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‘Ava!’ Johann’s face was beaming. ‘I thought I’d missed you.’

She was just how he remembered her. She wore the same long grey coat, and her dark blonde hair was rolled up beneath the same felt hat she had been wearing when he first met her. She was standing beside the kerb with her bicycle, and Johann was at a loss to understand how she could have retrieved it without him having seen her sooner.

Ava continued to smile at him, but with a degree of bemusement as she asked, ‘Whatever are you doing here?’

Not waiting for an introduction, Volker stepped forward. ‘He came to find you. He’s besotted with you, aren’t you, Johann?’ He thumped Johann playfully on the shoulder. ‘And now I can see why.’

Johann laughed to hide his embarrassment. ‘This is my friend, Volker Strobel. You remember I told you about him?’ He turned to Volker. ‘Volker,’ he said, beaming. ‘This is Ava Bauer.’

Ava offered her hand and Volker took it in his. With his eyes fixed on her, he spoke to Johann first. ‘You told me how you met Ava, Johann, but you did not tell me how pretty she was.’ His eyes seemed to devour her as he leaned in and kissed her hand. ‘
Fräulein
Bauer.’ He clicked his heels. ‘It is a pleasure indeed to finally meet you.’

Johann thought Ava was about to start giggling at Volker’s flirtatious introduction, but by the time he had lifted his head again, Ava’s face was composed, with just the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

‘I know the name Strobel,’ Ava said. ‘Are you related to senior Reich Minister, Joseph Strobel?’

Volker raised his chin proudly. ‘Baron Joseph von Strobel is my father—although since the German nobility is no longer recognised, my family has stopped using the title.’

‘Volker’s a very well-connected man,’ Johann said.

‘Yes, perhaps,’ Volker said. ‘My father is a great politician, just like our
Führer
. That’s where the real power is.’ He paused. ‘But enough of all that.’ He moved closer to Ava and placed his arm loosely around her so that his hand was resting on her bicycle saddle. ‘Do you know that Johann here hasn’t stopped talking about you since the riots?’

Ava looked as though she wanted to giggle again, and from the mischief written all over Volker’s face, it was clear to Johann that his friend was out to embarrass him.

‘I wanted to see you again, Ava,’ Johann said. His stutter returned. ‘I-I hope you don’t mind my having found you again like this.’

‘No, not at all. I’m quite flattered.’

Johann could feel another blush rising, so he changed the subject. ‘I see that you’ve had your puncture repaired.’ He pointed down at the front tyre of Ava’s bicycle, having no idea whether it was the right one. ‘We were waiting for you by the bicycle racks. I don’t know how we missed you.’

‘I don’t leave my bicycle there any more. The racks get too full. A few of us leave them across the street.’

She gestured behind her, but Johann couldn’t take his eyes off her long enough to see where she meant.

‘Well, that explains it,’ Volker said. ‘We were just going for a drink. You’ll join us, of course.’

‘Well, I—’

‘But you must,’ Volker insisted. ‘We’ve waited over an hour in the cold for you, haven’t we, Johann?’

Johann nodded and gave Ava a sheepish smile. Now that he had found her again, the last thing he wanted was for her to be put off by Volker’s overly direct manner.

‘It’s true that I’ve been waiting at length in the hope of seeing you again, and that Volker here, like the good friend he is, has been standing in the cold with me. If you do have the time to join us for a drink, I should like it very much.’

‘I’d like it, too, but I’ll be late home and Papa will worry.’

Volker cut in again. ‘What if I told you I know how you can have a drink with us and still be home at your usual time?’

‘How?’ Ava asked.

Volker lifted her bicycle up onto the pavement. ‘Walk with us and I’ll explain along the way. We’re wasting time here, and you were going in this direction anyway.’

They started walking, Ava pushing her bicycle with Johann to her left and Volker to her right.

‘I know a nice place just around the corner,’ Volker continued. ‘The proprietor has been a friend of my family’s for a very long time. He’ll serve us the finest brandy to warm us up, and when we’ve finished, I’ll borrow his van and Johann and I will take you and your bicycle home to your papa, who will be none the wiser. Now what do you say to that?’

