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‘You know as well as I do, old boy, locals would mete out justice in their own sweet way if we didn't do it. And then there's no end to it.' Arthur passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Nothing will settle down till justice is done, and more's the point, is seen to be done. Only way to make them understand no one can come
knocking on the door in the night. Draw a line and make a new start.'

‘Well, it's a rotten business we're in,' said Ralph, longing to get out of the schoolroom and the overused air.

Arthur wiped his forehead once more. ‘Okey-dokey.' He pulled the last page of the report from the typewriter with a tearing sound. ‘Let's get this lot turned in to Security and then see these palatial digs you've scouted out for us, Ralph.'

Dusty and Ralph escorted the prisoners, now in handcuffs, to the lorry. It was the first time the mayor and the girl had seen each other, and she fixed wide, wet eyes on him. ‘Maurice?' she said.

‘Stupid bitch,' the man muttered in Dutch.

Ralph felt his arm fly up, felt the crack of bone on bone as his fist hit the mayor's chin and he stumbled, fell to his knees, the blood spreading from his nose, covering his chin and chest. Dusty moved swiftly to hold Ralph back and then pull the man up.

‘Give us a break, Colchester, and cool down, will you?'

Ralph put his hands on his knees and breathed deeply. It hadn't been the mayor's face he'd been taking a swing at. He knew that – and he had to get a handle on this anger. Looking up at the stars in the anthracite sky he let his breathing fill with the cold air, in and out, let reason return.

As they drove back in the twilight the mayor's sly, inscrutable expression stayed with Ralph. How could anyone really know a man like that, what he was capable of under the charm? With a stab he thought of Max. Max who had spent the war years in Madrid, being wined and dined at the British Embassy, German officers everywhere, all hand in glove with Franco. Max had never really explained why it was that he'd failed to come home and volunteer to do war work, instead staying on to count beans at the Madrid bank. What had Max really been up to? And the most puzzling thing of all had been the fact that someone, somewhere had decided that Max should be granted
an OBE shortly after he came back to England. For what? For staying out of it? For pushing money around in an oak-panelled office in Madrid? Nothing about Max from those years made any sense.

‘Habitable's not the first word that comes to mind,' Dusty said as they pulled a third mattress into the upstairs room of the draper's. They dropped it on the floor and a cloud of dust rose up. Ralph unrolled his bedding and sank down, too tired to unlace his boots.

Lying on his back he finally allowed himself to take out the letter. He read it through once again but the message was still the same. He was illegitimate. He didn't belong to Robert Colchester one bit. A prickling of something like shame across his skin; he was Max Gardiner's little bastardo.

‘Here, old boy. Stop going through your love letters. Get some of this in you and get some sleep,' said Dusty. He had a bottle of ration whisky and was emptying it fast. He passed it over as a nightcap. Ralph took a swig, then another.

He crumpled the letter into the inner pocket of his kit bag. His eyes sore with dust, his body aching, he pulled off his top clothes. He took the leather photo wallet from his jacket pocket and stood Alice beside his bed on his kit bag; Alice punting on the Cherwell, the sun haloing her fair hair as she smiled mischievously, her presence in the room a balm. The other half of the photo frame showed a formal picture, taken in a studio. It had been her present to him once they got his call-up date. Her fair hair was brushed and back-lit; she wore pearl earrings and lipstick. She gazed up intently at the corner of the picture, carefully following the photographer's instructions. He watched her for a while. Then he lay back onto the bedroll with a feeling of sinking, heavy enough to sink down into the earth below the house, into a deep oblivion.

In the morning a forest of light shafts dazzled through the gaps above him. It was hard to wake up. The grimy mattress and rough army blanket seemed wonderfully warm and comfortable. Freezing winter air was coming in through the broken windows. He could hear birds fussing on the roof. Sparrows perhaps. When had he last heard birds? He looked over at his photos of Alice, reached out a hand and drew the photograph frame onto his chest. He put a kiss on the cellophane cover.

Dusty was attempting to shave with a mess tin of water and a steel mirror. A mile or so away the heavy artillery guns started up again. Dusty jumped and nicked his chin. You never got used to it. Ralph dragged his shirt and underclothes under the blankets to conserve the warmth there and began to dress.

In the cafe where he had housed the NAAFI they found the taproom quiet, sounds of pots banging through the doorway into the kitchen, the smell of army sausages and bacon overpowering the thin scent of old beer. Two dishevelled beds were lying in front of the tiled stove that heated the bar room. A woman's yellow hair showed above the blankets; next to her the little girl was curled up asleep.

In the kitchen the orderlies seemed to be sharing a suppressed joke. They glanced over at Ralph.

‘'Ad a good night's sleep then, Sergeant Colchester?'

Laughter from the boy stirring a large pot of baked beans.

‘And you men? Slept well?'

‘Bit noisy here at times, sir.'

Dusty came in, the smell of whisky evident from his morning nip. There was a slight tremor to the flame as he lit up the first Woodbine.

‘You've billeted the cookhouse in a knocking shop. Cook says there was a right noise going on in the room next to his.'

He coloured. How could he have missed it? A chump really. ‘Well, we'll have to move out. Bad for the men I know and . . .'

