Latchmere House, London, 1941
"In the interrogation room, MI6 Major Frank Foley and Captain Short sat at a table with the chief interrogator, Lt-Colonel Robin 'Tin Eye' Stephens in his Gurkha uniform and monocle. Hess in his Luftwaffe uniform was brought in, limping on his right leg.
"Can I have a chair, sir? My ankle is hurting," Hess complained.
"Hauptmann Horn, you are in a British Secret Service prison at the present time," said Stephens, glaring at the prisoner. "You are a prisoner of war. You will remain standing. It is our job to determine who you are, be it Hauptmann Horn, Rudolf Hess, or just some bad actor.
Verstehen Sie
?"
An officer came in and handed a message to Stephens.
"
Wo sind Ihre Papiere
? Where are your papers?"
"I lost them, sir."
Keinen Auswei
s, Herr Horn? No identity card, no Nazi party membership card, no passport. Well, if you pretend to be the Deputy
Reichsminister
, you must remember your party card number?"
"I forget."
"I thought Hess was an early member of the party?"
"Yes, sir."
"Could it be number 24 or maybe number 16?"
Hess looked truly stumped by the question and scratched his head. From the bestselling author of
An Absolute Secret, Shipwrecked Lives, Remembrance Man
and
White Slaves
comes this brilliantly imagined novel about one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War. After parachuting into Scotland in 1941, the German Reichsminister Rudolf Hess was revealed to be an imposter. A team of MI5 intelligence officers led by Paul Cummings and his German wife Claudia were sent to Camp Z to investigate the Hess double. The team soon started to uncover the imposter's secrets including the shadowy Herr Oberst and his training by the SS. But the British government decided to bury the truth with the Official Secrets Act and it was only in 1973 that a British doctor confirmed the fraud during a medical examination in Berlin.