‘It’s best you don’t know names. Safer. There’s nothing you can tell, if you were caught.’

Whoever they were, this had been thought through.

‘If workers escape, we help them, if we can. Hide them. Feed them. Forge papers.’

‘But that’s dangerous,’ Dora said. ‘If you were caught–’

‘If we were caught, we’d be sent away, perhaps killed. Yes. It is dangerous. But who can stand by and watch…’ He searched for a word. ‘This criminality. That’s what these camps are. Criminal.’

‘Plenty do,’ Dora said. ‘Turn a blind eye.’

‘No one wants to play the hero.’ His voice softened, and he added, ‘I have no family, not now.’ He swallowed, as if the memory of Margaret had been there all along, stuck in his craw. ‘I have nothing to lose, no one to put in danger.’

You have me. Dora bit her lip instead.

He leaned over, brushed his fingers against her cheek, squeezed her hand. She smelled his sweat, the pungent onion of it. Nerves, it had to be nerves, for the room wasn’t hot, despite the range, not hot enough for natural sweat. ‘Now I’ve put you in danger. I am sorry.’

‘When would you have told me?’

‘Perhaps never,’ he said. ‘When would you have told me?’

‘Perhaps never,’ she said, smiled.

‘Have there been others, before Alfred?’

He nodded.

‘Hiding in the attic? How many? Who were they?’

‘I can’t say how many,’ he said. ‘Mainly Russians. But not all. They come from all over Europe. He is the first German.’

‘How do they find you?’

Geoffrey shrugged. He wouldn’t say.

‘Do you run this?’ She wasn’t sure what to call it. Resistance?

He shrugged again. Not a word.

‘You arrived on the wrong day.’

‘Or the right day,’ she said. ‘That wound is serious. He could have died. I’ll need to come back, in a few days, to check on it.’

‘You shouldn’t be involved. It’s too dangerous.’

‘I am involved now, Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to be. I want to be.’

He smiled, tipped his head to one side. ‘You can be our nurse,’ he said. ‘Our trusted nurse.’

‘What happens to them?’

‘We have safe houses.’

‘And if they die?’ Dora said. ‘What do you do then?’

‘We bury them, with dignity.’

‘Where?’

‘In the four-acre field,’ Geoffrey said, as if it was obvious, matter-of-fact. ‘And if we find a corpse that the Germans haven’t thrown in the sea or sunk in the cement, we bury that too.’

Dora looked at their hands, entwined, her skin pale against his. The grandfather clock in the hallway whirred and began to strike the hour. She counted out. One. Two. Three. Four. She had to go, be back in time for tea.

He took her elbow, led her out to her bike, held the handlebars while she mounted it.

‘Thank you, Dora,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’