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I thought justice was meant to be the watchword now. I thought the country was going to be cleansed. So why hasn’t that notion reached Unterwald?

Noemi dropped to her knees in the long grass, oblivious to the summer flowers spreading out like a carpet around her. Automatically reaching for the gun she’d thrown away when she’d thought her battles were done. If she’d had it to hand now, she’d be firing.

She’d been conjuring up images of the town for months, ever since she’d retreated into the forest. She’d walked up and down its streets and round the market square on dozens of long, lonely nights spent revisiting her old haunts, and she’d kept every inch of its landscape the same as it was when she’d been happy there.

She’d promised herself the buildings would be intact and unscarred, that they wouldn’t have seen bombs or fire.

She’d kept the framework of her hometown safe in her head.

But not the people who’d hurt her and her family, and especially not Viktor.

He hadn’t been in any of the pictures she’d conjured up once the way Germany was going to be governed had been explained to her, and she’d pictured him finished.

‘You shouldn’t encounter too many problems heading south, other than the obvious food and transport challenges.

Munich and Nuremberg are wrecks of course, but the Americans are in charge in Bavaria, and that’s a far better prospect than the Soviets.

I imagine most people are hoping they’ll be under their rule, or the British, once the country’s fully occupied and carved up. ’

Noemi couldn’t find any pity for Munich or Nuremberg – they would only ever be places filled with bad memories for her.

But she didn’t want to see the evidence of their dying days, and she couldn’t bring herself to trust any of the Allied troops while the war was still raging, not after the vengeance she’d witnessed from the hillside above Dresden.

That was why she’d stepped back then and let the world carry on moving towards whatever peace might mean without her.

She’d fled into the depths of the Tharandt Forest the day after the city’s destruction and made a home for herself there close to the banks of a well-stocked pond.

She’d kept herself to herself as much as she could, moving round the scattered hamlets that edged the trees only at night, never speaking or showing herself to anyone.

Nobody had noticed her pressed into the shadows outside their windows once night fell, listening to their radio broadcasts.

Nobody knew who’d left a freshly caught carp or trout wrapped in leaves on their doorstep at the same time a shirt disappeared from a washing line or a tree mysteriously lost its fruit.

Noemi didn’t steal for stealing’s sake. She only took what she needed; she always left some form of payment.

Nobody came hunting for her, but she never felt safe.

And it hadn’t been easy to re-emerge from her isolation, even when the news about Hitler’s death and Germany’s surrender was all over the airwaves.

Her first steps back had been tentative ones, an exercise in rebuilding her trust. She’d spent a night in a barn here in return for a day’s apple-picking, a few more in a town there in exchange for helping to clear up its bombed buildings.

Her re-entry had become easier as she met more people like herself, alone and a long way in every sense from home.

Wary but wanting to believe there might be kindness again in the world, or at least not wanting to add to the harm it already carried.

Happy to cross paths and provide a little companionship for an hour or two and move on.

Eventually, she’d begun to drift in and out of the Displaced Persons’ camps, where there was hot food and clean clothes and volunteers offering advice.

None of them had heard of Unterwald, but they’d all told her Bavaria was a sensible choice.

That anything was preferable to stumbling into the Russians who controlled Berlin and the north-east of the country.

‘The Americans hate Germans the same as everyone else does. But their soldiers are better disciplined, and they don’t seem to have any problems with Jews, which is never a given with the Russians.

They’ve also sworn to flush out Nazis from their sector and make them pay for their crimes, which would presumably make your hometown safer for you to go back to. ’

That was welcome advice. It had allowed Unterwald to properly become the idyllic place of her childhood again.

Noemi had forced Dresden out of her head; she’d grabbed on to her old dreams. She’d put her parents back into the town and into their businesses the way she’d imagined them when she was in the convent – as happy as they’d been before Hitler came to power – and rewritten her birthplace as if the war hadn’t happened.

That had been a comfort. But remembering them had also brought back memories of Pascal, and those weren’t a comfort at all; they were cinders burning her skin.

There wasn’t a space for men like him, and especially not men like his father, in any version of the town where her parents could be safe.

So she’d pushed Pascal away as hard as she’d pushed away Dresden’s fires.

She’d papered over him instead with a picture of Matthias – recovered from his injuries and alive and reunited with her – standing at her side in the café, with Hauke and Frieda smiling behind them. That had been a far safer image.

Noemi began the last stage of her journey home convinced her happy ending had to be waiting for her.

It took her a long time to accept that she was fooling herself, that nothing about her future – and very little about her present – was in her control.

