I gave her my passport. Quiller. NATO representative for the Red Cross. Scars, groin and left arm. Only two frontier endorsements, Spain and Portugal. We never like it to be thought we're widely travelled and therefore experienced.

"Thank you, Herr Quiller." She looked more relaxed. It seemed she didn't know there was one thing that could lie better than a camera, and that was a passport. I said:

"I'm trying to trace refugees whose relatives have died in England. Some of them have been called as witnesses, so I go to the courts to find them." I didn't think she was listening. She came closer and stared at me.

"You're English. As an Englishman, what do you think of Adolf Hitler?"

"Bit of a fidget."

Her long mouth tightened in contempt. "The English were so safe on their little island. They never saw anything happen."

"No." The one in the groin had been done at Dachau.

"Do you think he is a genius?" she asked me angrily.

"Yes." ‘Is’ noted.

"That man?"

"An evil genius."

She seemed more satisfied with me. I was beginning to understand. The ‘is’ was the biggest clue. She was living in the past.

I am a bad judge of age in people. The most I could do here was to allow for certain facts: a girl who deliberately watched mass-murder trials, who believed that someone had twice tried to kill her, who kept a wolfhound to protect her, and who showed signs of fierce pent emotion, would look older than her age. She looked thirty.

"When will people understand," she said in the strange wail I'd heard against the wall in the street, "that he's got to be blotted out, right out, so that he doesn't exist any more?"