Jim had spent the day taking statements from some of the women who’d been held in prison camps since the fall of Singapore. Unlike the men, they were eager to tell their stories, to purge themselves of the horrors they’d withstood so they could regain some sense of self-esteem. As they poured out all the wrongs that had been inflicted upon them, Jim became aware of the profound anger they all possessed for their Japanese captors, and also that the same names came up time and again.

Jim had discovered early on that the men and women who’d been prisoners had lost their confidence and self-belief, and this was particularly true of the men, who felt shame at being captured when others had actively served their country by bringing the war to an end. They were mostly reluctant to talk of their experiences, but those who did haltingly revealed the depths of misery and brutality that had been inflicted upon them.

Not all the torture had been physical. There were accounts of punishments aimed at killing off the last spark of hope in men already desperate for some small sign of humanity and that they had not been forgotten by their loved ones. The cruellest had been to burn three sacks of letters from home in front of them in retaliation for an escape attempt. That had almost broken the man relating that story, and Jim had left the respite camp with a heavy heart and a bitter taste in his mouth.

For the women it had been an ongoing and desperate struggle to keep their children alive, and with each burial their spirits had dwindled. Subsisting on a diet of mouldy rice soup, they were weakened further by hard labour, malaria, dysentery, jungle sores and ulcers, and the nurses and doctors amongst them raged to Jim about the lack of medicines and the simplest things such as calcium tablets, suture needles and thread, or clean bandages.

When they’d been liberated, it was to discover that the locked storehouse was packed solid with medical supplies and Red Cross parcels filled with powdered baby milk and tinned food, the like of which they hadn’t seen for four long years, and which could have saved so many lives. Their rage was bitter and profound, their stories repeated over and over as yet more women were brought in from the far-flung prison camps.

Jim had enough evidence to ensure that the men guilty of these heinous crimes would be executed – although most of the women had demanded to be left alone with them for five minutes so they could dish out their own punishment. He couldn’t blame them, for they’d lost far more than any person could withstand.

He felt drained by the harrowing stories, and knew they’d live with him long after the prisoners had been repatriated. And yet he’d come to realise, much to his surprise, that he was doing a worthwhile job that was making a difference. That he had an empathy with those men and women and the ability to listen and carefully absorb what they told him without letting his emotions get the better of him. They didn’t ask for sympathy, but needed to be believed and assured that the guilty would be punished – and he was the man in a position to do that.