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The sound came again and Johann’s eyes were drawn towards it. This room was partially lit by the gaps in the boards at the window, and in the half-light he saw the silhouette of a man in an overcoat, bent over a cabinet, rummaging for something—valuables, Johann supposed. He despised looters, who preyed on the misfortune of others. He leapt at the man, grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him round, pinning him back against the cabinet.

‘Get out of here!’

Johann drew his fist back ready to hit the man, whom he could now see more clearly. He was an older man, perhaps in his fifties. He looked terrified.

‘Candles!’ the man said. ‘I was looking for candles.’

‘Johann?’

Johann’s muscles went limp at hearing his name, but it was not the man before him who had spoken. It was a woman’s voice. She sounded weak and frail, and so very old. He let go of the man and turned around. And there, sitting in an armchair with blankets piled around her, he saw a woman he barely recognised. The grey daylight from the gaps in the window boards revealed a gaunt and pallid face. Her head was shaved, and her hollow eyes seemed to stair back at him. Johann was immediately reminded of those unfortunate souls he’d seen at Dachau when he went there to see Volker. It was Ava’s mother, Adelina, and in her lap . . .

No, it can’t be.

Johann had to step closer, convinced that his eyes were playing tricks on him in the half-light. But it was true. She was holding a baby.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Present day.

Following Jan Statham’s phone call to the civil registration office in Ingolstadt, having asked them to retrieve the vital records they held for Ava’s paternal uncle, Kurt Bauer, Jan came back into the meeting room where she had left Tayte, and he thought she had even more of a spring in her step than when she’d left. Her face was full of smiles. She had several printouts in her hand, and Tayte imagined they were the reason she was so excited.

‘Wow, I’ve heard about German efficiency,’ he said with a grin. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve sent the records for Kurt Bauer over already.’ He was grinning because he knew full well that such a feat was impossible in such a short time frame.

‘No, silly. They’re from Starnberg,’ Jan said as she sat down.

She placed the printouts onto the desk in a pile in front of Tayte, and he immediately began to share her excitement. On top of the pile was a printout from the
Sterberegister
. It was for Adelina Bauer.

‘Ava’s mother,’ Tayte said as he recognised her name.

‘Month of death, May,’ Jan said, showing Tayte the corresponding column on the record. ‘Year of death, 1945.’

‘So Ava’s mother died just as the war was ending.’

Jan nodded. ‘The cause of death says
Lungenentzündung
. That’s pneumonia.’

Tayte took a deep breath as he wondered whether the record offered any significance to his search. Adelina Bauer had died prematurely, but he imagined many people did for one reason or another during those dark years. He turned to the next record. It was from the
Heiratsregister
showing Heinz Schröder’s marriage in 1910 to Frieda Schäfer. Jan had already found Heinz’s birth certificate, which Tayte slid across to keep Heinz’s vital records together. The following printout showed another entry from the
Sterberegister
and Tayte sighed to himself at seeing it.

‘Heinz’s wife also died prematurely,’ he said, noting that the death certificate, or
Sterbeurkunde
, for Frieda Schröder had been issued in 1933, twenty-three years after their marriage. ‘She was only forty-two years old.’

‘Some of the records I see are enough to make anyone weep,’ Jan said. ‘It took me a while to get used to seeing people’s lives laid out like this—sometimes a birth certificate one year, and then a death certificate for the same child a few years later. You deal with it, don’t you, but I don’t think it’s something you ever really get comfortable with, or want to for that matter.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Tayte said. ‘I find it can help to look for the positives. In this case I’d like to think that, although Frieda’s life was cut short, she spent twenty-three happily married years with Heinz before she died.’ Tayte turned to the next record. It was a birth certificate. ‘And look, they had a son, Franz Schröder, born in 1913, just before the Great War.’

‘That must have been a hard time for Mrs Schröder.’

‘I’m sure it was,’ Tayte said, turning to the next record and reading the word
Sterbeurkunde
again.

‘Oh dear,’ Jan said when she saw it. ‘That’s her boy’s death certificate. 1942.’

