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because of him and that had to mean he was being tailed; good for his refugees, not so hot for him, given he had no idea of the resources they had employed for the task.
    The street being long and straight, he saw the Auto Union coupé, hood up, coming towards him at quite a distance, moving slowly on the cobbles, which made itbuck and sway, the jarring of its body as the springs failed to cushion it properly indicating the car was carrying too heavy a load. The first clue to it being the Ephraim family was the sight, in the driver’s seat, of the man Lanchester had called his blue-eyed boy, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, while alongside him sat the father with a worker’s cap pulled well down, hiding his grey hair.
    Jardine saw blue-eyed boy’s lips move and guessed it was an admonishment not to look in his direction, the coincidence of their arriving as he was departing as good a way as any to let them know of possible danger. As the car passed, it being natural for him to glance in its direction, he saw five people crowded in the rear, the daughter and youngest son sat on laps, then the suitcases strapped onto the jump seat, too many to his mind, which produced a flash of irritation which grew as he crossed the road behind it, halting at a bus stop and able to look back the way he had come and see the vehicle drive on past the doorway from which he had emerged.
    That luggage rankled: it was always a problem to get people to leave things behind, items they had probably not even noticed for years suddenly taking on huge sentimental importance. Valuables he could comprehend; it would be a fair bet that Papa Ephraim had stuff on his lap and all around his feet, old master and modern art paintings in leather tubes, a case of precious objects that had to include heirlooms and, inevitably, a solid-silver seven-branch candlestick for Friday night prayers. It did not matter what he made of the car and it being overloaded – it only mattered if those on his tail, and they had to be there evenif he could not see them in the gathering gloom, were made curious.
    Blue-eyed boy would not stop until he was out of sight: the ship was not due to sail until first light, so a way would have to be contrived to get the family into that tunnel entrance in the dark. It was no longer his problem; he just had to keep the watchers watching him and then he had to get clear and out of Hamburg and Germany by a different route, the first stage of that to get on the approaching bus.
    Jardine knew with night coming his best chance was to return to St Pauli, though not to the bar in which Lanchester had found him – the red-light district was busy in the hours of darkness and there were streets there that would make it near impossible for anyone to follow. Once in his old stamping ground, his way out he already knew, the only problem he had was of being picked up before he could get there.
    Many times throughout his life Callum Jardine had been in a position of danger in which he could do nothing to alleviate it; people now saw the last campaign of the Great War as a walkover, the German army retreating and the Allies dogging their heels. It was nothing like that: in retreat the Kaiser’s army made the advancing Allies fight for every pre-prepared trench system and they had been constructed in advance and in depth.
    The only way to take them, tanks rarely being available, was by infantry attack, and if the tactics had improved since the bloodbaths of Verdun and the Somme, it was still hard pounding, while to that was added the feeling, withthings hopefully coming to the end, that no one wanted to be the last one to stop a bullet.
    Sitting on the first bus, which took him to the Hauptbahnhof, followed by another from the main railway station to St Pauli, Jardine was aware that he was sat in well-lit seats and easily observed, a bit like a target in a shooting gallery. That feeling did not diminish when he was finally on foot and he