He turned, his heel scouring the sand. Joe watched him walk towards the dunes. Despite the jacket, Joe shivered and slumped to the ground, bones of marrow, the soft putty of his skeleton. List disappeared from view. He shuddered, the hairs on his arms standing up as if his grave had been dug and trampled over. An animal scurried in the sandy undergrowth, made him jump. Flashed. Gone. A dormouse? A field mouse? Perhaps a vole. A mole. There were molehills beyond the dunes, soft hillocks of chewed earth. Did moles chew? Or scratch? Worms chewed. He could hear them, a soft percussion in the silence, as the ocean breathed in and out.

The sun sat crooked in the sky. His sin. His original sin. He had believed Trude. Put his trust in her. All along, she was untrue. Why? Why him? He’d led her to the dell. Betrayed Geoffrey and the nurse. Were they still alive? The two labourers, they were dead. Four people, and the cook made five. Five people condemned because he had been too vain to resist. For what? She had promised him heaven but gave him hell. He was a murderer. A coward. A liar. He’d lived a lie as a priest and this was his punishment.

The cold muzzle pressed into his cheek.

‘Aufstehen!’

Joe breathed in sharp, looked up at the guard holding the gun, his body foreshortened, silhouetted against the sun.

‘Shoot me,’ Joe said.

The guard kicked his thigh. ‘Aufstehen.’

Joe pushed himself onto his feet. He could make a run for it, head for the sea, force the guard to shoot him, kill him outright. Joe looked at the beach. He was too scared to run, too feeble to decide. Stumbled back along the path with the Mauser pressing into his back.

A collaborator. A Kapo.

A cuckold.

Why couldn’t he stay in the shelter of the marram grass, live on berries and fungus, sleep in the moss with the breeze of the sea?

Cook. His turn to field the suspicious, starving eyes of the inmates, the accusations. You do all right for yourselves, you cooks. Bastard Kapos.

Ernst had put his arm on Joe’s shoulder. ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘You’re not guilty for what you did. You’re the victim.’

‘It wasn’t just the cook,’ Joe said. ‘There was so much more. So many more.’ Where could he begin? All his life. A lie.

‘Don’t look back,’ Ernst said, shaking his head, wagging his finger. ‘Think to the future. You and me, we’re history’s witnesses. Be strong, comrade. The past will look different in a few years.’

Joe lay on his bunk as the men moaned in their sleep. This was his cross. Guilt. Solid and heavy, boxing him in and shackling him tight. What was doubt now? Nothing but a flimsy cross made of palm fronds.

If he was to live, then he’d make amends.