Tayte nodded. ‘What does this mean?’ he asked, pointing to the section where the reason for death appeared. ‘
Gefallen
.’

‘It simply means fallen,’ Jan said. ‘Heinz Schröder’s son was killed in action during the war. Look here, it shows the place of death as Russia.’

Tayte shook his head. Whatever side a person was on during a war, he imagined that every parent shared a common grief at such a loss of their child. He turned to the next record. It was another birth certificate—a
Geburtsurkunde
—for a second son, Werner, born little more than a year after his brother Franz. Tayte hung his head over the next record when he saw that it was almost identical to the previous death certificate.

‘Two sons killed on the Russian Front in the same year.’

‘Perhaps it’s a mercy their mother had already passed away by then,’ Jan said. She shook her head. ‘Terrible times. I don’t know how any mother could cope with such news.’

‘Or father, come to that,’ Tayte added. ‘By the end of 1942, poor old Heinz Schröder seems to have lost all his immediate family.’

‘There’s a couple more records to go,’ Jan said, prompting Tayte to look at the next one.

‘This is another marriage certificate,’ he said, scanning the details. ‘In July 1945 Heinz Schröder married Helene Schmidt.’

‘It’s nice to know he remarried.’

Tayte smiled. ‘See, that’s a positive, right there.’

There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the marriage. The bride’s address told Tayte she was a local woman, perhaps someone Heinz had known for some time, given that his first wife had died more than ten years earlier. The witnesses were a neighbour called Martha Olberg and another member of the Schmidt family. Tayte turned to the last record, and as soon as he saw it a shiver ran through him. His breath caught in his chest as he scanned the details.

‘Karl Schröder?’ he said, unable to believe his eyes.

‘Does that name mean something to you?’

Tayte nodded. ‘It’s what I’m looking for. At least, I think it is.’ His eyes were all over the document, taking everything in, and at the same time trying to understand what this discovery meant. He was looking at a copy of Karl Schröder’s birth certificate. The father was listed as Heinz Schröder, the mother as Helene Schröder née Schmidt. The place of birth was shown as Gilching. ‘This was issued in September, 1945,’ he added.

‘So it gets even more positive for Heinz,’ Jan said. ‘He had another son. This time with his new wife, Helene.’

Tayte scrunched his brow. ‘I don’t think so. See here. The date of birth is shown as February, 1945, yet this certificate wasn’t issued until September that year, seven months later. The date of birth is also five months before Heinz and Helene were married.’

Jan looked more closely. ‘That’s curious then, isn’t it?’ She pointed to something written on the record. ‘And this field asks whether the child was born legitimate or illegitimate, and it says “
legitim
”, which is something of a contradiction, too.’

‘I think that what we’re looking at here is an amended birth certificate. I don’t believe Heinz and Helene are Karl’s biological parents at all.’

‘You think he was adopted?’

Tayte reminded himself that if this was the Karl he was looking for, the same Karl who had later married his mother, then he had gone to see Tobias Kaufmann’s father, Elijah, back in the 1970s with a view to tracing his parentage. If Karl had believed that Heinz Schröder was his biological father, Tayte could see no reason why Karl would have done that. There would have been no need to look any further.

‘I’m sure you’re aware that it’s common practice to change the facts on amended birth certificates so it appears as if the adoptive parents are the child’s biological parents. The place of birth can be changed to suit the adoptive parents’ address, even the date of birth can be altered. I think on this occasion the date of birth must be correct, or it would likely have been amended to something closer to the date when the child was named.’

‘That makes sense,’ Jan said. ‘They don’t call them “amended” certificates without good reason, do they?’

‘No, they don’t,’ Tayte said, thinking that his own birth certificate showed he was born in Washington, DC, where his adoptive parents brought him up, but he had later come to see that for the falsification it was.

‘So, do you think Karl is Ava’s child?’

