Winter of the World by Ken Follett Read Free Book Online

be used ruthlessly. Interrogate them without mercy.’
    ‘Yes, Minister,’ said Diels.
    Lloyd realized that Walter had been right to worry. This was the pretext the Nazis had been looking for. They were not going to listen to anyone who said that the fire had been started by a lone
madman. They wanted a Communist plot so that they could announce a crackdown.
    Göring looked down with distaste at the muck on his shoes. ‘My official residence is only a minute away, but it is fortunately unaffected by the fire, my Führer,’ he said.
‘Perhaps we should adjourn there?’
    ‘Yes. We have much to discuss.’
    Lloyd held the door and they all went out. As they drove away, he stepped over the police cordon and rejoined his mother and the von Ulrichs.
    Ethel said: ‘Lloyd! Where have you been? I was worried sick!’
    ‘I went inside,’ he said.
    ‘What? How?’
    ‘No one stopped me. It’s all chaos and confusion.’
    His mother threw her hands in the air. ‘He has no sense of danger,’ she said.
    ‘I met Adolf Hitler.’
    Walter said: ‘Did he say anything?’
    ‘He’s blaming the Communists for the fire. There’s going to be a purge.’
    ‘God help us,’ said Walter.
    (iii)
    Thomas Macke was still smarting from the sarcasm of Robert von Ulrich. ‘Your brother wants to move up in the world, as you have,’ von Ulrich had said.
    Macke wished he had thought to reply: ‘And why should we not? We are as good as you, you arrogant popinjay.’ Now he yearned for revenge. But for a few days he was too busy to do
anything about it.
    The headquarters of the Prussian secret police were in a large, elegant building of classical architecture at No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse in the government quarter. Macke felt proud every time
he walked through the door.
    It was a hectic time. Four thousand Communists had been arrested within twenty-four hours of the Reichstag fire, and more were being rounded up every hour. Germany was being cleansed of a
plague, and to Macke the Berlin air already tasted purer.
    But the police files were not up to date. People had moved house, elections had been lost and won, old men had died and young men had taken their places. Macke was in charge of a group updating
the records, finding new names and addresses.
    He was good at this. He liked registers, directories, street maps, news clippings, any kind of list. His talents had not been valued at the Kreuzberg police station, where criminal intelligence
was simply beating up suspects until they named names. He was hoping to be better appreciated here.
    Not that he had any problem with beating up suspects. In his office at the back of the building he could hear the screams of men and women being tortured in the basement, but it did not bother
him. They were traitors, subversives and revolutionaries. They had ruined Germany with their strikes, and they would do worse if they got the chance. He had no sympathy for them. He only wished
Robert von Ulrich was among them, groaning in agony and begging for mercy.
    It was eight o’clock in the evening on Thursday 2 March before he got a chance to check on Robert.
    He sent his team home, and took a sheaf of updated lists upstairs to his boss, Criminal Inspector Kringelein. Then he returned to the files.
    He was in no hurry to go home. He lived alone. His wife, an undisciplined woman, had gone off with a waiter from his brother’s restaurant, saying she wanted to be free. There were no
children.
    He began to comb the files.
    He had already established that Robert von Ulrich had joined the Nazi Party in 1923 and had left two years later. That in itself did not mean much. Macke needed more.
    The filing system was not as logical as he would have liked. All in all, he was disappointed in the Prussian police. The rumour was that Göring was equally unimpressed, and planned to
detach the political and intelligence departments from the regular force and form them into a new, more efficient secret police