Meanwhile they had nothing to do but wait. People nowadays had no idea how much waiting there had been. They thought that war was all gunfire and explosions, sirens and screams, but he remembered it as long periods of tedium punctuated, like a summer night by lightning, by moments of intense excitement such as he had never imagined possible until then. He had been fifteen at the time, and immortal. Death was something that happened to other people. It no more occurred to him that he might be killed than that he might get pregnant.

As it turned out, he was right. Everything went according to plan, except that Angelin caught a stray bullet which emptied what little brains he’d ever had all over the mulch and moss of the underwood. But although no one came right out and said so, Angelin was expendable, and in every other respect the ambush was a textbook success. Mussolini’s die-hards were cut down in seconds — all but one youngster who threw down his gun, pleading incoherently for his life, and had to be dispatched at short range.

But during that interminable period of waiting, all he had been aware of was the pallid light reaching down through the trees and the welling silence, fat and palpable as a spring, broken only by the rasp of his companion’s digging. Using a small, short-bladed knife, Angelin was painstakingly excavating the hillside in front of the oak tree behind which they were concealed. Eventually the scraping noise got on his nerves.

‘What are you doing?’ he whispered irritably.

Angelin smiled in a vacuous, almost mocking way.

‘I smell something.’

He’d responded with a muttered blasphemy.