They’d strapped Mr Hendrik’s leg and made a crutch, then stumbled on for miles, across fields and through groves of birch, oak and pine, along muddy trails pressed with small animal prints in stuttering diagonal lines, down empty, stone-walled lanes in the middle of the night. Mostly, Krüger carried Mr Hendrik on his back (he was feverish and unable to walk without intense pain). It was all impossible and pointless, and often when they stopped to rest the burden of their bodies almost crushed their will. And yet neither man complained. They went on. They endured together. They exchanged barely a word (what was there to say?), but the silence between them deepened and fused their plight. The silence contained the truth of their presence inside it, nobody else in the whole wide world but them. They, exclusively, shared what they had created, and had created what they shared. It was not the intimacy of brothers (nor of lovers) but of friends, willingly beholden.

They slept in abandoned houses without roofs, with sheep and cows in cold barns, out in the open sometimes, even on the harshest nights. They had initially avoided villages and towns and had drawn out the distance between themselves and the carriage (and the body of Wesley Lewis Jr) for as long as they were able. One night, finally, an inn on the outskirts of Borken: a meal and a bed, safe enough now, surely. It was the first bed they’d slept in for weeks. A cold night, but their blankets were warm, even if they were wretched and Mr Hendrik’s leg had turned a shade of deep purple.

They ate and went to sleep. And then, in the moon dark, a man.

Krüger woke with a lamp in his face and the barrel of a pistol pressed into his cheek.

‘Shhh . . .’ a voice said. ‘Not a word now, son.’

Instinctively, no idea where he was, Krüger tried to lift his head. The pistol pressed him harder. The flintlock creaked, steel and spring stretching, Krüger felt the tensing through his skull; then a click, the pistol primed, alive. He was unable to formulate one succinct thought.

‘Nice and calm,’ the voice said. ‘There’s a man at the door, too.’

In the next bunk, Mr Hendrik said, ‘Not him.’

The room had gathered a soft, honeyed light from around the cruel lamp. Krüger’s eyes adjusted. He saw an older man with long grey hair and white stubble thick over his chin, face deeply grained. He wore a dark coat with gold military buttons, the shoulders with faded rectangles where epaulettes had once been sewn. His shadow stretched the full length of the room and loomed above them.

‘You killed the American?’ he said, the pistol still at Krüger’s temple, though he was looking over at Mr Hendrik now.

‘To kill a man is nothing.’