1503954692 by Steve Robinson

be okay for the period we’re interested in if you didn’t first have to show that the person you’re interested in was deceased.’
    ‘I see,’ Jean said. ‘So what can we do?’
    ‘I think most of the information we can hope to gather will come from talking to people who knew Strobel and Langner, or those people who already have an interest in them, such as the man we’re going to see in the morning, Tobias Kaufmann. I’m hoping he’ll be able to tell us a thing or two. All we really have for now is what we’ve already heard from Johann Langner, and that only took us as far as 1938.’
    ‘We know they fell out over a girl called Ava Bauer,’ Jean said. ‘Can we find out more about her?’
    ‘We could try some general searches, but I don’t know that it would be worthwhile at this stage. I prefer to know what I’m looking for and why.’
    ‘We also know that Ava somehow came between Langner and Strobel, and that Langner regretted the day he introduced his friend to her.’
    ‘Jealousy?’ Tayte offered. ‘Fighting over the girl?’
    ‘That’s the impression I got from Langner earlier, although he didn’t directly say it.’
    Tayte closed his laptop again. ‘Jealousy seems most likely,’ he said. ‘Although we know from the research we conducted into Strobel prior to coming to Germany that he didn’t get the girl—not Ava anyway. According to Wikipedia Strobel married someone called Trudi Scheffler.’
    ‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t want Ava.’
    ‘No, it doesn’t. And if that’s the case, what terrible thing did Strobel do in connection with it? Langner was very clear that Strobel had done something.’
    ‘Jealousy can certainly bring out the worst in people,’ Jean said. ‘And by all accounts, Strobel was already on his way to becoming the very worst kind of person by the time the war broke out. When I found out that my ex-husband was cheating on me, I was jealous of the other woman for a very long time. What did she have to offer that I didn’t? It can eat away at you unless you get a hold of it. I wanted to do some terrible things to her, I can tell you. Sometimes I scared myself.’
    ‘But you didn’t, did you?’
    ‘No, of course not, but I thought about it.’
    ‘Thinking and doing are two very different beasts,’ Tayte said.
    ‘Yes, and Volker Strobel was clearly something else entirely. Who knows what a man like that was capable of.’
    Tayte agreed. He took a slow and thoughtful sip of his drink, considering that whatever had happened back then, the two friends and the girl, Ava, were clearly on some kind of collision course by the time the war began.

Chapter Nine
    Munich. April 1940.
    More than a year had passed since Johann Langner first met Ava Bauer, and the thought of seeing her again that evening made for a restless journey as the train he’d been travelling on for close to an hour carried him north to Munich. During that time they had seen one another far less frequently than Johann would have liked, not least because 1939 saw a new chapter in his life.
    At the beginning of that year, he and his friend, Volker Strobel, had left the Hitler Youth to join the enlisted ranks of the Waffen - SS , where they spent six months prior to their enrolment in the SS officers’ training school in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, which was thirty miles south of Munich. It was a paramilitary career path they had both been cultivated for over the years because of their exemplary service and leadership potential in the Hitler Youth, but the relocation had made any kind of contact with Ava very difficult.
    She had agreed to write to both Johann and Volker, all having become good friends during their brief time together, but so far, Ava had committed herself to neither man. Because of this, Johann and Volker often found themselves vying for her attention whenever the opportunity arose, and they would often compare the number of letters each had received from Ava, as though it were a