The road terminated at a gate.

‘That is Shark Island.’ Angus indicated a kind of peninsula, jutting out into the sea. ‘We take this path…’

They paced along a hot burning track that hugged the shoreline, hemmed in by broken concrete walls. Then they paused. A windswept and derelict warehouse loomed to their left, providing shade. The smell of the cold rich Benguela current was intense in the burning air.

Swift and concise, Angus explained.

‘Shark Island is where the Germans did a lot of their killing, in the 1900s. Used to be an island, now it’s attached by a causeway. This is where the Germans herded all the Witboii to die. In the Holocaust.’

‘Not the Herero?’

‘Nah. Different Holocaust. Another Holocaust. I know. I know.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I’ll explain sometime. Show me the map, with the writing.’

The precious old map. David pulled it from his jacket. The blue sad stars, the sad old creases. And the writing on the back.

Angus squinted at the tiny scrawl, and exhaled, his eyes barely an inch from the paper.

‘You’re quite right. It’s his handwriting. Dresler.’

Seagulls wheeled above them; a Namsea fish-truck rumbled in the distance, backing into a vast warehouse.

‘I think it might be an address,’ David said. He pointed. ‘See. Isn’t that “strasse”?’

‘Yes. But…’ Angus frowned. He twisted, looking around, the sea-wind tousling his rusted hair. ‘This is an address, a German name I don’t recognize – there is no Zugspitzstrasse here. In fact, not anywhere in Luderitz. How does it link to Shark Island?’

Amy spoke: ‘Maybe he was just…decoying. A lie?’

‘No,’ Angus replied, very firmly. ‘Dresler was petrified when he coughed that info. You saw him. Pissed himself like a baby. That bit is true. There is something here…on Shark Island. But I don’t see if it connects with what’s written on the map…’

Again, he gazed around at the yellow scene, at the haze of dust, the scruffy grey road, the derelict sheds and wharves. The hot wind ferried the elegiac coughs of seals from beyond the cliffs. ‘We need something German. Here. Connected with the Germans.’ His gaze fixed. ‘There. The Holocaust museum. That hut…must be.’

‘Holocaust museum?’

Angus shrugged. ‘I know. Doesn’t look much. But yes, that’s a museum, it’s tiny, this is Africa – but it’s very important to the Namibians. It’s usually closed. I mean – so remote, they get no visitors. You book by appointment and -’

David advanced.

‘Come on!’

The museum was a low wooden building, battered by the brutal Benguela winds, at the very end of the promontory. The museum door was shut. The air was somehow cold and hot at the same time. David could feel his skin burning, the sunshine was truly painful now.

Angus turned a handle and pushed. Locked. David stepped alongside, and briskly kicked at the door. It succumbed with ease, the lock shattered.

They were inside. The hot wooden space was full of shelves and cabinets and glass cases ranked along the walls; and three large skulls grinned at them from the top of a large plinth.

‘Christ,’ said Amy.

Angus explained: ‘The Herero Skulls. Fischer had them scraped clean by Herero women, they had to flense the skulls of their own murdered husbands. He wanted to examine them, compare skull sizes. Bless his little callipers. But we need to find – I don’t know – where would the Fischer data be – they are here – there must be something here -’

They searched. Frantic and determined, they searched and scoured, they ransacked the dusty display cases, they overturned shelves of old books with titles in Gothic script, flicking desperately through the pages. Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen.

But nothing. They sorted and sifted through scientific instruments, somehow gynaecological and ghastly in their pristine steeliness. Nothing. David shunted aside a box of desiccated human bones, feeling guilt and horror as he did so. He was mistreating the evidence of two forgotten genocides, the hideous relics of a lost racial empire.

There was nothing. They were confounded. It was done. The three of them knelt in the centre of the little hut and shared their despair: whispering and quick. Angus was looking at his watch.

‘That chopper goes in forty minutes – if we don’t get it -’

Amy stared around, her eyes bright and hostile. The Herero Skulls grinned at them, from the tragic plinth in the corner. She coughed the dust and said.

‘Horrible place. Horrible. I don’t understand, Angus. There is nothing here from Germany, nothing at all, it’s all Namibian. German Empire but Namibian. How could the Fischer data be here anyway?’

Angus nodded, his voice low and resigned. ‘You’re right. It’s all Namibian…’

David listened. Saying nothing. The skulls smiled at him, laughing at the Cagot. Was he a Cagot? They were mocking him. He tried to drive the thought from his mind. Focussed himself on the map. The clue.

‘Zugspitzstrasse. What does it mean?’

‘Nothing obvious.’ Angus sighed, and shook his head. ‘It’s a common German street name. I’ve heard it before…’ His expression stilled, and changed, and flashed, and was transformed. ‘I’ve heard it before! Jesus!’ He stood up. ‘I’ve heard the name before. David. The map! One more time, yes yes, this is it -’

They all stood. Life quickening in the veins.

The map was unfolded in the dusty light. Angus held the paper a fraction from his face, reading the tiny line of writing.

‘It’s the address of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut. In Berlin! Zugspitzstrasse. 93. The store rooms.’

‘How -’

‘Famous in…eugenic circles. Not really known to anyone else. This was a note made by Dresler for your father, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So he’s given him an address. Where to find the Fischer data, maybe, or some clue as to where the data might be…This is the Institut.’

‘But it’s in Berlin. How does it relate to here -’

The scientist’s smile was triumphant. Even in the pure and horrifying drama, he was helplessly exulting in his own cleverness.

‘I worked it out! There is something in this room from Germany.’

He turned and pointed. At the Herero Skulls.

‘Them?’

‘They were repatriated, from Berlin, in 1999. After years of wrangling. They used to be kept in the Kaiser Wilhem Institut. Now they are here. They have been to Germany. They were in Fischer’s possession throughout the war, and after at the Institut. The answer must be in them somehow.’

Angus moved quickly to the plinth and picked up the biggest skull. He turned the sad and smiling cranium in his hand.

‘An obscene joke. The Nazis loved obscene jokes, they paved Jewish ghettos with Jewish gravestones, so the Jews would trample their own dead. And -’ He was examining the skull, closely. ‘And where better to hide something very, very…important…than a skull like this? A sacred relic of a terrible genocide. Fischer must have known no one would ever smash it open, retrieve the secret, unless they definitely knew what they wanted, where they were seeking.’ He lifted up the skull, squinted inside, then he lifted it higher, talking quietly to the skull. ‘Sorry, brother, I am so very fucking sorry – but I have to do this. Forgive me.’

He dropped the skull on the floor. The dry aged bone shattered at once, almost gratefully. Crumbling in the dust, adding dust to orange dust.

A tiny steel cylinder glinted on the floorboards, amidst the scattered shards of bone. Angus picked it up.

‘Hidden in the olfactory cavity.’

Amy and David gathered around. Faces tensed, and perspiring.

Angus ripped the top off the slender metal tube, and pulled out a tiny, exquisitely rolled piece of paper, almost leathery in consistency, like parchment but somehow finer.

The Scotsman focussed and examined the yellowed slip of paper. Etched across the paper, in faded old ink, was a tiny map.