Was it a coincidence that the same woman had images of both Dora and Trude? My mother had some connection with Jersey. Perhaps her mother wasn’t English. Perhaps she was German. Joe had taken Barbara Hummel in good faith. But now she’d shown him Trude’s photo too, he wasn’t sure who she was, or what she was after. How could he break that to Geoffrey after all he’d been through?

Geoffrey had poured out his heart to Joe. Joe should come clean with him. He owed it to him, after all these years, to confess his part, hard though it was. He poured the tea, sat with his elbows on the table, spooning in the sugar and stirring his mug.

‘I have something to tell you,’ he began. ‘About the day the Feldpolitzei arrested you, in the war.’

He stared at the tea eddying in the mug, brown rings and froth.

‘You see,’ Joe took a deep breath and went on. ‘It was me who led them to you.’

Joe paused, watched as Geoffrey raised his head and looked at him. ‘You?’

‘I didn’t mean to,’ Joe said. ‘But there was this German nurse, you see.’

He lifted out the spoon and it fell with a clatter on the plate.

‘Sorry,’ he said, picking it up and laying it down silently. ‘I don’t know how to say this, but I had an intimate relationship with her. Yes.’ Say it how it was, that’s what they called it in the papers. No time now for euphemisms. ‘And in the course of that I led her to the field with the dell, where I watch the birds.’

‘You?’ Geoffrey said again.

‘It was me who led her to the farm.’

Geoffrey sat there shaking his head.

‘I’ve never had the courage to tell you, see,’ Joe said. ‘I was a coward. I thought if I stay here I can make amends. Atone. It was a terrible sin, what I did. And there’s no excusing.’ Joe stood up, pushed back his chair so the legs grated on the flagstone floor. ‘I can pack my bags now, if that’s what you’re wanting. I quite understand.’

He picked up his mug and walked towards the door.

‘I’ll be in the van.’

Joe stepped out into the evening, with a light head. He should have confessed forty years ago. He was a weak man, that was for sure. Feeble. Faint-hearted, a moral slouch. A charlatan. Oh, he had guilt, by the shedload. But what was guilt, without true remorse? Without penance? An indulgence, that was all. An affectation. All breast-beating and mea culpas. Empty, selfish gestures.