He looked as if he had aged a decade in the last hour, his muscles sagging and his neck scrawny. Joe could see his Adam’s apple rise and fall, the whiskers on his neck white and sharp. He’d have to shave him properly tomorrow. Joe could see he wanted to talk. He couldn’t bid him goodnight, not right now.

‘And you had it wrapped up tight inside you, all this time.’

‘Like you bottled Dora’s story inside of you,’ Joe said. Geoffrey shook his head, tut-tut, dabbed at his eyes and wiped drool from his nose and mouth. Joe stared into the distance, at the damson light outside. Two old men, he thought, weighed down by the stones of guilt.

‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ Joe said, after a while. He meant, it played on my mind. The nightmares. He walked back to the chair. Geoffrey looked alone, in pain.

‘I didn’t mean to kill the cook,’ he said, lowering himself into the seat, elbows on the armrest. ‘But no man has the right to judge who lives or dies. We were all starving. We knew the pain of that. The obsession. To deny a man food, that is a terrible crime.’

Geoffrey nodded.

Joe added, ‘But I don’t need to tell you this.’ He had read about the trials in Hamburg after the war, the evils done in Neuengamme. Geoffrey hadn’t wanted to stand witness, to stand out, as he said, but he’d followed them in the papers and on the wireless, day in, day out. I knew him. Yes, that happened. ‘What had that old man ever done?’ Standing with his bowl, so meek. ‘I meant to teach the cook a lesson. I didn’t mean him harm. No, Geoffrey, that wasn’t my sin.’

Talking gave Joe energy again. He should stay, keep Geoffrey company. Geoffrey was upset. This was the longest conversation Joe could remember them having, a real heart-to-heart. There was a drop of Jameson left in the bottle. Joe reached for his glass, topped it up, showed the bottle to Geoffrey. He shook his head.

‘I’ve had enough.’

‘Denying the dead a proper funeral,’ Joe went on. ‘Not giving the poor souls back to the ground so their bodies could rise again. That was a sin.’

He took a sip of the whiskey. He hadn’t drunk like this for forty years, could feel his brain swell and shrink beneath his skull, hammer for mercy.

‘But it wasn’t my sin,’ Joe went on, ‘and there was nothing I could do, except say a prayer.’

Geoffrey nodded.

It’s past his bedtime, Joe thought. ‘Will I help you upstairs?’ he said.

‘Presently. Go on.’

‘The sin I committed was in believing there was a God in heaven on the first day of hell on earth. So I said the prayers, a requiem in my head, every night, in the Latin too.’