‘I think there’s a very strong possibility,’ Tayte said. ‘We don’t know what became of Ava yet, but it’s fairly certain she was no longer with Johann after the war. I don’t know why just now,’ he added, thinking again about the terrible thing Langner had said Strobel had done. ‘If Ava had a child, though, it’s possible that by the end of the war, she might not have been able to look after it. And here we have a child adopted by Ava’s maternal uncle. The timing of the adoption certainly fits, and Heinz’s birth record tells us he was born in 1887, so he would have been fifty-eight years old in 1945, when he and Helene adopted Karl. That could be considered a little old to want another child, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Jan said. ‘Although I imagine there were plenty of displaced children in Germany around that time, because of the war. I shouldn’t think his age was so much of a barrier to adoption as it might be today.’

‘No, and especially if the child was from your own family and there was no one else around who could look after it. We already know Ava’s mother, Adelina, died in May the year Karl was adopted.’

‘The original birth certificate should be able to confirm it,’ Jan said. ‘Although it might not be so simple to find it, let alone obtain permission to see it.’

‘I’m sure it would take too long,’ Tayte said, knowing that such sealed original birth certificates could be very difficult to get at, even if you were the person named on the certificate. He turned to the last record. ‘Here’s Heinz Schröder’s death certificate. He died in 1959, age seventy-two.’

Tayte did a quick calculation, noting that Karl would have been fourteen at the time of Heinz’s death. He thought Karl couldn’t have known he was adopted until sometime afterwards. Perhaps his adoptive mother had told him. He suspected Heinz must have taken the story of how Karl came to be adopted to his grave, or Karl wouldn’t have had such a hard time trying to find his family after Heinz died.

Jan began to tidy the papers on the desk. ‘Looks like we’ve run out of records. Any idea where you want to go with your research next?’

Tayte nodded. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said, considering that Johann Langner must know the truth.

He also considered the now strong possibility that Johann Langner was his paternal grandfather. Langner was married to Ava. That fact made him the obvious candidate for Karl’s father, and yet there was that terrible thing Volker Strobel had done. Given all that Tayte had heard since arriving in Munich, he still couldn’t rule out the possibility that Strobel was his grandfather.

Tayte sat back in his chair, his thoughts spinning wildly through his mind. He had plenty of information gathered in the records before him. They painted a picture of several interwoven lives, telling a story that in many ways backed up his hunch that Karl, who was in all probability his father, had been born to the Bauer family. But who was Karl’s father? Tayte had to find out. He had to find a way to see the ailing Johann Langner again, to confront him about the matter while there was still time.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Headi
ng for the street outside the Civil Registration Office, Tayte took out his phone and called the German Heart Centre again, preparing himself for another clash with Ingrid Keller. Only this time he wasn’t going to back down. If it turned out that Langner and Ava were Karl’s parents, then he figured Keller had to soften a little when he told her they could be related.

‘Hello,’ he said as his call was answered. ‘I need to speak with a patient in your care—Johann Langner. It’s urgent.’

‘One moment, please.’

Tayte kept walking as he waited for Keller’s harsh tones to come on the line. He reached the street and started to look for a taxi to take him to the hospital, whether Keller refused him or not.

‘Mr Tayte?’

‘Yes, hello,’ Tayte said. It wasn’t Keller. The voice belonged to a man.

‘I understand you wish to speak with Johann Langner. I’ve been in charge of his care while he’s been with us.’

‘Can I speak to him?’

‘I’m afraid Herr Langner is no longer with us, Mr Tayte.’

Tayte stopped walking. ‘He died?’

There was a hint of laughter in the man’s tone as he spoke again. ‘No, no, Mr Tayte. To the contrary. He was discharged this morning. Is there anything I can help you with?’

Tayte sighed with relief. He smiled. ‘No, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ He was about to hang up when he thought to ask, ‘Do you know where he went?’

‘Home, I should imagine.’

‘Home,’ Tayte repeated. ‘Yes, of course. Well, thanks for your time.’

Tayte ended the call and stuck out his hand as a vacant taxi approached. As he climbed in the back he looked up the contact information he had on Langner from his earlier research. He had an address, but no phone number.

‘Grünwald,’ he said to the driver.

Then Tayte sat back for the ride and tried Jean’s number again. As before it went straight to voicemail, telling him he still had some time left to follow his instincts before returning to the hospital. When the beep sounded in his ear, he left another message.