‘You know what?’ Agnes squatted on the bench beside Dora that evening, after the meeting with List and Hoffmann. She put her bowl on the table, slurping the soup over the side as she steadied herself. She licked her hands. ‘Waste not, want not.’ Grimace of a smile. ‘He took my baby,’ she said, leaning into Dora.

‘What baby?’

Dora wondered if Agnes wasn’t a little delirious, had caught a fever. She had no child that Dora knew of.

‘My little blond-haired baby. He still had his curls.’ Agnes’s eyes filled with tears and her nose began to run. She wiped the mucous with two fingers, dragging it across her mouth, ran the back of her hand across her cheek. ‘I never told you this. I never told anyone.’

Then why me? Dora thought. Agnes had made no secret of her contempt for Dora, and Dora didn’t trust her now. But Agnes was no actress, and the tears were genuine. It could have been a phantom pregnancy, of course. Dora had read about them, though she’d never had a case.

‘His name was Emile,’ Agnes went on. ‘He was born the twenty-seventh of April 1939. Just over a year before those bastards invaded.’ She leaned to one side, rummaging in the pocket of her dress. ‘This is all I have of him.’ She opened a small square photograph and slid it along the table for Dora to see. The celluloid was cracked in the middle along the folds, but Dora could make out Agnes holding a small child with blond curly hair. She looked at Agnes, at her worn face, her cracked and missing teeth, her thinning, colourless hair.

‘I fought like a tigress,’ Agnes went on. ‘When they snatched him. That’s how I lost my teeth. Bam in the kisser with the flat end of a rifle. What they didn’t knock out turned bad. Killed the roots, see.’

The baby could have been any baby, but the timbre of Agnes’s words suggested she was telling the truth. Agnes may have been many things, but she wasn’t a liar.

‘I was never a beauty,’ Agnes said. ‘But this turned me ugly and old. I don’t care. I live to get him back again.’

‘Who took him?’

Agnes looked over her shoulder. The guard was slouching by the doorway, picking at his hand. Dora hawked, spat, an ugly glob of green phlegm.

‘Himmler,’ she said.

Himmler. She could hear Hoffmann simpering Himmler, as if he was a matinee idol. Even List held the name in awe.

‘Himmler?’ Dora repeated.

‘Well,’ Agnes said, ‘technically, a henchman.’

‘What for?’

‘For his experiment. His programme.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Dora said.

‘Breeding. Like cows. Or mice. Breeding fucking mice.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Dora said. ‘What mice?’