Hitler's Secret by William Osborne

family.”
    “That’s all?” said Leni. She was unconvinced. Otto might be good at shooting, but he was rubbish at lying.
    “That’s all.”
    They walked on. “We have to trust each other, Otto,” Leni said eventually.
    “I know and it wasn’t important, I promise.” But he was looking straight ahead and not at her. Leni decided not to push it any further for now. She’d get it out of him in the end, whatever it was.
    “Fine, let’s talk about something else,” she said.
    Otto smiled. He seemed relieved. “All right, let’s practice. What do we like to do on a Sunday afternoon after lunch?”
    Leni thought for a moment. “Ah, the Fischers are creatures of habit. We don’t often leave Salzburg. In the summer we go to the park for the concerts in the Mirabell gardens.”
    “And in the winter?”
    “Skating. We go skating at Hellbrunn.”
    “I love skating,” said Otto. He sounded wistful, as if he really did. “Your turn.”
    “All right, what’s the name of the girl you like on our street?”
    “What? There isn’t a girl I like,” said Otto, frowning.
    Leni smiled. “Good,” she said.

Otto and Leni reached Prien by midday, keeping mostly to the lanes and walking across farmland in places. They had seen plenty of people along the route, working the land and going about their daily business in little villages, but no one had stopped or questioned them except to wish them “ Guten Tag .” Now they were waiting in Prien’s pleasant main square for the train to the lakeside port of Stock. A brass band was playing military tunes.
    MacPherson had briefed them about the area, and the lake in particular, but Otto already knew that the Chiemsee was the largest lake in Bavaria, nearly twenty-five miles long and three wide. It was deep, too, teeming with fish, and had three islands. The largest was the Herreninsel, and the smallest the uninhabited Krautinsel. But, as MacPherson had told them,it was on the middle island, the Fraueninsel, that the child was being held. Otto and Leni were to take a pleasure boat to visit King Ludwig’s nineteenth-century summer palace on the Herreninsel in the afternoon and from there make their way across to the second island by nightfall.
    After a year away from Germany, Otto found sitting in this town square strangely alien. He didn’t feel connected to the country anymore. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he was there under an assumed identity. Every other person seemed to be wearing some kind of uniform, and most buildings were draped with Nazi flags. Had it been like this before he’d escaped? Maybe he was just more sensitive to it now. He listened to the brass band and tried to take his mind off the situation.
    “Maybe we should walk to Stock. It’s only a few miles,” he said.
    Leni was sitting with her bare feet in the stone fountain in the center of the square. She took her left one out and examined the blister on the side of her big toe. “My feet are on fire. I’m not walking anywhere except to the station.”
    “I don’t like hanging around here,” Otto muttered.
    Leni took out a small printed timetable and consulted it. “The train’ll be here in twenty minutes, and no one’s taking a blind bit of notice of us.” She plunged her foot back into the water. “Can’t you buy us some lemonade at least?”
    “All right. Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
    Otto walked across the square towards a small store. It was a traditional, family-run business with long salamis covered in peppercorns hanging above the counter. At the back was a tin tub full of ice and water and floating bottles of beer and lemonade. He plunged in his hand, took out two bottles, and went back to the front of the shop. There was a queue, and the woman in front of him in the line took an age buying her weekly groceries: a little bit of this and a little bit of that, all interspersed with a good long chat about local events. Otto shifted from one foot to the next, anxious