I pushed open the door to the church as if I was breaking into a torture chamber. I stood in the doorway for an age. Felt the cool air on my hot, damp cheeks. Stood in that great rectangle with its wooden pews and its distant ceilings, vast flagstones and its dark shadows. The stained-glass windows offered almost no light and there were no switches on the wall but instinct made me reach out to the recess by the door and close my hand around the waxy candles. I found matches too. Lit myself a feeble torch that turned the half-black air into a golden circle of red, purple and yellow.

There were footsteps on the dust of the floor.

Almost sleepwalking, shivering so hard that the candle was fluttering in my hand, I followed the footsteps to where they became lost in a big old smudge of different patterns. Fairfax had kneeled here. You could tell just by looking. He’d eased himself onto his side by the third row of pews. I peered forward, squinting. Felt around in the old wood of the pew. A keyhole. A mouth set in the wood. I found a likely key and slid it into the gap. It opened as easily as the door.

I reached inside.

The papers were ragged. Crumpled. Even in the half-dark I could see they had been blackened and singed. They had been saved from fire. They still smelled of smoke.

Why did I take them? I still don’t know. But the words that I read on those grey and yellow pages changed me so deeply they may as well have been carved into my heart with a blade.

EXTRACT. TR 046.

… I recognized the boy strapped to the bonnet. I don’t think I knew his name but he was familiar to me in the way that somebody you see every day on your way to work is familiar to you. Almost enough to nod hello to. The sort you can’t instantly place if you see them out of context. I was looking at him with my head angled, unconsciously mirroring the way he was looking at me. He wasn’t really alive any more. He wasn’t dead either but the way he looked; the absence in his eyes, none of that looked like life. It was Milice work. Favre’s work. They stood beside the men in uniform. Shadows. Three or four of them; blobs of oil among the grey of the uniforms. Torturers. Killers. Zealots. We feared them more than we feared the Germans. They had chosen this life. Opted to kill their own kind.

‘Move. They are staring. Come. Come.’