Wilde lowered his voice. ‘We should be careful. Whoever was here might be around still. Is it just this tiny house and the little chapel?’

‘There is a woodshed at the back, with room for a broom and other tools. And the caves behind.’

Wilde took a last look around, even gazing into the cooking pans. There really was nothing here. God, what a miserable, spartan existence. Surely, the beauty of the mountains would never compensate for the absence of human contact.

He looked at the woodshed behind the house. A few logs were scattered on the ground, nothing else. To his right, the chapel was twice the height of the house. It had a tall arched doorway, which opened easily. His eyesight struggled to adjust to the dim interior. At first he just saw an altar and a carved cross with Christ in a loincloth.

And then he saw the corpse, stretched out along the stone-paved nave. Its head was soaked in blood and unrecognisable as human.

*

In the first two weeks of liberation, many souls were lost to malnutrition and disease in the Apfelwald camp, but after that things improved quickly and dramatically. Living skeletons became vibrant human beings again, women regained their menstrual cycles, sexual desire returned. Now, in late August, Dr Angie Gray had been counting the days since the last death, and the figure stood at ten. That was yesterday.

Today, she had lost a patient. An old Jewish woman had been brought to the medical centre in a state of collapse the evening before, having been found curled up on the dusty ground near her barrack-room dormitory.

The words ‘old Jewish woman’ were not quite right. The truth was, Anna Brand was only in her forties, but her hair was white and thin, her skin was sallow and deeply lined and she looked twice her age.

She had survived the war, but not the peace. Angie had tried many times to talk to her, but she was trapped in a shell of memories from which she could not escape. Angie very much wanted to help her migrate to England or America, but it was difficult without contacts or relatives in those countries to sponsor her, and Anna Brand was never forthcoming with information to help the process. The only clue to her life came when she said that her sister lived in Palestine, but when Angie probed for details, such as the sister’s name and address, Anna Brand had clammed up. Now she had finally found peace, but Angie Gray was distraught.

‘What did she die of, Doctor?’ one of the nurses asked as they stood looking down at the woman’s pathetic remains.

Angie shook her head. In her examination of Anna Brand when she was brought in, she had found no specific diseases, or evidence of cancers or TB. Yes, the woman was underweight, but certainly not dangerously so. ‘I don’t know.’