There is a military policeman watching the unloading of the LST. ‘I need to go into one of the Piraeus suburbs,’ Tom informs him. ‘Where can I find some transport?’

‘Out of the question, I’m afraid, sir,’ the red cap tells him politely, though his expression suggests he feels himself confronted by an imbecile. ‘ELAS are in charge between here and Athens, sir. You wouldn’t want to be wandering off into no suburbs.’

‘Bloody hell.’ Tom takes off his beret and drags his fingers through his salt-stiffened hair. You knew this, he tells himself. You read it in the paper. But when he was sitting, blanket-wrapped in a deckchair with Capri twinkling in the blue distance, he didn’t imagine this reality. There aren’t any Greek civilians around at all, he realises, only sailors and gendarmes. There are columns of smoke everywhere. A mortar round goes off very close by, and everyone on the dock flinches. ‘I’ll take a car, then. At my own risk. I’m a …’ He hesitates, and points a thumb at the green flash on his shoulder. ‘I’m an official war correspondent.’

‘Sorry, sir. If you were Monty himself I couldn’t let you do it. You wouldn’t get far anyway.’ The MP lowers his voice. ‘Rumour has it that one of our lot got dragged out of a police station just around the corner from here. When they found him, ELAS had skinned him alive.’

‘That sounds like utter rubbish to me, Sergeant,’ says Tom.

‘Still can’t let you go off on your own, sir,’ the MP says apologetically, but he draws himself up to his considerable height and Tom knows there’s no point arguing.

Not even a villainous pair of Greek commandos, whose jeep is bristling with weaponry, will take him to Kokkinia, even though he all but implores them. ‘Kokkinia is full of commounistés,’ they tell him, not bothering to keep the suspicion from their sun-lined faces. The only way open to him is into Athens by tank or armoured car. A friendly dragoon sergeant offers him a lift, and soon he is half standing, half sitting in the turret of a Humber, trembling with frustration and enveloped in a fug of sweaty socks, tobacco and petrol smoke, armpits and old sardine tins. When they set off, he wonders if they are turning into the street where the Cordelio was, but the buildings are mostly rubble. There is destruction everywhere, and graffiti, great dripping reams of it. They pass a large bloodstain spilling down the front steps of a little house, on which someone has dropped a now-wizened bouquet of wildflowers.