Langner studied the image. ‘You seem very sure of the year. How can you be so certain?’
‘I’ll come to that in a minute, if you don’t mind,’ Tayte said. ‘Do you recognise her?’
Langner seemed to give it some thought. He took his time before answering. Then he began to shake his head. ‘No, I’m sorry.’
Tayte had been prepared for that. He didn’t expect it to be so simple. ‘But you do recognise the building she’s standing in front of.’ It wasn’t a question.
Langner brought the photograph closer to his good eye and scrutinised it.
Jean joined the conversation. ‘You bought the building from the government in 1958 after it was earmarked for demolition as part of an area regeneration project.’
Langner began to nod his head as he set the photograph down onto the bed. ‘Yes, this is one of my buildings. It’s on the outskirts of the city, not far from here. The stone lions were originally placed there as representations of strength and courage. They’re quite unmistakable.’ He smiled at Jean. ‘You’ve certainly done your research. I can see that you already know a good deal more about me than I know about you.’
The remark caused Jean to fidget in her seat. She pushed her shoulder-length brown hair back over one ear and returned an awkward smile. ‘It’s made a welcome change to the historical figures I usually find myself researching.’
Langner laughed. ‘The living over the dead, eh? It will not be long now before I am one of your historical figures myself.’ He turned to Tayte. ‘So your mother was outside one of my buildings when this picture was taken, and you’ve come all this way in the hope that I can help you to identify her?’
‘Perhaps not directly,’ Tayte said.
The months of research that had begun when he’d opened the safety deposit box his late friend and mentor, Marcus Brown, had bequeathed to him had led him here, and now he only hoped his hunch was right—he was desperate for it to be right. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a folder, which he placed on his knees. Opening it, he withdrew a photocopy of a newspaper cutting Marcus had left for him, along with a brief letter explaining that he hadn’t told him about it before because he didn’t want Tayte to get his hopes up until he had more to go on. That’s all there was, and Tayte supposed Marcus must have made the discovery close to his death or there would have been more. However little, Tayte believed it was enough.
‘I’m sure you remember the day this picture was taken for the local newspaper, the Abendzeitung,’ he said, handing it to Langner.
Langner took the photocopy. It showed two images of the same neo-classical building. One was clearly more recent than the other and had been taken when the newspaper article was printed in 1963. The other was from an unforgettable time in world history. Both images showed a wide three-storey building, with what Tayte considered to be an oppressive central portico, whose towering concrete pillars reached almost to the full height of the structure. In the centre were the two stone lions, exactly as they appeared in the photograph Tayte had of his mother.
The letters above the main doorway were obscured in the photograph, showing only part of the words spelled out above it: ‘nd E’. With only the limited elements of the photograph to go on, Tayte had come to think of the building as a hotel somewhere, and he’d spent many hours trying to work out possible names for it—the Grand Excelsior perhaps. He’d spent a great many more hours researching those hotels whose names fitted, but he’d found nothing that matched. And it was no wonder, because he now knew he’d been looking in the wrong places. The words above the main entrance weren’t even English, they were German: ‘Blut und Ehre’—‘Blood and Honour’.
Tayte heard Langner say something then, but it was spoken too softly to make out. ‘I’m sorry, what was that?’
‘Hitlerjugend,’ Langner repeated, gazing now at the newspaper copy as though the older image, with its tall Nazi Party flags adorning the pillars, had stirred old memories within him. ‘Blut und Ehre was the motto of the Hitler Youth. The building was established for promising young boys from all over Germany.’ He shook his head. ‘I wanted to do something good with that place, although many of Munich’s people at the time would sooner have seen it destroyed. I believed it was important to preserve it.’ He paused. ‘What’s that British phrase I’m looking for? Ah, yes . . . Lest we forget.’
‘So you turned it into a museum?’ Jean said.