Chapter One

      ‘SS Oberführer Klaus Von Trellenberg was your grandfather.’ Stunned into silence, Kathryn felt an impulse to laugh. But Aunt Ingrid’s face was stern.

      In the same impartial tone, the revelation was repeated, the words exploding like shards of broken glass that shattered the stillness.

      ‘SS Oberführer Klaus Von Trellenberg was your grandfather.’

      Kathryn felt her jaw drop and couldn’t stop it. The shock induced a faint trembling and she drew in a long breath as her aunt continued.

      ‘Freda refused to discuss the past. It never happened, she buried it, her childhood in Germany, the war, everything that had gone before 1945 ceased to exist. She reinvented herself, erasing her Prussian past to embrace a new identity here. I think she almost believed she was English.’ A harsh guttural sound tinged her voice with bitterness. ‘I never understood Freda, we were total strangers; how we ever sprang from the same womb is beyond me.’

      ‘Is this why you wanted to see me, to tell me that my grandfather was a Nazi?’ Kathryn sneered. ‘Is this some kind of joke? My mother’s father an SS officer? It’s ridiculous! Her father was Kurt Hessler, a factory worker killed on active duty in 1943. He was your father too, Ingrid, you should know.’ Kathryn tried to contain the hint of fear entering her voice. ‘And your mother died of tuberculosis before the war.’ The doubt in Kathryn’s words begged to be assuaged. ‘Didn’t she?’

      Ingrid was shaking her head, eyes narrowing to thin slits full of derision, and Kathryn felt a strong urge to slap her aunt’s face.

      ‘Your grandmother was a Prussian aristocrat. She died in Berlin at the close of the war. She killed herself.’ Ingrid’s mind drifted back to a cold January in 1945. The memory of that night, repressed for so long, flooded her mind; so lucid it startled her, and she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Yet the image had come to life, moving through her head like the jerky silent movies she had watched so avidly as a child. She saw herself sitting on the edge of her bed in the Von Trellenberg house in Berlin. She was shivering not from cold, but from fear, and she knew she must get down to the cellar quickly. With hands clamped to her ears, to shut out the terrible sound of bombs dropping all around, she remembered calling first for Freda, then her mother, as she ran out of her bedroom and down the long hall towards her mother’s room. Up till this moment the memory had always been in black and white, and now for some reason it was a vivid colour.

      Her mother was dressed in an emerald green taffeta ball gown; her limp body looked like that of a rag doll hanging from the makeshift gallows erected from a bedpost and library ladders.

      The sound of the air raid faded to nothing as Ingrid’s screams, and the hammering of her own heart, filled her ears. Luize Von Trellenberg was wearing matching green silk shoes, one of which hung precariously from her big toe, the other had fallen to the floor. With a shudder, Ingrid remembered tripping over that shoe as she stumbled out of the room. She also remembered banging her head, and thought how strange it was that she should recall this now – after fifty years. She remained lost in thought as Kathryn spoke again.

      ‘Are you trying to tell me that it was all lies: my mother’s childhood in Cologne; her parents; the house where she was born, and grew up; the house that