Or that, for all their good intentions, the Americans – who rarely spoke the language and were struggling to force a silent and sullen population into categories they didn’t want to fit into – couldn’t control it either.

The conquering troops were overstretched and exhausted and deeply shocked by the scale and the horror of the crimes they’d uncovered.

The conquered population was reeling from its defeat, afraid of discovery or guilt-ridden.

To add to their disorientation, the Führer had done what he’d always sworn he would never do: he’d abandoned his people.

Mouths clammed up in town after town. Memories failed.

No one had seen anything; no one knew anything.

No one had willingly joined the Nazi party; no one shared its beliefs.

The Nazis were they and them , but never we or us .

‘They ordered it… That was their doing… They said it had to be done.’ On and on, the dance went in those early days, following a pattern that was too tightly woven for the Americans, or the rest of the Allies, to unpick.

But Noemi didn’t know that. Or at least not until she returned to the meadows above the town and watched the truth strutting round large as life in the market square below.

At least I didn’t walk straight into a trap.

She’d nearly done exactly that. But the closer she came to the town, the harder it had been to throw off the survival instincts which had become as natural to her as breathing.

No partisan approached a new place in the open – and after four years away and almost six years of war, everywhere in Germany was to some degree a new place, including Unterwald.

They stayed invisible until they’d carefully surveyed every aspect of it.

Noemi didn’t want to do that – what she wanted was the joyful reunion playing out in her head – but she was a creature of caution these days, so that’s how she moved.

She’d left the main road before she reached the first houses and taken the mountain track which led her to a familiar perch in a meadow with a clear view down onto the square. A view that had led straight to Viktor.

She’d blinked and blinked and wished the sight of him was no more than a trick of the sunlight or her memories.

But Viktor was there, as on show as he’d always been, swaggering around the town as he’d always done.

Accompanied by the Chief of Police who’d arrested her father, and the hotelier who’d stolen his business.

Shaking hands, patting small children on their heads, heading to the bar he had no rightful claim to, to hold court with his morning coffee.

He’s not wearing a uniform anymore, or not on the outside, but Unterwald is still his.

Noemi sat back on her heels, rage roaring through her.

Struggling not to scream as the dreams which had never been anything but dust in her eyes disappeared.

Every aspect of the map she’d drawn in her head was wrong, starting with Viktor.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be in prison, facing justice, or already tried and convicted and dead.

Because if Viktor was in charge, there was no place for her parents.

And if he’d carried on ruling the roost untouched, despite his long allegiance to the Nazis…

What about Pascal? What if he’s back too? What if he’s become some kind of war hero like he always wanted to be and has escaped punishment like his father?

She couldn’t push him away this time. Images of Pascal – as she’d known him, as she feared he was now – and the truth of her last years in the town burst out with the speed of water pouring through a cracked dam. All at once, her head was filled with a reel whose twists she couldn’t control.

The vanilla-scented bakery and her father grinning in his shirtsleeves as he tidied the bar.

Moonlight and the flash of Pascal’s eyes as he looked into hers; snow-capped peaks and the delicious warmth of his mouth.

Brown shirts and swastikas and a hand pulling hard at her hair as uglier mouths shouted ugly names.

Her father bruised and broken in a dingy prison waiting room.

Viktor sat in a chair like a grinning toad and stealing their lives away.

For every good memory, there was a cruel one waiting to swallow it.

For every moment of happiness, there was twice the pain.

Every time she’d imagined the homecoming she’d wanted, she’d been telling herself fairy stories.

What am I doing here? What good can it do to come back?

They were the two most obvious questions in the world, and she hadn’t considered them. She’d let herself be led by hopes and dreams she’d always known in her heart were false.

Maybe the word isn’t ‘good’. Maybe that’s not what I’m here for.

Noemi had been fighting and hiding and pushing down her fury for so long, she’d stopped feeling.

That numbness had evaporated in her first sight of Viktor.

Now all the years of anger and fear and betrayal were screaming as loud as the bombs and bullets that had filled her ears for too long.

Unterwald had taken everything from her, but now the war was over and there was a reckoning coming.

She took a deep breath. She took a swig of water from the leather bottle in her rucksack.

She climbed a little higher towards the comfort of the mountains, curled herself into the rocks and let the sun’s rays find her.

She could wait. She was very good at waiting.

She would let Viktor and his town have one last undisturbed day.

And then she was going to go down the hill to the streets she’d once loved and take back every last thing that he’d stolen.