Tayte had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. When he awoke he initially thought he was going to be sick, which he put down to whatever drug had been pumped into him. As the feeling passed and he opened his eyes, he found he still couldn’t see anything. Wherever he was, he was in total darkness, although he quickly realised he was no longer in Volker Strobel’s drawing room. The air was much cooler here and there was a dampness to it he could smell, as though he were in a basement somewhere. He was still seated, but when he tried to stand up he found himself unable to. He had been bound to something that rattled when he rocked back and forth in an attempt to free himself, although he was surprised to find that there was no gag at his mouth. He was about to shout for help when he heard a familiar tune. It was the show tune he’d set up as a ringtone on his phone. He snapped his head towards the sound and saw his phone glowing in the darkness as the call came in.
Jean . . .
Tayte struggled with his bonds again, but it served no purpose. He couldn’t break free. A moment later he heard another sound and he froze. There were footsteps in the distance, growing louder. A few seconds later the room was flooded with light to such an extent that Tayte had to shut his eyes again and turn away from the door that had just opened in front of him.
‘So, you’re awake. It’s about time, sleepyhead.’
It was Max Fleischer. Tayte was getting tired of hearing his accented English tones. Fleischer was also now dressed as a member of the SS-Totenkopfverb?nde, and Tayte supposed he must have walked in on Strobel’s preparations for a neo-Nazi gathering of some kind.
Fleischer strode over to Tayte’s phone and picked it up. He looked to see who was calling. ‘It’s your lady friend,’ he said. He laughed. ‘Don’t worry. If you don’t make it through this, I promise I’ll take care of her for you.’ With that, Fleischer opened the back of the phone and popped the battery out. ‘We can’t be too careful, can we?’
Make it through this? Tayte thought. Through what?
As Tayte’s eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that he was strapped to an old wheelchair. He was in a small stone room that had been stripped of everything it had once contained, apart from the bright strip light above him and a crate of some kind, upon which his few personal effects had been set out. He heard more footsteps then and his attention was drawn back to the door as another wheelchair was pushed into the room. It was being guided by the taciturn Ingrid Keller, who Tayte now knew was not Johann Langner’s daughter, but Volker Strobel’s. Trudi Strobel’s story about Johann coming to her after he was released from prison was a blatant lie. It had been Volker Strobel, returning to his wife, whom Tayte now imagined he had been seeing in secret all these years.
‘Ah, Mr Tayte,’ Strobel said. ‘I’m afraid you missed my ceremony. I was being honoured for my former services to the Führer and the Fatherland, and for the past fifty years to the Fourth Reich.’
‘What time is it?’ Tayte asked, sounding a little groggy from the drugs. He was no longer wearing his watch, which he supposed was on the crate with the rest of his things.
‘It doesn’t matter what time it is,’ Strobel said. ‘The only thing that matters now is whether or not you want to get out of here. Do you want to get out of here, Mr Tayte? Go back to your sweetheart and fly home, eh?’
That sounded good to Tayte, but after all he’d seen and heard, whatever Strobel promised him, he knew it wasn’t going to happen. Even so, he had little choice but to play along for now. ‘Yes, I’d like that very much.’
‘Good! That’s a very good start indeed. Now, you remember I said I wanted you to help me?’
Tayte nodded.
‘Well, as I said, do this one thing for me and then you can go. But I don’t want to do it in here.’
Strobel nodded to Fleischer. ‘Bring him, Max.’
With that, Fleischer took hold of the wheelchair Tayte was strapped to and they followed Strobel and Keller out of the room. They were soon in a corridor that led along a stone-walled passage where Tayte saw exposed pipework, confirming his belief that he was in a basement somewhere. At the end of the corridor a procession of Nazi flags adorned the walls, lit by more of that overly bright and harsh strip lighting. They came to a door on which was hung a framed photograph of Volker Strobel as a young SS officer, shaking hands with a man Tayte recognised as Heinrich Himmler. Strobel must have noticed Tayte staring at the photograph as they waited for Keller to unlock the door.
‘It was taken on one of Himmler’s visits to the camp at Dachau,’ Strobel said. ‘I remember that his daughter, Gudrun, was with him.’
‘Really?’ Tayte said, sounding uninterested.