Yet you could not fault their efficiency: when they said his goods would be delivered on a set day, that was the day they would arrive in Hamburg, and he was there before them, in what was for him an old stamping ground. Gessler had assembled the agreed batch of weaponry, he had inspected everything and it was all proper; he had even tested random weapons and they worked.

There was a residual guilt from his last departure from the city, so hurriedly made, in which he had to go without saying goodbye to someone important: the lady who had not only occasionally shared a bed with him for several months, but also probably saved his life with a phone call. The walk he took around St Pauli, with a hat low on his eyes, took him past many of the places he had frequented and it was good to know the people who had been there before were still around.

They were doing what they had always done, selling the dream of a good time as long as you could pay, very likely purveying stuff you could buy for one mark for ten – twenty if you were a real idiot; the club hostesses were still pretending to drink what was supposed to be champagne and the heavies were still there to ensure the clients pay the excessive bills when they complained.

The sad bit missing was the bar of Fat Olaf, where Peter Lanchester had found him on that fateful day. That was closed and shuttered, and where was he? Had he paid a price for Cal Jardine getting away before the Brownshirt SA thugs arrived to beat his brains out? He hoped not, and the chances were good; Fat Olaf was a survivor, maybe he had opened up somewhere else.

He had walked the Reeperbahn, slipping into the Herbertstraße as darkness fell to make sure Gretl the great dominatrix was still plying her trade and her whips, glad to see her in a new costume of sparkling gold, glaring out with practised ferocity to the street, waiting for those players and payers who wanted to go home and tell a great story about their Hamburg adventure; it had never occurred to Cal that anyone really enjoyed the first part of Gretl’s thing, it was the way she took the pain away that made her an institution.

He was sad that he dare not say hello, because he did not have a clue what had happened when he left; Lette might know and, if she still worked in the local party HQ, would be finished by now. She had an apartment in Trommelstraße, not a place with a telephone and not a good address, but one with neighbours who looked after her kids when she was working.

It was not easy to call without everyone knowing – it certainly had not been in the past, and many was the time he had been ribbed when he came of a night, doubly so if he was spotted by the old lady scrubbing the stone steps as he left in the morning, and in a sense he was breaking an agreed rule: she had always known if he went it would be sudden, he had an unspoken order that the break should be final.

It’s damned difficult to be on the wrong side of a door when you worry about what might happen when you knock. Lette was a beautiful widow, good company, and there might be a new man in her life, which made Cal wish he could pretend to be some kind of door-to-door salesperson. That there was someone home, he knew – the radio was playing dance music.

He raised his hand to knock, then hesitated, thinking to walk away. This was all wrong, it went against the grain of everything he advised others to do, everything he thought right about how to behave – you cut the cord when it was life and death. Just then a neighbour came out to use the communal toilet and he had to hit the door to avoid suspicion.

It was heart-stopping the way the music diminished, the sound being turned down, and his heart was in his mouth as he waited, listening to the farting coming from the toilet. When the door was opened it was by Lette’s daughter, Inge, no longer the gauche twelve-year-old he remembered, but a promising fourteen and looking like the beginnings of a real woman.

‘Uncle Cal,’ she cried, her eyes wide open with glad surprise; then she flung herself at him and her shout brought the two boys running. Christian and Günter, both younger than their sister. They were around his legs within seconds, shouting his name. Having ruffled their hair and said their names he looked up and there was Lette, in an apron and looking tired, in what passed for a hall; was she drying her hands, or was that hand-wringing fear?

‘Hey,’ was his feeble greeting.

She came forward, maternal in the way she shuffled the children inside so she could shut the door, this while he was subjected to a stream of questions asking where he had been, and as children do, the boys were telling him about what had happened to them in between now and the last time he had seen them, gabbling away in near incoherence.

She was clever, Lette, the way she shooed the children away so she herself could give him a kissed greeting, in truth the chance to whisper in his ear that he should say nothing incriminating, that the boys, particularly, could not be trusted.

‘Say you have been at sea.’ Then she turned and began to take off her apron. ‘You take care of Uncle Cal, while I go and see if Old Ma Pieffer can look after you.’

Moans and groans ensued, the selfish cries of the boys contrasted with the self-possession of Inge as he was dragged to the table, covered in an oilskin cloth that had seen better times, to tell stories of South America, Spain, of creatures too fabulous to be real and to indulge in that visitor pastime, giving the children money.

‘Are you coming back to stay, Uncle Cal?’

When he looked at Inge then, it nearly broke his heart; he knew she saw him like a parent and had done so from the very first day they had met. They had bonded as if it were predestined, she trusting him, he good with her, and if leaving Lette had been hard, leaving Inge, whom he thought of as a daughter, was worse.

‘Boys, you have your bank still?’ The yeses were larded with anticipation – he had always been generous, and Cal obliged by emptying his pockets of pfennigs and the odd mark, passing them over. Then they dashed into the only bedroom where, no doubt, they would boast one was richer than the other.

‘Are you here to stay?’

He could not answer, but then he did not have to; his silence was sufficient. Looking at her, bonny but not yet fully formed, he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her as he had once done, maybe tell her the stories he had loved inventing. Somehow she was beyond that. It was a relief that Lette returned with the news that Old Ma Pieffer was on her way down.

‘I can’t, little one.’

Inge nodded and he knew that when he was gone she would cry. Lette had her coat on and was keen to get out of the door and there was just a flash of jealousy in Inge’s eyes that her mother spotted and smothered with a kiss; if Cal was close to Inge, her mother was closer still. Then they were out on the landing, his nose twitching at the odour of the neighbour’s noisy evacuation, down the stone stairs and into the street.

‘What do you mean “We can’t talk”?’

The laugh was hollow. ‘What do you think will happen when Christian and Günter go to school tomorrow? Once they have sung a hymn to the damned Führer they will be asked if anything strange has happened and they will say Uncle Cal came back. Their good National Socialist teacher will ask who Uncle Cal is.’

‘For the sake of Christ.’

‘You do not know what they will say, what they will be asked, or the consequences, and that, my lost love, is life in the Third Reich; I cannot even talk in front of my own children, because if I do they will be encouraged to denounce me. So, do you think we could have talked in there about why you had to leave and the phone call I made to give you a chance to flee?’

‘Is there somewhere we can go?’

‘Cal, this is St Pauli, there are a hundred places we can go.’