Joe stared at Ernst. This wasn’t true. He couldn’t mean it.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Ernst said. Yanked at a body, rolled it over. Joe heard the splash as it entered the water.

‘No,’ Joe said. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t.’

‘Do it,’ Ernst said. ‘They’re dead.’

Joe raised his right hand, in nomine patris.

‘Shut up,’ Ernst said, eyeing the guard who leaned against the door of the truck, smoking. ‘Work.’ He pulled at another corpse. ‘Faster.’

Joe spoke the rest of the prayer quietly, so Ernst couldn’t hear. Swinging the bodies over the cliffs like mailbags from a train. Eyes stinging with the salt from his tears. ‘Rest in peace. Amen.’

Tailgate up, the truck moved off. Joe heaved, wept. Dry tears. Shock as deep as a crater, black, fathomless, infinite. Neither Ernst nor Joe spoke. The sentences couldn’t come. The words weren’t there.

In the back of the truck with the sun bright as a spotlight, Joe could see that Ernst was a young man, no more than a year or two older than himself.

‘Pieces,’ Ernst said. ‘Bits. That’s what the bastards call us. Stücke.’

The truck bumped over an unmade road towards the building site. Joe held on tight.

‘You steel yourself,’ Ernst said. ‘But you never get used to it.’

There was a small table in the middle of the barrack and four men were playing poker with a deck of cards that they had filched from a German. They were betting high, Joe could hear, fantasy money, stakes in their dreams.

Ernst stood by watching them.

‘How long have you been here?’ Joe asked.

‘On Alderney? About six months. But I’ve been a prisoner for ten years.’ He smiled. ‘And I’m still here. The bastards won’t kill me.’

‘Ten years,’ Joe said. ‘That’s a long time.’ He wasn’t sure he’d last ten days.

‘I was arrested in 1933,’ Ernst went on. ‘Clamped in Sachsenhausen.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t agree with them.’ He smiled. ‘We’re all commies here. Or crooks. What happened to you?’

Joe wasn’t sure what to say. He saw her frail body, the dark sweat under her arms. Had they thrown her off a cliff? Fed her to the fishes and the monsters of the sea? He felt the tears run down his cheeks, his lips quiver. Don’t cry.

‘No matter,’ Ernst said. He put his hand on Joe’s arm. Joe swallowed. Be a man. The poker players roared, slapped the cards on the table. The dealer began to shuffle.

‘Your English is good,’ Joe said, for want of something to say.

‘I need to practise,’ Ernst said. ‘So stay strong, little man.’

Little man. He hadn’t been called that since he left Cloghane for the seminary, felt a rush of homesickness as sudden as a squall.

Chapter Eleven: Dora

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DORA

London: June 1985