“And with this officer, whose name you want. I’ve been thinking, sir. What if it came down to his word against mine?”

“It won’t.”

“It’s just that I know the army, sir. I’ve been in uniform since I was fifteen. I know sometimes people get mashed up in the machine.”

“You have nothing to fear, Calley. I thought I made all this clear last time we spoke.”

“You did, sir. I just wanted to be sure I’d understood right.”

“The colonel is waiting for us. Are you ready?”

Calley nodded. From up here, between the tilting of red roofs you could see the blue-black mirror of the harbour. Henderson glanced at the paper in his hand, though the name there must have been in his head for days. He spoke it, carefully, twice.

“That sounds about right,” said Calley.

“About right?”

“That’s the name I heard, sir.”

“You are sure?”

“Never been more so, sir.”

The inquiry was a drama that had reached its last act. The colonel asked Calley about his escape from Spain, the long walk with a detachment of stragglers to the Portuguese border, a place marked by nothing. Calley had commanded. He was the only one with rank. They walked with their feet wrapped in strips of blanket or they walked in bare feet, each step a print of red on the road. They ate grass, berries. Once they caught and ate a bird of a kind none of them had seen before. They had stones in their mouths. They crossed the empty hills like the last men left on earth and those who prayed at the beginning did not pray at the end. Once they realised they were across the border and no longer had to fear French patrols or Spanish guerrillas they entered settlements and begged from people who had almost as little as they did but who offered water or milk, a bite of bread.