‘You know what my background is?’

‘Military.’

‘That’s right. Did De Jaager tell you?’

‘No, because I never asked,’ said Louis. ‘I picked up on it the first time we met.’

‘I served eight years in the Dutch army,’ said Hendricksen. ‘I joined when I was eighteen: Airmobile Brigade. I was twenty-two when we were told we were to form part of an infanteriebataljon – in our case, Dutchbat Three – to be sent to the Balkans as part of the UN peacekeeping mission, except nobody had figured out how to keep peace in a place where everyone around you was committed to war.

‘Our mission was to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 819, which was supposed to make the town of Srebrenica and its surrounding areas a safe haven for civilians under attack from Bosnian Serb paramilitary units. But the mission was flawed: keep the peace, but don’t shoot anyone; guard the civilian population, but don’t get too involved, just in case someone takes offense. The UN didn’t want to be drawn into another bloody war in Europe, but we were already there. We were involved; it was just that the UN wasn’t prepared to acknowledge the implications. Eventually, we were going to have to pick a side, and it wasn’t going to be the Serbs, but no one wanted to make that admission, not then.

‘By July 1995 we were marooned in the town, surrounded by Ratko Mladić and his cutthroats. There was a constant flow of refugees – men, women, children, mostly Muslim – all looking to us for protection, but we couldn’t even protect ourselves. We numbered fewer than five hundred men with each rotation, armed with a few heavy machine guns and a pair of RPGs. They had tanks and artillery, we had armored personnel carriers. They cut our supply lines, and when we made incursions into their territory, we took fire. We called in air support, but the Serbs were holding fifty of our men hostage and threatened to kill them if the planes attacked, so the bombing run was called off. And all the time, the number of civilians inside the town kept growing and growing: fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, twenty-five thousand. They were terrified, and we were terrified, too.’

Hendricksen was no longer looking at Angel and Louis. He was staring at the floor, as though in its devices he might be able to discern some version of the patterns in his own life, the paths that had led him at last to this place, and this admission of guilt.