‘I know what you mean,’ Jean said. ‘You can’t knock the place for authenticity though, can you?’
They came to a display of Hitler Youth daggers and Tayte wondered why none of these boys’ parents thought it just plain wrong to have their thirteen-year-old child running around with such a weapon attached to his belt. He imagined some mothers must have, but were perhaps too afraid to voice their concerns. On their way around the education centre they saw several other visitors and a few more members of staff in their Hitler Youth costumes, although if this was a typical day’s business, Tayte thought Johann Langner must be running the place at a loss in order to keep the past in people’s minds. They saw numerous display cabinets as they wandered through lecture rooms, classrooms and a large sports hall, which were all connected through a matrix of corridors whose parquet floors, as with everything else, had been painstakingly restored to their original form.
Over an hour had passed by the time they had gone full circuit, and when they arrived back at the entrance hall Tayte thought it was good to have visited the place, even if he had to concede that it had done nothing to further their understanding of why his mother had gone there.
‘I think I’d like to go someplace and get my laptop out,’ Tayte said. ‘Do some digging around online.’
‘Do you want to get a coffee?’
Tayte had seen a sign for the on-site coffee shop. ‘You mean, here?’
Jean frowned. ‘No, definitely not here. We can’t be too far from a decent café, though. Maybe we could stop off somewhere on the way back to the hotel.’
‘Sure,’ Tayte said. ‘That sounds great.’
As they made their way back to the car, Tayte said, ‘Would you like to go out for dinner tonight? We can get a coffee first, have a stroll through the city, and find somewhere fancy to eat.’
‘I’d love to, but I’d like to get out of this day dress first.’
‘You look great,’ Tayte said with a grin. ‘Sometimes it’s nice just to go with the flow and see where it takes you. Don’t you think?’
Jean laughed at him. ‘And there I was thinking you were a routine kind of guy.’
‘Hey, I’m working on it, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, you are,’ Jean said, laughing again. She reached up and gave him a kiss. ‘Thank you.’
As they got back into the car, Tayte smiled to himself and thought he would have to work on it more often.
Chapter Eighteen
They found an independent café in a sunny spot set back from the main road just outside Munich’s city centre, where it was also easier to find a parking space. Jean ordered a single pastry between them to go with their coffee.
‘We should share one,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to ruin our appetites for that fancy dinner you mentioned.’
Tayte had to smile. They were still getting to know one another, and he thought that Jean clearly didn’t know him all that well yet, or she would have known he could have eaten her half of the pastry and another two besides without putting so much as a dent in his appetite.
They set up at a table in the window, looking out at the tables and chairs in the forecourt, rather than sitting out in the early evening sunshine, because Tayte’s laptop screen didn’t handle bright light very well. He got his notebook out and flicked through the pages to find the information he’d written down when they left the elderly lady at the apartments by the waterway earlier. As he opened his laptop, he was glad to see the place offered free Wi-Fi.
‘I’ve been wanting to explore the drowning of Geoffrey Johnston,’ he said, ‘so why don’t we start there. Maybe his death was an accident, but I’d like to satisfy my curiosity.’
‘I’ll see what I can find on my tablet,’ Jean said.
Using Google’s translation services to better understand his findings, Tayte started with the German national broadsheet newspaper, Die Zeit, which he’d used a few times whilst looking into Volker Strobel before he and Jean left England. It was the country’s most widely read weekly newspaper, and it had a good digitised archive available online that dated back to the newspaper’s creation in 1946. Tayte started with the year he was most interested in—1973, the year his mother and Karl had gone to see Elijah Kaufmann. He figured Geoffrey Johnston, whoever he was, was likely to still be alive at that point. Tayte entered Geoffrey Johnston’s name into the search field. No results were found, so he tried 1974 and was presented with a single result from January that year.
At that moment, Jean looked up from her tablet PC and said, ‘You’re kidding me?’
‘What?’ Tayte said. ‘What is it?’
Jean put her tablet PC on the table and spun it around for Tayte to see. ‘Geoffrey Johnston has his own Wikipedia page. He was a British diplomat with the Foreign Office. His last role was Consul-General, Munich.’
‘Are you sure that’s the same Geoffrey Johnston?’ Tayte asked, scrolling through the information Jean had found.