‘Poking around in the night,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘What you looking for?’ He indicated the Gladstone bag that I had placed on the table. ‘That old thing?’

‘Not you,’ I said. ‘I’m not looking for you, Len.’

‘Maybe you should be,’ he said, and he shifted the shotgun in his paralysed hands.

‘Why don’t you put the gun down, Len. Then we can talk.’

He gripped the .410 tighter.

‘You asked me how I came here,’ he said. ‘I came with the soldiers. I rode on the back of a T-34. Do you know the T-34?’

‘It was a tank in the war. The Second World War. The Great Patriotic War, you call it. The T-34 was a Russian tank.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The Russian tank. The T-34 was the Russian tank. The tank that bought your freedom. The tank that paid for your democracy. Britain, America. You said once that I was too young for the war. You were right. I was eleven years old, too young for a war of annihilation. The Germans were coming and I was in the fields and I ran away. Then the Red Army took our town and I returned. But the town was not there any more. Because we were sub-humans. To them. You understand? My mother. My father. My grandmother. My sisters. Sub-humans. I never cried so much as at that time. The last days of my childhood passed in this way.’

He was silent, lost in memory, or listening to the night.

‘I went west with our soldiers,’ he said. ‘West, west, west. The First Belorussian. The frontoviki – frontline troops. Through a world in ruins. Do you know why they kept me? Because I had almost the same name as their leader. General Georgy Zhukov. What do you call it?’

‘A mascot,’ I said.

‘A mascot. I wanted to live. I wanted to stay alive. But I wanted to see Germany destroyed. I closed my heart to pity.’ He shook his head with wonder. ‘They had so much! The Germans were so rich! The farms, the animals – why did they come to us when they already had so much?’

‘They wanted more, Len,’ I said soothingly. ‘They wanted the world. It was madness.’

But he wasn’t listening to me now.

‘Our soldiers wanted women,’ he said. ‘“Frau, frau, frau!” I wanted something else. For my dead family. For my grandparents. For my sisters. For my parents. For my gone family. Our frontoviki placed me inside a cellar. One by one, a dozen Waffen-SS men who had destroyed their papers and ripped off their badges were sent inside. I could hear them screaming on the other side of the door. “Nix SS! Nix SS!” Our soldiers had showed me what to do. You know? The knife through the neck, then pull, then kick the Nazi down the stairs. A dozen of them. So, you see an old man. But you’re looking at a killer.’