Prologue

Göttingen, Germany, March 1933

In another time and place, it would have taken all of Harry’s self-control not to laugh at the spectacle in front of him. But this was neither the time nor the place, and he had the growing sense that they ought to have left long ago.

He had found himself captivated, though, by the woman sitting at the table next to them. She had a wide face, full cheeks, a radiant smile and tumbling auburn hair. Her laugh demanded attention and he’d been rewarding it with more than was polite, even if they had yet to be introduced or exchange a word. He told himself that the pimply youth engaging her in earnest conversation must be a brother or cousin, perhaps a friend.

They were in the gloomy basement of a beer hall called the Ratskeller, normally the haunt of students and those leftists still brave enough to show their faces in public. But tonight it was awash with sweaty Nazis, drunk on Pilsner, their pristine, ridiculous uniforms and the very real prospect—the reality, even—of absolute power. It was a cavernous room, with dark timber panelling, iron light fittings that hung low over the bar, and vaulted stone ceilings, which seemed to magnify the Nazis’ booming voices into something that resembled rolling thunder. Perhaps it was. The gloom was thick with cigarette smoke, tables draped in stained white cloths packed close together.

Harry, who had been studying under the great mathematics professors Hermann Weyl and Edmund Landau for his entire term away from Cambridge, was trying to explain to David Wilson, who had missed the first half of the term due to illness, just how much had changed since the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s emergency decree, which had been its most direct consequence. The Nazis had real power now and, in his view, intended to use it to extinguish what remained of Weimar’s fragile democracy. Even the Ratskeller’s owners had thought it safer to nail up photographs of Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering, which hung just above Harry’s head in the corner.

The Führer was no longer a laughing matter, if he ever had been. And the presence at the long Nazi table of Simon Hughes-Hallett and Ed Haddon, their fellow Cambridge students, only served to underscore that fact. If the cream of the British aristocracy was now paying homage to these dangerous men, the world had a problem. ‘We should go,’ Harry told Wilson. His friend was not of a martial, or even brave, disposition and he thought it best to get him away before things deteriorated.

The pimply youth at the table next to them appeared to agree. He nodded. ‘We should, too,’ he told the vibrant woman opposite him.

‘I’m enjoying myself,’ she shot back. ‘I haven’t seen anything this funny in years.’

‘We shouldn’t be laughing.’

‘So you say. I don’t see why not. They’re all fat and sweaty, the ugliest people I’ve ever seen in my life.’

‘Sadly, politics in Germany,’ Harry interjected, sensing his chance for an introduction and leaning across the gap between their tables, ‘as everywhere else, is not a beauty contest.’

The woman turned to him and gave him the benefit of her mega-watt smile. ‘It really should be.’

He offered her his hand. ‘Harry Tower.’

She took it, her palm cool to the touch. ‘Amanda James.’

The Brownshirts at the table nearest to the wall stood to delight the few student drinkers who had remained with another rendition—their third—of the Horst Wessel song. Hughes-Hallett rose to his feet beside them. He was a big man, gone early to seed, with a puffy face that made him look like a pumpkin. He was very drunk too, with a voice that could shatter glass at a hundred paces. ‘Isn’t he the one who urinated on you from his rooms in the quad?’ David Wilson asked.

Harry had forgotten he’d told Wilson that.

‘Die Fahne hoch!’ the men belted out. ‘Die Reihen fest geschlossen!’ Raise the flag! Our ranks are closed!

The room fell silent in acquiescence. There were already rumours that Göttingen’s world-famous mathematics department was about to be purged of all its Jews, or those married to them, which would likely render it next to useless. The assumption was that every other faculty would soon face similar pressures. Harry had already written to the college authorities back home to outline his concerns, not that it would do him, or them, much good. He was giving serious thought to cutting short his studies here.

‘SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt.’ The SA marches with calm, steady step.

Like hell it does, Harry thought. The SA was the least calm and steady body of men he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter.

‘My God,’ Amanda said, in horror. ‘They are simply appalling.’

