Hour after hour of clicking track, followed by month after month of the grim brutality of the work he’d been asked to do.

He had done it, though.

He’d suppressed what was left of the tattered and battered Soviet population and made them sorry they were ever born.

He hadn’t hated them; he just hadn’t cared about them.

They were less than grit trapped in his boot.

He’d done things he wouldn’t have been able to imagine years before. He’d shot, stabbed, slashed, and slaughtered his passage to hell.

He’d killed so many times that taking a life was now like taking a sip of cold coffee.

He didn’t feel guilt, but he did hate it.

He hated it because he knew it was all so pointless.

And the knowing was the worst.

None of it mattered.

There had been a time when Dannecker had cared about Germany and the Führer, and nothing else. There had been a time that whenever he heard the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” being sung his eyes would mist over, and he would have to get to his feet and link arms with the monster standing next to him.

But all that was gone.

He’d seen through it.

It was a sham, and the madness of it all was now apparent. It was broken; he was broken; the whole Reich was broken. He no longer cared because there was nothing he could do about it. Except try to survive and make it out the other side.

The car thudded through a pothole and his forehead brushed against the cold glass of the side window.

“Shithole,” he said quietly to himself.

“Sir?” His driver looked at him.

“I said that this place is a shithole.” Dannecker turned to face him.

“Yes, sir.” The driver looked away.

“Do you have a cigarette, Muller?”

“No, sir.”

“Fuck’s sake.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Dannecker rested his chin in his hand and went back to the window. The car banged through another pothole. This one was filled with oily brown water that erupted and plumed across the pavement and onto two young women walking to work. They threw up their hands, but dropped them quickly when they saw the armored half-track full of Waffen SS soldiers following Dannecker’s staff car.

The soldiers on the back of the half-track whistled and shouted at the women, who in turn spun away to look at their dripping reflections in an empty shop window.

Dannecker smoothed the front of his uniform and twisted the driver’s mirror around so he could check his appearance. He wiped his hand across his cropped hair, then pulled at the collar of his tunic and adjusted his Iron Cross. He looked over his shoulder out the back window to check that the half-track was still behind them, and then leaned forward to look at the sky out of the windscreen.

Heavy clouds.

England.

Did it ever stop raining?

“May I have my mirror back, sir?”

“Take it, there’s nothing in it I want to see.”

The staff car pulled in to the curb, while the half-track stopped in the middle of the road to provide cover. The soldiers on the half-track were tumbling down and taking up positions on either side of the street before Dannecker even had his door open. A few of them paused, looked lost, and then followed their colleagues and dodged closer to walls and parked cars. Dannecker stepped out, looked around at the tall office buildings that surrounded Hope Street police station, and placed his cap on his head. He kicked the car door shut with his heel, then bent slightly at the waist to use the reflection in the window to check that his cap was on straight.

Across the street there was a clatter as someone dropped his rifle. Dannecker looked across at Staff Sergeant Paul Becker.

Becker shrugged a what-can-I-do sort of shrug, then glared at the men spread out around him.

Becker dominated the street, all six feet four of him, head held high, a challenge to snipers, unlike his men, who were crouching low and dodging around. Becker slung his StG 44 machine gun over his shoulder and walked around the half-track to join Dannecker.

Dannecker didn’t return the salute.

“Who dropped his rifle?”

“Kraus, sir.”

“Jesus, where do they find them?” Dannecker didn’t wait for an answer from either Jesus or Becker. Instead, he turned and walked up the steps into the police station.

Becker followed his boss.

Same as he always did, without orders and without questions.

 

Chief Superintendent James Evans hated his job.

He wasn’t scheduled for retirement for another four years, but even if he made it that far, he doubted they’d let him go. Police pensions had been slashed, so even if they did, he probably wouldn’t.

He was trapped, and he knew it.

The police force had become a cutthroat world where the wrong word or step could lead to you being sacked, imprisoned, shot, or disappeared.

Either by the Germans or the resistance.

Evans didn’t know which was worse, and he hoped he would never find out.

Every day was filled with dread.

Every day was worse than the one before.

Every day he wished he were dead.

He had joined the job just after the 1919 Liverpool police strike. Back when half the force had been sacked overnight for daring to stand up for their rights. Evans had answered an advert in his local paper, then jumped on a train from Wales to Liverpool and never looked back. For six years he hadn’t thought about promotion. For six years he’d been happy to be a simple bobby walking the beat. Then one day he met a girl who wanted a husband who was better than a beat bobby, so he’d worked hard and become a detective. It wasn’t long before that wasn’t good enough, either, so he became a detective sergeant, and then an inspector, with a car and a mortgage that looked like it was never going to go away.

He’d have stayed an inspector if the war hadn’t come along, then the invasion. He was the only senior officer who hadn’t been part of the final stand as the Germans took control of the city. Many coppers had fought alongside the last troops who held out, and the ones who had survived were long gone, away working on the continent.

Evans hadn’t been a coward that day. Surgery on a burst appendix had deprived him of the chance of being a hero, pretty much the same as it had deprived him of dying and getting it over with.

As a result of being alive, he was all that was left of the officer class in Liverpool. He’d been sucked into an unhappy vacuum, and that vacuum had just sucked a Waffen SS major, and the biggest, scariest-looking staff sergeant he had ever seen, to the other side of his desk.

Evans put down his pen. Behind the German staff sergeant, Mrs. Kenny, Evans’s secretary, peeked around and lifted one hand to the ceiling in a what-was-I-supposed-to-do gesture.

Evans didn’t know what to do, either.

Dannecker sat down and tossed his cap onto Evans’s desk. Becker took up position leaning against a filing cabinet.