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‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but from what you’ve told me – and I’m not saying I think this is right or fair – I expect we’ll find that the paperwork approving the sale of your family’s property, and the records of the payments that were made in connection with it, will be in order.

Our people will do their best to check the details when they’re back in the town, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up.

I’m afraid that – given the problems with food supplies and the lack of housing for starters – the issue of reparations is nowhere near the top of our list. You’re going to have to be a little patient with us. ’

However conflicted Noemi’s feelings about Pascal might have become since their meeting, she’d hadn’t shifted an inch when it came to Viktor.

And whether her head decided to call her fight against him justice or revenge, the need to fight him hadn’t altered.

Not that the process was proving to be an easy one.

It had taken Noemi almost two weeks to track down the right person to speak to in the American headquarters in Munich, and the hurried appointment that had led to had been very frustrating.

The clerk had also refused to give her a second one.

‘Speak to one of the investigation team who’ll be stationed in with you and get your case logged there,’ was the best he could offer.

And stationed suggested a far more permanent presence than the two days the Americans were actually planning to stay in the town while they attempted to denazify it.

Her heart sank when she realised how restricted their timetable was in comparison to the promised scale of their ambition.

Registration Order:

‘This was apparently sent to every household.’ Ute handed Noemi the flyer which had arrived at the farmhouse with the morning post. ‘It’s a bit fanciful, don’t you think?

Asking people to tell tales on themselves.

I don’t see how they’ll be able to check the entries, not in the brief time they’ll have before they need to sort out rationing.

I don’t imagine much good will come from it. ’

Neither did Noemi. She’d seen for herself how the town closed ranks.

Once it became clear why she had returned – and whether it was because they didn’t believe she was entitled to restitution, or because of guilt over the way her family and the other Jewish residents had been treated – no one spoke to her longer than they were required to; no one made eye contact.

If she went into a shop, she was dealt with efficiently, but there was never a moment of warmth.

‘You’re an irritant and a reminder of a time they’d rather forget. You being here is making them look in the mirror, and at each other, and dredge up old sins.’

Noemi had no doubt that Ute was right, but the suggestion Ute followed that observation with sat far less easily.

‘If the Americans can’t help you – and the town won’t – do you think it’s perhaps time to consider moving on? That it might be better to start afresh somewhere else?’

She’d probably been right in that too, but Noemi wasn’t ready to hear it.

She’d been chased out of Unterwald once; she wasn’t going to be chased out again.

If and when she left, it would be on her own terms. And whether anyone else could help her wasn’t the issue: Noemi had plenty of fight of her own.

‘What are you doing? And where on earth did you get these?’

Noemi whirled round, splattering paste off her brush in a messy arc over the pavement.

She thought she’d checked the square thoroughly when she’d started – there’d been no sign of anybody around then.

The presence of the American investigation team in the Unterwald Hotel had sent the town’s residents scurrying home early.

And the last person she’d expected to see – or to have to explain herself to – was Pascal.

She hadn’t been intending to see him at all.

She’d been avoiding him since their meeting at the farm, although he’d been taking up far too much space in her thoughts.

Which wasn’t anything he needed to know.

She glanced at the poster dripping with paste on the wall, and decided to answer at least part of his question.

It wasn’t as if he was going to call the police.

‘The printing shop has a cylinder press and very weak window locks, and I’ve run this kind of stuff off before. It wasn’t difficult to do.’

Pascal didn’t ask where she’d learned any of the skills she’d just admitted to.

Instead – in an uncomfortable echo of the Karwendelhaus which she instantly dismissed – he picked up one of the posters from the bundles at her feet.

She waited while he read it, to see how he would react, before she volunteered any further information.

‘These are really good. “Who will bring him to justice?” That’s a brave question.’

The respect on his face took her by surprise.

The posters weren’t actually very good at all – they were a crudely printed list of Viktor’s crimes under the heading Nazi in Hiding and his name, but Noemi was proud of them.

She’d included his treatment of all the town’s Jews, his property thefts and the dealings she suspected he’d had with the black market, and his plan to send young boys out to their deaths in a last-stand attack on the enemy.

It was the kind of smear campaign the partisans were good at, and – following the patterns she’d learned in her days as one of them – she hadn’t picked only one target.

She hesitated for a moment and then reached for a sheet from a separate bundle.

‘There’s this one too. I’m not as certain of the details, but I’m sure I’m right with the allegation.’

The second poster she handed him was a mirror of the first. The Nazi she’d accused on it of being in hiding was the town’s doctor; the crime she’d referenced was participation in the euthanasia of the physically and mentally ill at the Hartheim hospital.

And the question she’d finished with this time was, ‘Do you know what happened to your children?’

‘This goes back to the day we met in the hotel, doesn’t it? Before I went to Sonthofen?’

Noemi nodded, but she hurried over Pascal’s question. She was surprised he’d remembered their exchange, but she had no intention of straying into awkward personal territory.

‘I told you then I’d overheard things while I was waitressing, and that one of those discussions concerned the “special arrangements” Doctor Brodmann had made for a child born with a twisted leg.

Hartheim’s come up more than once in the papers as a killing centre for the sick, and I think that’s what he meant – I think he had the child sent there.

And based on other gossip that I’ve heard since I came back – about the type of people who disappeared while they were under his care – I doubt that child was the only one he despatched. ’

Pascal’s hand shook as he returned the poster to the pile. She knew his, ‘You’re right about the practice; it was commonplace, and I think you’re right about him,’ hid a darker story of his own behind it. Whatever that was, she wasn’t ready to ask, and he clearly wasn’t ready to offer it.

I should tell him to go away again. I should make it clear this has nothing to do with him.

She dipped her brush back into the paste again, hoping he would take the hint if she said nothing else. She didn’t want an argument or raised voices that could lead to her discovery before the task was complete. But Pascal had other ideas.

‘I assume these are for the Americans’ benefit?’

She carried on sticking up the next poster, wondering at which point he would leave. She certainly wasn’t about to edge round the truth.

‘Yes, they are. I want a proper spotlight shone on your father, and the doctor, to start with. But they’re for the town too.

Hopefully once people read these, they’ll remember the ones who were sent away and never came home, or were punished because someone held a grudge against them.

And then, who knows, perhaps – if another wave of denunciations follow – these registration forms will start to gather real weight. ’

‘Because nobody deserves to escape justice, including my father. And nobody should stand by and let that possibility happen.’

He’d completed her thought process in the way they’d done for each other since they were tiny.

Before the world drove the worst kind of wedge between us.

She didn’t respond. When Pascal picked up her spare brush and began pasting the posters about Viktor onto the market square’s buildings, Noemi didn’t stop him either.

But the crack she felt run through her heart as she watched him help her spread the evidence against his father around Viktor’s town felt like an opening, not a break.

By the time dawn began to creep in pink ribbons across the mountaintops, the town was awash with posters, and Pascal and Noemi’s arms were stiff with stretching. The empty bucket seemed to have tripled in weight as they hauled it, and themselves, back along the path out of town.

‘You didn’t print a poster about me.’

Noemi had been waiting for him to mention that omission since he’d read the allegations against his father and the doctor.

He wore his guilt too heavily to pretend it wasn’t there.

She stopped walking. They needed to get the evidence of their sticky bucket and brushes away quickly, but she knew he’d keep asking unless she told him why.

‘No, I didn’t. I would have done when I first came back, when Viktor told me where you’d served and what you’d done. Hearing that fired the anger I’d been carrying with me about your choices for years. But then I talked to you, and other people talked about you to me. And now…’