As the song ground on towards its inexorable and somewhat telling conclusion—‘Already Hitler’s banners fly over all streets. The time of bondage will last but a little while now’—Harry’s gaze was drawn to a man who sat alone in the corner. At first, he’d thought him likely to be one of the university’s academics, but any reputable professor would surely long since have had the good sense to depart. And this slight, angular fellow just sat there, tugging at his moustache and drinking his single glass of Pilsner with measured care. And watching everyone. Who was he? Harry wondered. And why was he sitting alone, his gaze flicking from Harry to the Nazis and their companions and back again?

He surely wasn’t from the Gestapo. It was a facet of life in Hitler’s new Germany that you always felt watched.

Unable to contain herself, Amanda stood and proceeded to goose-step up and down the room with her finger beneath her nose to imitate Hitler’s moustache.

Her mockery was so brazen that the uniformed thugs and their companions fell silent. Only Hughes-Hallett’s booming voice pierced the hush. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ He looked at the pimply youth she had been sitting with. ‘Can’t you control your woman, Carrington? I thought she was supposed to be the daughter of an earl. You’d think she’d have more damned manners.’

The nearest Nazi reached over and tried to grab Amanda’s skirt. She pulled away, but he had enough of a hold to force her to slip on the flagstones. She hit the floor hard. Another Nazi, a big sweaty man with dark hair cropped close to his skull, lurched forward, took the hem of Amanda’s dress and flipped it over her head to reveal her underwear. There was a roar of laughter.

Amanda screamed. The man stood over her, as if about to contemplate a more serious assault. But Carrington dived at his feet to reassemble Amanda’s clothes and beg forgiveness. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘she’s very drunk. She meant no harm.’

Yes, she bloody did, Harry thought. And liked her all the more for it.

Carrington hurried Amanda towards the door and, for a moment, it looked as if that might be the end of the matter. But Harry had seen enough of the Nazis to know restraint was not part of their make-up. The men stood and began to follow the couple to the door, hitching their belts and pulling up their sleeves.

Harry caught the eye of the man in the corner. A half-smile tugged at the corners of his lips, as if he was interested to see how this would play out. He was gazing intently at Harry, his right hand clutching a Homburg on the table in front of him. He had his coat on his lap, as if about to leave.

‘Stay here,’ Harry instructed David Wilson. The last thing he needed was a vicar’s progeny as a wingman in a dark alley late at night.

Harry hurried up the steps and emerged into a chill wind, the cobbled alley half lit by a single street-lamp. He heard voices, then a single, anguished cry. He walked into the gloom and figures gradually took shape. Carrington was at the back, an ineffectual, whimpering bystander. Amanda was somewhere in the midst of the sweaty throng, trying to fight back, grunting and crying in terror.

Harry could not quite discern the men’s intention—harassment, humiliation, assault, rape—but if he had learnt one thing in the tumult of his childhood, it was how to handle dangerous odds.

Attack with overwhelming force.

And then run fast.

He hit the men at the back of the group, like a runaway train. They were drunker than he had imagined and scattered like pins in a bowling alley. But the big man who had assaulted her first recovered quickly. He turned, faced Harry. ‘Scheisser,’ he grunted. He swung with a giant fist, but Harry was too fast. He ducked easily, then hit the big man such a devastating punch with his right that he careered back into a drain-pipe and smashed to the ground.

Harry picked up Amanda, threw her over his shoulder and ran, through the twisting fog, down the winding cobbled street beneath the ethereal glow of the night lamps.

The footsteps behind them faded into rancid curses.

They stopped running. He put Amanda down. She had a hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh, despite the trauma of the assault. ‘Whoever you are, you’re a bloody maniac,’ he said.

She smiled back at him. ‘Well, whoever you are, you’re a good man to know in a tight spot. How did you learn to fight like that?’

‘Wait here.’

Harry retraced his steps carefully, wanting to be sure their pursuers had abandoned them to the night. He lurked in the gloom by the entrance to a butcher’s shop not far from the scene of their crimes.

The Ratskeller was swallowing the last of the dejected Nazis. Carrington, the pimply youth, had vanished. And only the small, slight man who had been watching him in the bar stood outside still, playing with his moustache.

Who the hell was he?

Perhaps it was Harry’s imagination, but he seemed to smile as he raised his hat. Harry turned away from him and headed back, a spring now in his step, to the woman who had just exploded into his life.