Ava turned to Johann, and he could see that she was still unsure. He could also see that Volker had changed his opinion of Ava quite considerably now that he had met her. This was a far cry from wanting him to have nothing more to do with her.

‘It would just be for one drink,’ Johann said. ‘And I should very much like the opportunity to continue the conversation we began two weeks ago.’

Ava smiled. ‘I don’t see why not. As long as I’m not late home.’

‘Good!’ Volker said. He laughed then as he grabbed Ava’s bicycle and began to run with it. ‘Come on! If we hurry, we might have time for two drinks.’

Chapter Seven

Present day.

Outside the German Heart Centre on Lazarettstrasse, Tayte and Jean followed their bags into the back of a cream-coloured Mercedes taxi. Although they hadn’t had to wait long, Tayte was glad of the cool air-conditioning, which was a welcome respite from the hot afternoon sun. Tayte liked taxis. They took the stress out of driving on unfamiliar streets, and you didn’t have to know your way around. He thought back to the last time he’d worked with Jean, in London the previous year, and was glad he didn’t have to travel around on the back of her motorcycle again this time.

‘Maxburgstrasse,’ he said to the driver, and they were on their way, heading towards the city centre.

When the ECG machine Johann Langner was attached to lit up with alarms for the second time during their visit, Ingrid Keller had once again ordered them to leave, and this time Langner had not recovered sufficiently to insist they stay to hear the remainder of his story about his friendship with Volker Strobel and the girl, Ava Bauer, who had come into their lives not long before the war began.

Tayte turned to Jean. ‘I hope the old man’s okay. Maybe we should have left sooner.’

‘I was thinking the same thing,’ Jean said. ‘But he wanted to talk, didn’t he?’

‘I know, but I can’t help feeling a little responsible. His nurse was right—he needed rest.’

‘I think what really set him off that last time was talking about Volker Strobel. Whatever did the man do?’

‘A terrible thing,’ Tayte said, thoughtfully, repeating Langner’s last words to them, knowing that he wasn’t referring to the terrible things Strobel had done to earn him the moniker ‘Demon of Dachau’, but something else. ‘I’d love to know what he was referring to, and I’d have really liked to hear what else he had to say.’

Jean agreed. ‘Maybe we’ll get another chance to talk to him.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ Tayte said, but recalling how ashen and drawn Langner had looked as they left his hospital room, he somehow doubted it.

As they continued their taxi ride through the busy streets of Munich, Tayte turned his thoughts to their destination: the registered offices of
Die Freunde der Waffen
-
SS
Kriegsveteranen
—
The Friends of the Waffen-SS War Veterans
—or the FWK as the organisation was commonly known. It was close by and their bags were light and few. Now that he was in Munich, rather than going to their hotel to check in, Tayte was all the more keen to push on and piece his own family history puzzle together.

‘Hopefully we can fill in the rest of Langner’s story some other way,’ Tayte said. ‘The FWK might be able to tell us a thing or two.’

‘That’s if they’ll talk to us.’

‘True, but we’ve nothing else planned until tomorrow. It’s worth a shot.’

Jean pulled out her tablet PC. ‘I made some more notes about them. While you were staring at the back of the seat in front of you on the plane this morning, I found a newspaper article from the
Guardian
a few years ago.’

Tayte caught Jean’s wink as she teased him about the flight and he threw her a playfully sarcastic smile. ‘So what have you got, hotshot?’

‘Well, it seems that the German government has had a close eye on the FWK for some time. They were established as a non-profit and thus charitable organisation in 1945, but the Federal Finance Court denied them their non-profit status in the early 1990s, when it was discovered that they were not only raising funds to help
Waffen
-SS war veterans and their families, but that they were also assisting families of convicted war criminals. The report goes on to allege that the FWK are even supporting wanted war criminals who are still at large today.’

Tayte scoffed. ‘If that’s true then I’m not surprised they lost their charitable status. I wonder if they’ve been helping Volker Strobel. Maybe they know where he is.’

‘I’m sure you’re not the first person to wonder that.’

‘No,’ Tayte said, thinking ahead to tomorrow’s meeting with Munich’s foremost specialist on the Demon of Dachau—an eminent Nazi hunter called Tobias Kaufmann.

