Miller grew serious. At length he rose, still naked, crossed the room and came back with his document case. He seated himself on the edge of the bed.
‘You’re going to learn pretty soon what I’ve been up to,’ he said, ‘so I may as well tell you now.’
He talked for nearly an hour, starting with the discovery of the diary, which he showed her, and ending with the break-in to the forger’s house. As he talked she grew more and more horrified.
‘You’re mad,’ she said when he had finished. ‘You’re stark, staring, raving mad. You could have got yourself killed, or imprisoned or a hundred things.’
‘I had to do it,’ he said, bereft of an explanation for things that now seemed to him to have been crazy.
‘All this for a rotten old Nazi? You’re barmy. It’s over, Peter, all that is over. What do you want to waste your time on them for?’
She was staring at him in bewilderment.
‘Well, I have,’ he said defiantly.
She sighed heavily and shook her head to indicate her failure to understand.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘so now it’s done. You know who he is and where he is. You must come back to Hamburg, pick up the phone and ring the police. They’ll do the rest. That’s what they’re paid for.’
Miller did not know how to answer her.
‘It’s not that simple,’ he said at last. ‘I’m going up there later this morning.’
‘Going up where?’
He jerked his thumb towards the window and the still-dark range of mountains beyond it.
‘To his house.’
‘To his house? What for?’ Her eyes widened in horror. ‘You’re not going in to see him?’
‘Yes. Don’t ask me why, because I can’t tell you. It’s just something I have to do.’
Her reaction startled him. She sat up with a jerk, turned on to her knees and glared down at where he lay smoking, his head propped up by a pillow.
‘That’s what you wanted the gun for,’ she threw at him, her breasts rising and falling in her growing anger. ‘You’re going to kill him …’
‘I’m not going to kill him …’
‘Well then, he’ll kill you. And you’re going up there alone with a gun against him and his mob. You bastard, you rotten stinking horrible …’
Miller was staring at her in amazement.
‘What have you got so het up for? Over Roschmann?’
‘I’m not het up about that horrid old Nazi. I’m talking about me. About me and you, you stupid dumb oaf. You’re going to risk getting yourself killed up there, all to prove some silly point and make a story for your idiotic magazine readers. You don’t even think for a minute about me …’
She had started crying as she talked, the tears making tracks of mascara down each cheek like black railway lines.
‘Look at me, well bloody well look at me. What do you think I am, just another good screw? You really think I want to give myself every night to some randy reporter so he can feel pleased with himself when he goes off to chase some idiot story that could get him killed? You really think that? Listen, you great moron, I want to get married. I want to be Frau Miller. I want to have babies. And you’re going to get yourself killed … Oh God …’
She jumped off the bed and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her and locking it.
Miller lay on the bed open-mouthed, the cigarette burning down to his fingers. He had never seen her so angry, and it had shocked him. He thought over what she had said as he listened to the tap running in the bathroom.
Stubbing out the cigarette he crossed the room to the bathroom door.
‘Sigi.’