John walked through the doors as the soldiers standing guard saluted him, and up the main staircase ahead. His legs dragged, as if he were ploughing through a quagmire of bloated forms with stippled fingers pulling him down. The dry, forensic posts planted to guide the way were beyond his reach.

He slipped in next to Sieg, almost as young as himself, sitting with the other translators in the side room as the lawyers opened the day’s proceedings, coffee and cigarettes for the taking. They listened on a loudspeaker to the deliberations, waiting for their shift. Russian speakers, German, French and English. John’s cup clattered back on its saucer and he righted it, fingers shaking. Sieg looked up, placed a hand over John’s to steady it, raised an eyebrow, smiled. They’d been drinking together last night.

‘You cannot feel and do your job,’ he said, voice hushed so the others didn’t hear. ‘Remember what we said? You must not feel.’

How can you do this? John had asked him last night. How can you listen?

John swallowed now, nodded, his mind stewed in misery, his muscles pulsing out of control. He could no sooner detach himself from the task than sever his own head.

‘It does not make you a monster,’ Sieg said. He’d escaped on the Kindertransport, had lost most of his family. Sieg spoke English with a Scottish lilt. ‘Or a sadist,’ he went on. ‘It doesn’t make you amoral. Any more than a ventriloquist becomes his dummy.’

Like Archie in the Navy Mixture on the wireless, John thought, except it wasn’t. He envied Sieg his calm, his detachment. The other translators too, with bruised, chequered histories. He dreaded making a mistake, dreaded his job. Why did it affect him so badly?

‘Five minutes to switchover,’ the monitor said. He was American, a lieutenant like himself. John began to sweat, coffee moiling in his gut. He wanted to vomit. He clasped a hand over his mouth and stood up abruptly, knocking his cup as the window spun to the side and the walls crashed towards him. He felt the furniture as he fell between it, the sharp wooden arm of the chair piercing and wrenching his side as he lost consciousness.

He came to in the first-aid room, an army nurse feeling his pulse.

‘The doctor will be here soon,’ she said. ‘You fainted. Nothing to worry about, though you have a nasty bump on your head and the makings of a fine bruise on your left side.’ She poured him some water. ‘Sit up.’ She hooked an arm behind his back, pushed him forward and stuffed pillows behind him.

‘I’m on duty,’ John said. ‘I have to go—’

‘You’re going nowhere,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Where are you from?’

He lifted the glass to his lips, dribbling the water down his chin as his side throbbed with pain.