‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Mr Wever,’ said Stuart. ‘By now you are one of us.’ ‘

Wever grunted as he bent over to retie his bootlaces.

‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’

‘No,’ said Wever. ‘Go ahead. And mind the patch of mud near the shed; the baker’s van got stuck in that last night. Took him half an hour to crawl out of it.’

‘Thanks, I will,’ said Stuart, and tucking his head down he hurried through the rain to his car. The motor started at the first touch of the key and he switched on all the lights so that he could negotiate the muddy lane without sharing the baker’s fate.

Stuart was almost at the Red Fox when the explosion occurred. The flash lit up the grey countryside like lightning, and the force of it made his ears pop even before he heard the noise. He turned his head in time to see the column of smoke. It was not the oily black smoke that stunt crews make for war movies. This was the real thing: a wraithlike smudge which dissipated almost immediately.

Stuart heaved on the brake as a hailstorm of wood chips and metal fragments splashed into the puddles round him and nicked his car’s paintwork. He opened the door and got to his feet in the pouring rain. This part of the country had long since had its hedgerows ripped away by cost-conscious farmers. The open fields gave Stuart a view of the Wever house. There was little left of it; the merest trace of smoke hung over the scattered stones and a large piece of the roof was leaning upon the nearest of the chicken houses.

Stuart returned to his Aston Martin. There was no sense in going back there. Even now there would be police cars and ambulances on the way. Furthermore, the standing instructions gave a strong warning against field employees becoming involved in police inquiries of any kind. The Secret Intelligence Service got no pleasure from sending high-ranking department officials across to the Home Office, cap in hand. In spite of all this, he turned his Aston in the car park of the Red Fox and went back.

The clock, thought Stuart. Perhaps the man who had come to mend the chimes had not been installing new ones. Perhaps he had planted explosive in the long case. It was that part of the house which had suffered most. But who had phoned Wever, and was it a warning?

The kitchen was the scene of the greatest damage. Only a close scrutiny by explosives experts would reveal whether the bomb had been placed in the clock, and they would have to search a long time to piece it together. The smell was almost overwhelming. He spat the soot from his mouth.

Wever must have been standing near the stove. There were hardly any signs of damage on his face or his clothes but he was bundled up like a rag doll in a toy box, and was unmistakably dead. Stuart went through his pockets but there was nothing there that one would not expect to find on a hard-working chicken farmer who was too old to cope with the work demanded of him and had cash problems that required him to put aside the payments on a second-hand rotovator.

So that was the man who had brushed shoulders with Hitler. Well, there were worse fates than ending up on an East Anglian chicken farm. There was no sign of Wever’s wife. He stepped carefully over the wreckage of wood splinters and broken glass to get to what had once been a bedroom. There was a cot in the corner. He picked up the woollen blankets. There was no sign of a baby.

The rain was still coming down steadily, soaking into the broken furniture, hissing upon the hot stove and dampening down the dust of the broken plaster. He turned back towards his car, glass cracking underfoot. It was as he stepped over the broken wall of the bedroom that he saw it. The rain had made the metal box shine and he stooped down to inspect the object more closely.

It was an expensive wall safe, built right into the brickwork of the bedroom, in a wall added to the house by the enterprising handyman, Franz Wever. The front of the safe was intact and its door firmly locked. It was the back of the safe that had sprung open with the collapse of the wall. He prised the metal back as if it had been the bent lid of a half-opened sardine can. His hand went into the gap and he found some bundles of papers.

There was an insurance policy, some letters from the local planning office giving permission for building new chicken houses. There were Wever’s permits and a West German passport stamped only twice for visits to Berlin. He had lied about never going back-what other lies had he told?

With this bundle there was another one, wrapped in the black plastic from which fertilizer bags are made, held tight with two rubber bands. Stuart snapped the fastenings off and unwrapped the packet. There was Wever’s old German army pay book, some souvenirs of foreign paper money dating from the war, and a medical form dated September 18, 1944, certifying him fit for infantry duties. Nothing of importance, thought Stuart, and looked at his watch. The police would surely be here any moment. There were houses and farms nearer than the Red Fox, and even there the sound had come like a thunderclap.

It was as he was about to rewrap the pay book that he saw the envelope tucked in amongst the ancient paper money. He ripped the flap open. There it was-Führerkopie, a page from one of the Lagebesprechungen, Hitler’s daily military conferences, with the names of Jodl, Göring and Hitler down the left-hand side. A script of some demented screenplay which played to packed audiences for six long nightmare years. So it had not been Breslow who was so obsessed by the contents of the tin boxes that he had to steal a souvenir, but Wever himself, the arch cynic to whom Hitler meant nothing.

There were other things too: a GPO receipt for a registered letter addressed to ‘General Delivery, Terminal Annex, Post Office, Los Angeles, California 90054 ’, dated almost one week earlier; a battered Reich Chancellery pass, stamped each month and signed up to the end of 1944. It was a good souvenir. There was a sepia, postcard-size photo, taken in some provincial studio by the look of it, the photographer’s name and an Austrian address in flamboyant script on the back. A young child posed stiffly in front of a painted backdrop of snow-covered mountains. One could almost hear the anxious father calling to the child to hold still.

The other photo was unmistakably amateur: a grubby snapshot from a cheap camera, the print now cracked and dog-eared. Three men were standing self-consciously in what looked like a factory yard. Behind them posts or perhaps factory chimneys and, beyond those, low rolling hills. The reproduction was too grainy to see any detail but one jackbooted young man in leather overcoat and mountain cap looked like Max Breslow. Alongside him, Wever stood in an awkward jokey pose, his elbow resting on Breslow’s shoulder, the other hand on his gun holster which was worn over a mottled camouflage jacket. The third man was in civilian clothes: a long black overcoat and, in his hand, a wide-brimmed felt hat. On the back of the photo ‘Max’, ‘Franz’ and ‘Rb. Dir. Dr Frank’ were written in pencil.

Stuart put the passes, the Führerkopie of the sheet of minutes and the photographs into his pocket before putting the rest of it back into the broken safe. Then he clambered over the debris and ran back to his car. Even before he started the engine, he could hear the wail of the police and ambulance sirens. By the time his car was at the main road he could see the flashing blue lights twinkling through the haze of rain as the police cars bumped along the track that marked the end of Wever’s few acres.