They came in his dreams, memories storming the walls of oblivion. Words polka-stepping between the corpses, Dance with me, John, women with withered dugs, give me a smoke. Lieselotte sliding from a pack of cards, and the cards were bodies, stacked and shuffled. She smiled as she came towards him, became Anatoly with worms bursting from his pustules, and the boy with the mangled foot cried out that he was under orders, he had his orders. Don’t go near him. Otto Ohlendorf nodded, said we had to understand, I did a good job, don’t you agree?

John jerked awake, his leg stiff with cramp. He’d drunk too much last night. They all had. Drowned their sorrows in whisky and beer. Each to his own. A silent club of proxy victims, soaking up the pain of the survivors, the witnesses. The excuses of the henchmen, the quibbles of the murderers. The dry, forensic questions of the lawyers.

He pushed himself out of bed, washed himself and shaved. He’d only just started shaving when he’d been conscripted. Twice a week to start with, then every other day. Now he had to do it every morning, lather his face and scritch with the razor. He used to watch his father shave. These days his chin made the same noise, his lips twisted the same way, fingers pulled his cheeks like his father before him, scritch, scratch.

Did that make him a man? His father had never cracked, not even under enemy fire with shrapnel searing his leg.

‘Mustn’t mollycoddle the boy,’ he used to say. ‘Needs to toughen up. Too soft for his own good.’

Was he soft? A coward? He loved words over fists, languages over bayonets. He’d won an exhibition at Merton, Modern Languages, deferred it. He’d prove to his father he had the stomach for war too.

He made his way towards the Palace of Justice. The old town was in ruins and the air thick with dust. He coughed. They all coughed, the Nuremberg Cough, ha ha. A cough like no other, from the ashes and stench of death. John thought it was nerves, too, day in, day out cramped in the booth, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, tense as he struggled, lungs tight, tendons taut. Léon Dostert had given them all training in the new technique, in the microphones and headsets. He was an American, an army man, a lieutenant colonel, expected discipline.

‘My German isn’t good enough,’ John had said. ‘I’m not a native speaker.’ Not like the other men and women. He found it hard groping for the word when he didn’t want to say what he had to say.

‘Your superiors think otherwise,’ Lieutenant Colonel Dostert said. ‘You come with excellent reports. Give it a go. We can move you on to translation if necessary.’