Formal funeral services had also been suspended. In light of the steadily rising death toll, it had been decided that there was no longer a need for the men to gather to pay their respects en masse at every burial. The mood in the camp was grim enough without twice-daily funerals serving as reminders of the rapidly deteriorating conditions. For the sake of morale, the onerous duty of disposing of the dead was carried out with as little ceremony as possible. After the chaplain had performed a brief eulogy as the bodies were taken from the morgue hut and laid in the wagons, the burial detail would proceed unaccompanied into the woods to take care of the rest.

It had been the morning detail that discovered the troopers’ corpses out by the burial pit, whereupon the alarm had been raised.

And Quade had received his summons.

For when a corporal who’d risen to take a piss in the early hours reported seeing some winter-clad soldiers and a wagon parked outside the hut that housed the two British prisoners – who were then checked upon and found to be missing – the troopers’ deaths took on a whole new meaning, as did the two faint musket shots a number of the camps’ inhabitants later remembered hearing, though they hadn’t taken any notice of them at the time.

Quade had been ordered to report first to the tent adjacent to the medical hut where the bodies had been delivered. He did so in a state of stunned disbelief. It shouldn’t have been the troopers lying there. It shouldn’t have been anyone. His orders to the escort had been very specific. Wait until everyone in the camp was likely to be asleep. Remove the prisoners from their hut. Take them into the forest and kill them. Dispose of the remains. In other words, make them disappear. Four against two. How hard could it be?

The answer lay stretched out before him. All four, Surgeon Gilliland explained, had died from different causes. The first from a knife wound to the carotid. The second from a broken neck. The third, who at first didn’t appear to have a mark on him other than an injury to his cheekbone, upon further examination had suffered a contusion at the base of the skull; he had died of a haemorrhage inside the brain. As for the fourth man …

The gorge had risen in Quade’s throat when he’d seen the extent of the trooper’s disfigurement: a face so badly burned it looked as though each eyeball had been gouged out with a pair of fire tongs.