Jurat Clifford Orange, the Chief Aliens Officer, had a round face with grey hair and moustache and thick black eyebrows.

He coughed, a polite ahem. It didn’t fool Dora.

‘Distasteful business, this,’ he said, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his mouth. He looked behind him, nodded to the man sitting there, a notepad on his lap. Dora wondered if he was a secretary or a reporter. ‘For me as well as you.’

‘Oh?’ She wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

‘The German authorities,’ he paused.

Authorities? What authority did they have? They were occupiers. She resented the way this Jurat and Miss Besson, the Bailiff and the States, all of them, conferred legitimacy on the invaders.

‘The authorities,’ he repeated, as if that absolved him of culpability, ‘need to be sure of,’ he searched for a word, ‘the background of all alien residents on the islands.’ He sniffed. ‘I have been tasked with the responsibility of finding out.’

He shook his head, studied her for sympathy with large doe eyes.

‘Distasteful, as I said. But what can we do?’ He smiled, as if this acquitted him too.

You can resist, she thought. Resign. You don’t have to do their dirty business.

‘Under the rules of the Hague Convention, we are obliged to obey’ – everything? she wanted to ask – ‘all reasonable demands.’ The Chief Aliens Officer stared at her, eyebrows raised. ‘We consider this a reasonable demand,’ he said. ‘A chap needs to know who he’s dealing with, after all.’

The man behind him leaned forward. ‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘what they would do if we refused to comply with their requests?’

Dora moved her gaze from the Jurat to the man.

‘Sir Leonard de la Moye,’ the man said, standing up and extending his hand. ‘I’m just sitting in on this. Ignore me.’

Dora was uneasy. The Jurat alone was bad enough. Two of them made it an interrogation. Keep calm, she told herself. Say nothing. Background. That was the Jurat’s euphemism. Couldn’t bring himself to say, Jewish.

‘You are, as I understand it, a German. Am I right?’

She took a deep breath. She hadn’t been brought up to lie, wasn’t sure how well she could do it. Sir Leonard sat without moving, his eyes fixed on her.

‘No,’ she said. She heard the Jurat start, elbows sliding forward on the shiny surface of his desktop. There would be no evidence to the contrary, she knew, at least, not in Jersey and they couldn’t turn to London for proof. Besides, Hitler had declared her a non-German.

‘I was born in Sweden,’ she said.

That had been Matron’s idea. ‘I’ve destroyed your papers,’ she’d said. ‘Put down you’re Swedish.’

The Jurat raised one eyebrow.

‘Sweden,’ she added, ‘is neutral.’

He leaned back in his chair, stroked his chin. ‘But you came from Germany, I understand. What were you doing there?’