‘How can that be a sin?’ Geoffrey said.

Joe shrugged. ‘It was a blasphemy, all the same. You see, I had stopped believing in a God. It was all a pretence. Lying, that I was a priest. I was no more a priest than you or Ernst.’

‘If it gave them succour,’ Geoffrey said, ‘was that so bad?’

‘They were dead,’ Joe said. ‘I couldn’t help the living, only the dead.’ He tipped the last of the whiskey into his glass, the liquid forming rainbows as it swirled and settled. The clock in the hall worked itself up, chimed once.

‘Trude, now,’ Geoffrey said after a while. ‘You got her into trouble, trying to save Dora and myself. Do you count that as one of your sins?’

‘Trude,’ Joe said. He put down his glass and put a hand under Geoffrey’s elbow, pulling him to his feet. When Geoffrey leaned on him now, his body was light as a bird. He’d lost flesh, his skin translucent, his veins blue rivers. Joe could feel the bones beneath, see the liver spots on his face and hands. When had Geoffrey got so old?

‘You’ve been good to me, Joe,’ Geoffrey said. ‘And I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

‘You tell me that every night,’ Joe said. He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but he loved Geoffrey. Joe had wanted a wife at one time. He wasn’t much to look at it, no more than a penny titch of a man with little moral fibre, but he was a grafter and that counted for a lot in a husband. But women were fickle, untrustworthy. He had never found another one to his liking and he’d grown content over the years, he and Geoffrey.

‘Trude,’ Geoffrey said.

It was a while before Joe answered.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘there’s the thing. I was green. An innocent. The cruelty of it. The cruelty of them.’ Added, ‘No, she was not my sin. I have no guilt for her. Not now.’

And it wasn’t just Trude. Survival was a strange beast, seeing the man behind the uniform, we’re all in this together.

Alderney: February – July 1944