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claimed that ethics and self-analysis were outside his normal range of interests.
    “When the German nation surrendered with Admiral von Doenitz,” he read resonantly, “that was not intended to be the end of the fighting. Martin Bormann meant to carry on from the mountainous slopes of Bavaria, to fight and fight until the Third Reich was utterly destroyed down to the last man. Only then, the Nazis believed, would the super race rise from the ashes of civilisation. Or perhaps they intended merely to retire to Bavaria and grow old gracefully. For whichever reason, the Reichsminister of Economics had deposited all of Germany’s remaining gold, cash, precious stones and metals in a vault on the shores of Lake Walchensee.
    “It had long been known that Goering had hoarded a fortune in loot from the ravaged cities of Paris, Prague, Vienna. And this irreplaceable treasure...” He looked at her and then raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
    “I don’t like that phrase, the mountainous slopes of Bavaria. They are mountains.”
    “You seem to have missed the point.” Spoken with the massive dignity of a Swift accused of graffiti. “The point is that we abandoned the search for that treasure. I was sent back to Berlin after two days, because the Americans had taken over the sector. But as far as I know that treasure was never recovered.”
    “I still think you should do something about that phrase.”
    Steed tossed the manuscript back on his desk. “I’ll re-write the entire chapter, but first I intend to do some research on the subject. If you need me for the next three days I’ll be in Bavaria.”
     

Mrs. Peel picks buttercups
     
    Berniston was a two mile walk from Steed’s cottage, and Emma set off for Throgmorton Hall shortly after eight in the evening. The sun was setting behind a low hill and that total stillness in the air, broken occasionally by the buzz of midges round a beech tree, reminded her of the myth that belongs to childhood and has become clothed by memory in Edwardian dress. An early butterfly caught her eye, flitting away from a hawthorn hedge. All it needed was the distant click of a cricket bat or the low whirr of a tractor across the fields. She wondered whether in fifty years’ time the dream would change. Perhaps to evocations of caravan sites, transistor radios and the scream of jet planes. The smell of honeysuckle would be replaced by clean air and the people on the village green would be dressed in steel blue overalls.
    As she neared the hall Emma felt uneasily that she was being followed. But when she looked round there was no-one in sight. Two children crossed the road, laughing as children should at the beginning of summer, and a farm labourer came over the brow of the rise on a bicycle. “Evenin’, miss,” he grunted as he passed, which was nice. Perhaps the world was eternal after all, and things like fascism or communism or capitalism, wars and people dying were all illusions to support the idea of time moving forward.
    Emma Peel, aged seven, skipped across the dry ditch and put out her tongue at a solemn cow by the gate. It stared back but it was used to children. She picked a buttercup and held it under her chin. What was it meant to indicate? That she didn’t wet the bed? that she liked butter? She couldn’t remember. She clambered over the fence and took the short cut to the hall. The big house it would have seemed in those days compared with her father’s home in St. John’s Wood. She hopped from furrow to furrow singing Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternoon.
    Yes, she could see him now. He had paused by the gate where the cows were and then he started running crouched-backed along the side of the open-stone wall. Emma swerved, increased her pace and tried to reach the corner of the field before her pursuer. If he was armed it would make no difference because she was defenceless anyway in the middle of an open field. Oh dear, back to the adult life!
    Darkness, Emma