The taxi turned off the main road into a narrow street, and out of the window Tayte saw that they had arrived in Maxburgstrasse. He gave the driver the number of the building, thankful that the driver spoke English, as did many of the people he had so far encountered in Munich. As the car crawled along between continuous lines of parked cars, Tayte saw that the area was a hotchpotch of buildings old and new with a few shops here and there, and because the street was narrow, the tall buildings that lined the pavement threw everything into shade. The taxi pulled up in front of a featureless grey wall of offices, whose many dark windows dominated the façade.

Tayte paid the driver and refused the change. ‘
Danke
,’ he said as he and Jean got out, determined as he was to try a few of the more common phrases he’d learned from the app Jean had downloaded to her computer for the trip.

As the taxi pulled away, Tayte wished he’d thought to ask the driver to wait. The dark windows he and Jean were now looking up at made the place look ominously vacant. Jean slung her backpack over her shoulder and Tayte picked up his suit carrier and briefcase. He’d given up offering to carry Jean’s bag for her, however much he wanted to. They went closer, taking the few steps that ran up to the aluminium framed double doors. They were closed, and through the glass there was no light to be seen beyond.

Tayte sighed. ‘This doesn’t look good.’

He tried the door, and as expected, it was locked. There was a letterbox and a doorbell to his right. He pressed the button and heard a buzzer sound somewhere inside, thinking that during office hours it would have brought a security guard to the door.

‘At least it’s a nice afternoon,’ Jean offered. ‘I’d like to see the city centre as we’re so close. Do you want to get something to eat?’

Tayte had been trying to ignore the groans his stomach was making for the last couple of hours. A kind of brunch had been served on the plane, but however much he liked his food, he was always so tense during a flight that he could never face the in-flight meals. Something to eat sounded good, but a part of him just wanted to check in at the hotel and get on with his research. Several strands of interest had come out of their conversation with Johann Langner that he wanted to explore, but that part of him was the old part—the loner who rarely had anyone with him that he wanted to sit down and share a meal with.

He turned away from the building and gave Jean a smile. ‘That sounds great,’ he said, thinking it was what couples did on city breaks, but more importantly because he knew it was what Jean wanted to do. He caught a voice in his head then, telling him that the research could wait a few hours, and he almost laughed to himself. Before he’d met Jean such a thought would never have crossed his mind.

‘What is it?’ Jean asked, clearly noticing his smirk.

‘It’s nothing.’ Tayte grabbed Jean’s hand and led her back to the pavement, heading the same way the taxi had gone. ‘Let’s get another cab and ask the driver to take us to the finest restaurant in Munich.’

Jean laughed. ‘Are you paying?’

‘Sure, but in that case maybe I’ll ask for the second or third finest.’

They were laughing as Tayte turned back to see if there was a taxi coming, although he thought they would have to keep walking until they hit a more touristy part of the city. As he looked over his shoulder his smile turned to excitement when he saw two people, a man and a woman, at the glass doors they had just left. He drew Jean’s attention to them.

‘Look, someone’s going inside.’

He let go of Jean’s hand and almost jogged back up the steps to the door. He reached it just as it was closing.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. He was too excited to recall how to say it in German.

The door opened again and Tayte saw a tall, slim woman in a navy trouser suit, whom he thought was about Jean’s age, in her late thirties. The man Tayte had seen with her was standing in the shadows further back. The woman smiled expectantly, as though waiting for Tayte to say what he wanted.

‘Do you speak English?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ the woman said, a little indignantly, Tayte thought, as if he should have known that every German in a business suit spoke English.

Tayte paused to give himself time to get the pronunciation right for his next line. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for
Die Freunde der Waffen-SS Kriegsveteranen
. Is this the right place?’

The woman’s formerly pleasant expression changed to a frown. ‘We don’t have visitors.’

‘Well, can I make an appointment?’

‘No, I’m sorry. No visitors.’

She began to close the door, but Tayte quickly pulled out the photograph he had of his mother and thrust it across the threshold. He didn’t expect anything to come of it, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to be so direct as to ask if they were helping Volker Strobel evade the authorities.

‘I’m looking for this woman, or trying to find someone who can tell me her name. Can you at least tell me if you recognise her?’