The food, at a back street restaurant off Friedrichstrasse, was surprisingly good, as was the light German beer that washed it down. Sarah seemed sombre, which was unusual for her, but she came to life when he remarked on the number of English voices at the tables around them. ‘Didn’t you know? This is an army town, kinda like Colchester in England. Your Twentieth Armoured brigade does its exercises on the plain just to the north. Ten thousand Brits live round here, five thousand of them just up the road in Sennelager. People from England come to visit all the time.’
‘You’ve done your research.’
‘That’s what I’m here for.’ She smiled. ‘We’d better get back, breakfast is at eight.’
They said goodnight in the corridor and she reached up and kissed him on the cheek. He could still feel the heat of her lips as he lay awake three hours later.
Next day, they parked in the village and walked up through the narrow streets to the castle. It was still only nine-thirty and the museum didn’t open until ten, so they used the time to inspect the building and its surroundings.
‘This was the centre of Himmler’s power.’ Up close, the castle was enormous and Jamie felt dwarfed by the sheer scale of it. ‘It was to be a shrine to the Aryan race. Under the cover of an SS-Führerschule, an officer’s school, the SS leadership would have gathered here to study mysticism and the occult and to enact ancient long-forgotten ceremonies.’
‘I hate the place already,’ Sarah said, and he was surprised by the passion in her voice.
‘The castle was built by some German aristocrat in the seventeenth century, but it was more or less a ruin until Himmler took an interest in the early nineteen thirties. What you see is just a fraction of the complex he wanted to build here,’ Jamie continued earnestly. ‘It would have extended for miles, with eighteen separate towers and a huge SS barracks, all connected by roads laid out in a precise geometric pattern. You can read conspiracy theories that suggest it was going to be a landing ground for UFOs or the doorway to Nilfheim, one of the nine worlds of Norse mythology. No claim is too wild where Wewelsburg Castle is concerned. The SS attempted to blow the whole place up at the end of the war, but even with every explosive they had they barely made a dent in it. Eventually, they tried to burn it down, but the Yanks – sorry Americans – arrived before the fire damaged the main buildings and—’
‘And no one knows exactly what they found when they got here,’ she interrupted, determined not to be outdone. ‘Himmler had ordered that the Death’s Head rings of every fallen SS man should be kept here. He had some crazy idea that they absorbed the strength and courage of the soldiers who’d worn them. Eleven and a half thousand rings were believed to be stored in the castle’s crypt and vanished without trace at the end of the war. Hey, I can read, too. Look, the gates are open.’
They paid for tickets to the memorial museum and were directed to what had once been the castle guardhouse. A statuesque blonde girl in a white blouse and knee-length black skirt met them at the door.
‘English?’
‘How could you tell?’ Jamie asked. The two women looked at each other a certain way, like strangers who’d come across an injured rabbit and were debating whether to take it to the vet or put it out of its misery.
‘Maybe we should get on,’ Sarah said, smiling at the German girl.
‘Would you like a guided tour? Normally we only take parties of ten and more, but as you can see it is quiet this morning. I’d be happy to show you round.’
‘How much would that be?’
‘We usually charge forty-five euros, but since there are only two of you I could do it for twenty?’ She saw Jamie’s grimace. ‘Including your entry fee?’
He opened his mouth to say no, but Sarah spoke first.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, unhitching her rucksack and pulling out a wallet to hand over two ten-euro notes.
While their guide went to inform the ticket desk, she hissed at him, ‘If I’d known you were this cheap I’d have paid for my own schnitzel last night. I thought we were here to find out about the castle and the symbol and their relationship to Himmler? We won’t do that stumbling around on our own looking at the walls. This way we’ll discover more than is in any guidebook.’
Jamie soaked up the rebuke. ‘I thought, if we were on our own,’ he explained with exaggerated patience, ‘we might be able to spend a little time alone with the symbol and get a really close look at it. There was method in my meanness.’
Her lips made a perfect circle. ‘Oh!’