‘Lead on.’

He went to take her hand and lead her up the stairs but that was withheld. ‘I’ll wait for the explanation.’

‘You were in no danger, Corrie, I made sure of that.’

‘Well I have to tell you,’ she replied, her icy demeanour shattered and her eyes beginning to look tearful, ‘it sure as hell did not feel that way.’

The front door of the hotel burst open and Cal dropped to one knee as a reflex, the pistol coming up in both hands. Jimmy Garvin, looking dishevelled and as if the hounds of hell were on his tail, stopped dead, emitted a small moan and began to mouth a plea for mercy.

‘Thanks for looking after Corrie, Jimmy,’ Cal said, standing. ‘I won’t forget to tell your friends how intrepid you are.’

At least he was decent enough to look abashed as Cal commanded them to get out of the well-lit lobby.

‘No lights,’ he said as they slipped through the door. ‘Go over to the window and sit under the sill with your back to the wall.’

‘Why?’ asked the ingenuous young Jimmy.

‘Safest place when there are bullets flying about.’

He himself went to look out and the first thing he saw was a line of what had to be Czech police being deployed, taking up their positions, fully armed and lined up outside the entrance to the station, which indicated to Cal the first batch of the army would probably be coming in by train.

‘So?’ Corrie asked. ‘Do I get my explanation?’

‘Later, when Big Ears is not listening; right now we sit it out till the Czech army gets here.’

‘They’re coming?’ Jimmy asked, taking the silence as an affirmative.

‘How do you know?’

‘Do you ever stop asking questions?’

‘It’s what we do, Doc.’

‘Why do you call him Doc?’

‘Because, Jimmy,’ she replied, her tone bitter, ‘he’s a cartoon character, not real.’

How do you tell someone, especially with a third person present, that your life works in different boxes? She was feeling used and probably abused, so he went over and knelt beside her, whispering, ‘I know you’re angry and I can guess why, but just hold it all in for a while and when we’re alone I will tell you enough to reassure you that you were never in any danger.’

‘Then who was I running from?’

‘You throw your shoes at people, they get mad, Corrie.’

Her shoulders began to heave; it was funny and worthy of a laugh, but that soon turned to sobs as the pent-up fears surfaced and took over. He took her in his arms and held her close until they subsided and he got her onto the bed and told her to sleep, holding her hand until she went under.

‘Can you hear a train?’ Jimmy hissed, a few minutes later.

He was right, faint but unmistakable was the puffing of a steam engine, which grew louder until it was overtaken by the screeching of braking steel wheels. That was followed by the sound of shouting and both Cal and Jimmy watched as the troops emerged from the station to form up behind the screen of policemen.

‘Are those machine guns?’ Cal nodded. ‘Is there going to be a battle?’

‘There will be tankettes coming up the road from Liberec, artillery, and more troops as well. My guess is the Czech Government expected Hitler to declare war in his speech tonight and they intended to be on the move before he was. But the first thing they have to do is put down the locals in places like Cheb.’

‘This I’ve got to see,’ Jimmy insisted, as the troops began to march out of the square.

‘Nazi HQ, Jimmy, is where the main action will be, and don’t get yourself killed.’

As the youngster made for the door, Cal called him back. He had remembered his camera, which he now did not need, that or the film it contained.

‘Take this with you – you never know, you might get something useful.’

With the coming dawn, progress through the roadblock was finally possible and his dip plates as well as his irate insistence got Noel McKevitt priority, albeit not without a warning that there could be fighting up ahead. Delivered in German, he understood it; given twenty minutes later to Vince Castellano in Czech, all he could do was look understanding and nod silently before heading on up the road to Cheb.

There was no way of getting up any speed for either man and it was not just because of the amount of traffic, brought about by the hold-up. The army might not be moving, but by their mere presence they created endless bottlenecks, as trucks, horse-drawn artillery pieces, petrol and water bowsers, tankettes and all the paraphernalia of an army on the march did their best to tell the world they did not care how much inconvenience they could cause.

Peter Lanchester was awoken to take his morning coffee a couple of hours after they had departed Berlin, and he naturally, being British, enquired if the train would be on time. He was then treated to a level of disdain he had rarely experienced from an irate conductor, a pompous little man in his over-elaborate uniform.

In a mixture of bad and minimal English, mixed with a stream of German he barely understood, he was told in no uncertain terms that on the railway lines of the Reich, every train ran to its exact schedule.

The Paris-Prague Express would reach Eger at 11.15 on the dot. What time it would get to stations further down the line and Prague was down to the less efficient Czechs and he could not guarantee a prompt arrival there.

How Corrie slept through the din of battle amazed Cal but she managed it; the Nazis in Karl Hermann Frank’s headquarters were the most fanatical people in Cheb and would have put up stiff resistance anyway, but there was a chance they were reinforced by those SS troopers Veseli had told him about.

Machine gun fire went on for hours, into full daylight, as well as rifle shots which Cal presumed came both from within and without the heavily fortified building and which added to the clanging as bullets slammed into those steel shutters he had seen on his walk.

Slumber as she could, no one could stay that way when the artillery opened up: first the crump of the firing shell, soon followed by the blast as it smashed into concrete walls. Quietly, in between those noises and with a very necessary filter, Cal told her why he had come and how important it was that he did what he did, though he did not tell her what that was. It was really the way he had deserted her that was upsetting Corrie, especially after the intimacy they had shared the previous day in the woods and her room.

Cal knew enough about women to realise that they invested more heavily in a relationship than most men, which made them more vulnerable to the feeling that they might have made a mistake and allowed themselves to be seduced only for their bodies, not their being.

When they felt like that it was hard to find words that would provide enough reassurance, so Cal took the only way out he knew and to the sound of crumping artillery shells and pinging bullets they made love for the third time in less than a day.

‘Full marks for stamina, Doc,’ Corrie said as they lay quietly. ‘Sorry … Cal.’

‘Listen,’ he said, knowing he had been partially forgiven.

‘It’s gone quiet,’ she said. ‘That means it’s over.’

‘A bit of it is, Corrie, but it’s not over.’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘I doubt the cooking staff have shown up, but we can help ourselves.’

Jimmy Garvin was weary but ecstatic, having had a wonderful view of the assault on Frank’s Nazi HQ, and he had used up Cal’s film as soon as there was enough light to focus properly. Now he had to get to somewhere he could write the story and another spot from where he could send it to the news desk in London. The photographs were more of a problem; for that he needed a wire service and that was in Prague.

Still, if he could find a local camera shop he could get them developed. He headed back to the hotel, on his way passing a fair-haired, rather florid man asking a Czech army officer questions, forced to dodge out of the way as an old and oddly shaped car pulled up outside the hotel.