‘Believe me,’ Agnes said, tearing her bread in two and placing half in Dora’s bowl. ‘Baron von Aufsess won’t let you get away with it.’

‘Let him shoot me,’ Dora said.

‘He has more imagination than that,’ Agnes said. ‘Why waste ammunition?’

Dora picked at the bread Agnes had given her, grateful for the little extra. The Germans had no scruples and Dora wasn’t sure she was brave enough to step into the unknown. Was nursing a sick soldier by day so very wrong? Or comforting a lonely man at night?

There had been no word from List. No word about him, either. The officers did not speak about him. Why should they? He was SS, they were Wehrmacht. He had nothing to do with them, wasn’t even based in Jersey. Even the SS officers on leave from France never spoke of him.

The seasons drifted free of winter, into spring and summer. She was used to the routine, punch-drunk and battle-hardened. A gown for the evening, sitting on a stool at the bar, waiting, inured. She hoped for a protector. Someone to shield her. She’d look at each man, Are you the one? She couldn’t think of Vati, or Uncle Otto, List or even Geoffrey, any of the men she knew and loved, as she lay with her legs open and some pink Nazi with yellow bristles thrusting and thrashing, the smell of their must cloying in her nostrils. She thought of London then, walked herself up and down Fitzjohn’s Avenue, or recited the tube stations, Camden Town, Chalk Farm, Belsize Park. Or the U-Bahn. Friedrichstrasse, Hackescher Markt, Alexanderplatz. The Beethoven symphonies. ‘Eroica’. ‘Pastoral’. ‘Choral’. Mahler. La-la-ing the themes in her head. Mahler. Mendelssohn. Jewish. Degenerate. She never wanted to go with another man in her life, knew the damage that was being done, the infections that would make her sterile. Void. Voided. Who would want her now? Used and abused. List wouldn’t touch her.

She was no woman. She had no face, no features, nothing that spoke of her. Just cut and thrust. Mahler’s symphonies couldn’t help now, nor the streets and stations of home. She was a vacant, hollow frame lost in a no man’s land.

‘You’re quiet,’ Agnes said.

Dora had shrugged. With emptiness inside, what was there left to say?

There were two of them that night, SS, visiting, from Belgium. Drunk. Dora was nothing, skittles in an alley. The Mauser, cold in her groin, the hard steel inside her. Russian roulette. She wished there’d been a bullet. She could take no more. Her desire for death was sudden, overwhelming.

She’d have to be quick. Into the Revier. Her body was shuddering, uncontrollable motions that jerked through to her nerves and sinews. Hoffmann’s office, the key from the drawer, the medicine chest on the wall.