‘Leave it,' said Dusty. ‘We've only another night here all being well. The men will have to restrain themselves.' More laughter from the boy stirring the beans.

‘If she's got it you've had it, Parker. You remember that.'

Two girls appeared in the kitchen, thin and bony, pale cotton dressing gowns belted round their middles. They looked like nice girls, the sort who might well work as secretaries or behind the counter in a corner shop, capable and level-headed. The war had made them all take up unexpected careers. Ralph felt horribly sorry for them. They nodded enthusiastically at cook's gruff offer of breakfast and took their loaded plates into the bar, adding more bread from the tray as they went. Soon the little girl and her mother appeared.

‘Here you are then,' said cook, piling their plates up. The little girl stuffed more bread in her pocket and they hurried away to eat.

The day was taken up by assessing the numbers of Polish workers brought over by the Nazis for coal haulage along the canals. They were now destitute refugees, with no means of getting home other than to walk. They lived in squalid dwellings made from turf bricks, corrugated roofs leaking rain into their sleeping areas. The men crowded round Ralph, listless then threatening. They wanted food, shoes, soap, money to go home. They clamoured round him, asking him in their broken German to listen and write down the names of their relatives. A man with pale skin rusted with freckles was holding a knife that he passed from hand to hand as Ralph spoke, trying to reassure them he'd do something. Down in their subterranean turf dwellings it felt as if they were sinking into the mud, forgotten. The smell of mildew and other rot was overpowering.

Ralph could not believe their conditions and spent the day running around on the bike trying to get someone to take an interest in them, but came up with nothing but some sacks of potatoes from army stores and a pile of forms to fill in from the Red Cross. The
local population had closed ranks, fearful and suspicious of them, inured to pity.

He got back, haunted by such wretchedness. Swathes of displaced people everywhere, so many of them wandering across Europe, looking for anything edible, for a map to find their way home, for shoes.

And if he were to set out for home? Where was that now? There had always been the idea of returning to Valencia where he was born, or his father's family home in London. Not now. Now there was only a moving forward. Towards Alice and their future. Perhaps Dusty was right. The trick to surviving all this was to simply concentrate on the next task, the next moment, on the future.

At twilight the heavy droning of planes filled the sky once again and he realised with a sinking heart that they were in for another night of nerve-shredding explosions. From the billet in the draper's he watched allied bombers passing in layers towards Goch and the other German towns, battalions of stiff wings against the deepening evening sky. One pale star.

The shuddering bombs began to sound across the flood plain. A few days later Goch was taken.

Arriving at Goch late one winter's afternoon, they were silent. All that was left of the small, German town was its name and the smell of rotting sewage; smouldering fires burning among the mounds of black mud and churned debris; the sharp chemical stink of cordite from shells. It was hard to see how one was supposed to restore order and justice to this nothingness, this razed landscape.

The vacating army HQ had been leading operations from underground cellars which they now handed over to the Field Security unit. The CO was clearing away his papers from a small table covered by a lace cloth.

‘Make the most of it,' he told them. ‘Once we're over the Rhine we'll be sleeping in muddy slit trenches.'

The cellar smelled wet, a faint memory of potatoes or apples. The barrel-shaped roof was just about high enough for a man to stand up at the apex. They kept the oil lamp burning all night. Without it the place felt like a coffin.

The first thing Ralph did was to stand the leather-bound photo wallet up on the crate next to his mattress so that Alice could watch over him. All night lumps of plaster loosened and fell in papery clouds of dust as the guns pounded. Dusty reached into his bag for the last of the whisky ration, held the bottle up to the light to show only an inch in the bottom. Several days till the next allowance.

Ralph turned towards Alice's photo. If he could just feel her cool arms round his neck for a moment, her head on his shoulder. If he could just talk to Alice about the letter. He could see her serious little face, her head on one side as she listened to what he said.

‘It is your decision, darling,' Mama had written. ‘Only please think before you say things that you can never unsay again. Why give Alice a burden she doesn't really need to know about? Some secrets are bad things, yes, but then there are the secrets we need to keep, to protect a family. Darling, I have to tell you, if you must burden Alice, then her mother may see it quite badly if she knew you were born illegitimately.'

How could he not tell Alice? He and Alice had always shared every last thought and feeling, every idea and hope, the good and the bad. But if he told Alice, then Alice must tell her mother – everything magnified and pored over. He saw himself drinking tea in the garden with Mrs Hanbury. ‘Of course, funny thing is, turns out I'm Mr Gardiner's little bastard.'

When Ralph had fallen in love with Alice he had also fallen in love with that afternoon in the summer garden, the family seated
under the rose trellis as if they had always been there, and always would be. It wasn't the Hanburys' way to let things fall apart as Mr Gardiner had, leaving a wake of lumpy chaos behind him. In spite of all the awful fuss her father had put Alice's family through with his affair, somehow it had been arranged that calmer waters had closed over the matter, and nothing more was said. Since then Alice had become rather prickly and tender about things being done correctly. His heart felt pinched when he pictured himself telling Alice, the dismay on her brave little face as she struggled not to mind a further seedy layer to his story.

If he should lose Alice?

The vibrations of artillery fire from the massive cannons would probably continue all night. No hope of sleeping. He found a new sheet of paper from his writing case and began a letter in the dim lamplight.