He didn’t say a word (of course, he wasn’t permitted to say a word) and he looked up at the judge and had an out-of-body experience: Johannes Meyer was actually in Berlin, dreaming that this was happening to him, or to somebody who might have been him. Somebody they called John Myer. He didn’t know who this man was and, suddenly, it was a relief! It made him feel calm, because he knew that soon he’d be waking up from all this. He’d be able to go for a walk down Unter den Linden, and later visit Otto’s on Taubenstraße and drink good coffee, listen to the philosophers argue. What had become of the one called Krüger?

John Myer knew the sheep were stolen. All the sheep, everywhere, were stolen. Everything in the colony was stolen.

‘Wha’d’you want with bloody sheep?’ she said.

He should have listened to Kathleen. She’d wanted to lease the small house in York Street, rent out the back room to lodgers and sell them a bite, a bottle of beer, her exclusive night-time comforts (mostly it was that). ‘I need a man about,’ she’d said, loud into his ear because the grog shop was raucous, the Rocks at its debauched heights. ‘Someone I can trust,’ she said, ‘no bloody drunk, no basher.’ She leaned back a little, smiled kindly, smoothed John Myer’s hair across his forehead and came back to his ear. ‘Someone pretty like you, eh?’ And with a few coins in your pocket and the right signatures in your book, she thought. Because they wouldn’t lease shit to the likes of her.

Eighteen, and her breath rusty with rum. They’d met at the Ferret’s place, a dingy hole, and John Myer couldn’t even remember the first time, he’d drunk so much, fresh in his freedom; stumbling through the night, a thin mattress on a dirt floor somewhere, waking with his head cleaved. ‘There’s money owed,’ she’d said in the cold morning, standing above him. ‘You can buy us breakfast.’

That morning, in the streets, the mist like cannon smoke, drifting, whispering death. Kathleen’s blue face. And the girl again, in the window, who’d looked at him, who looked at him now. John Myer called out, still drunk, but what would that do? It wouldn’t do a thing.

Damper loaf and dark ale, she ate more than half, drank most of the bottle. His only friend in the colony then. Kathleen of the kind brown eyes and hair the colour of stale biscuit, who wore the same tattered maroon dress most nights, patched and sewn.

‘Wha’d’you say, pretty John? Do we have a deal?’