, there were dozens of cars following them on the long journey, and there was no way of telling if any of them contained KGB agents.

Much easier on a straight stretch of country road. Which, by examining her newly purchased map closely, Emma found.

They pulled over on the verge of a straight on a back road a couple of kilometres west of the garage. A blue van, a silver Opel, and a green BMW with a single male driver passed them and disappeared around a corner a kilometre away. They munched their sandwiches, checking each passing vehicle carefully. On one side cows grazed a low hill; on the other, tidy Bavarian farmland stretched into the distance.

‘Ready?’ Emma asked, once they had finished their sandwiches.

‘Ready.’

‘Let’s go.’

Phil drove as fast as he could along the country roads, Emma giving him a bewildering series of directions. He called out the type and colour of any vehicle that appeared in his rear-view mirror; Emma suggested this as an aide to spot a particular car reappearing. None did. They spent a frustrating two minutes trapped behind a slow-moving tractor before Phil accelerated past it on a blind corner. In ten minutes they were back at the entrance to the autobahn, which headed south to Munich.

‘That way,’ said Emma, pointing to a sign.

North.

Fifty-Five

Heike and Rozhkov stood beside their BMW on the low hill overlooking the distinctive green British sports car, Rozhkov training his powerful binoculars down on them.

‘They know they’re being followed,’ he said in his Slavic-accented German.

‘They can’t have spotted us,’ said Heike.

Rozhkov had planted a radio tracker in the TR6 in the hotel’s garage, and Heike had followed Phil and his grandmother on a heavy portable display plugged into the BMW’s cigarette lighter. Rozhkov had kept at least a couple of kilometres behind the British sports car the whole way. The only time they had got close was when they had driven past the stationary TR6 on the lane down there, and Heike had slipped down low in the passenger seat out of sight.

‘It’s all very well stopping for a picnic somewhere,’ Rozhkov said. ‘But they have just pulled over on to a verge. It’s not a natural stopping place. They want to lose us.’

‘They are not doing a bad job of it,’ said Heike. ‘But they don’t know we know they are heading to Greece.’

‘Phil knows,’ Rozhkov said.

‘Phil knows I know,’ Heike said. ‘He doesn’t know you do. He doesn’t suspect me, I’m sure of it.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Rozhkov said. ‘In which case they will be on the autobahn heading south in half an hour or so.’

Rozhkov stiffened. ‘They’re off. And they’re not going back the way they came. That means they are trying to lose us.’

Rozhkov and Heike jumped in the car. Heike put the bulky display on her lap and tried to read it. The display showed bearing and approximate range, which was fine on a straight autobahn, but was very difficult on winding country roads, especially without a detailed map.

They spent a frustrating fifteen minutes doing their best to keep up, Rozhkov letting his impatience show. Heike had had no training on the system. She suggested that they switch and she drive, but Rozhkov wasn’t having any of that. He was the man, so he had to drive.

Turned out Rozhkov was just as much a jerk as the hapless Marko, just in his own special way.

It was with relief that they crested a low hill and saw both the autobahn, and a green sports car moving towards it.

‘That’s them!’ Heike said, and put the display to one side.

A ‘well done’ would have been appreciated.

Rozhkov drove steadily to the junction and joined the highway heading south.

‘OK. How far ahead of us are they? I want to get the separation right.’

This was easier. Heike checked the display. It didn’t make sense. The dot was at the bottom of the concentric circles.

‘Hold on. They’re behind us!’

‘They can’t be.’

‘Look.’

Rozhkov leaned over and looked.

‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘They’re heading north! We’ll have to double back at the next junction.’

He glared at Heike and muttered something in Russian.

Russian was compulsory in East German schools and Heike had been good at it.

He had just called her a stupid female dog.

At the next junction, they veered off the autobahn and rejoined it heading north. After a frantic twenty minutes of seriously fast driving, a blip appeared on Heike’s screen, this time where it should be. At the top. Ahead of them.

They followed it on what was to be a long journey north, and then west, and then south through France.

To Spain.