'And who would live here? The racially pure like me, right? What the hell would we do all day? Listen to reruns of Hitler's speeches?'

She laughed. 'What a card you are. No – you would farm. Party ideology is founded on ideals of purity, you see, Corporal. And one such ideal is the nobility of the farmer. In the east there'll be no shortage of land, or indeed labour, and the farms could be quite extensive.'

He picked up the tray and sat back with it on his lap, still eating. He had no scruples about being ill-mannered before this nutcase Nazi. 'Party ideology?'

She smiled. 'Some of it can be a little baroque. But it's hard to argue with Hitler's fundamental thesis. There are three sorts of people in the world, Corporal. Those who create culture, those who preserve it, those who destroy it. There is overwhelming evidence in the historical record that those who create human culture are of the Nordic type.'

'How about the Greeks? I didn't know they were Scandinavians.'

'No, but they were of Nordic extraction. There have been many diasporas.'

'And these destroyers of yours?'

'The Jews. All this Hitler has set out clearly in his own writings. Of course even Hitler drew on the work of earlier thinkers. We have libraries here, you should read up. It was an Englishman called William Jones who in the eighteenth century first identified the Aryan race, you know-indeed he coined the term – based on a comparison of languages, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin. Hitler and Himmler both refer to a recent work by another Englishman called Houston Stewart Chamberlain. A son-in-law of Wagner. Called Race and Nation, it-'

'I'll take the scholarship as read. Look, you're English, I still can't believe you swallow a word of this.'

Her smile was thinner now. 'But I have seen these ideas work themselves out in my own life.'

'How?'

'My father, and his father before him, served the empire in India.'

'The white man's burden?'

'Under the British the Indians advanced more in decades than they had in millennia. But my father's properties near Bombay were burned out by insurgents; he was forced to return to England. And then his savings, the fruit of the labour of generations, were destroyed through the criminal incompetence of a financier-'

'A Jew?'

'Almost certainly, though I could not prove it.'

'So that's it. To avenge Daddy, you joined the SS.'

She flared, 'My father died in poverty. Do you imagine that the lands my family had to abandon in India are better off than they were under us? Do you imagine that my family's money is being put to good use by those who stole it from us? You see, I grew up amid living proof of Hitler's thesis.'

'Yeah, yeah,' he said. 'So what do you want from me?'

'We're offering selected prisoners of war the chance to come here, lightly supervised at first-'

'You want me to be your poster boy in the States.'

'Well, if you took on the challenge it would create a lot of headlines. I've been over there; I know how it works. It could generate some goodwill.'

'And it might neutralise the news my mother sent back about Peter's Well. Right?'

She leaned forward, crisp in her black uniform. 'I won't try to minimise the harm that has been done to you and your family, Gary. I'm well aware of it. Since I've been stationed in Hastings I've got to know your father-in-law. Rather well, actually.'

'George?' He couldn't believe it. 'You're the SS!'

'Well, I'm also a human being. And he doesn't have anybody else. The civilian police are rather shunned, you know, by those who don't understand. Some call them collaborators, and worse. George needs company – somebody who understands.'

'"Company." My God. So this was why you were detailed to recruit me.'

'We often talk of Hilda-'

'Don't you dare speak of her.'

'Try to keep calm, Gary.'

'I've had enough of this farce. I want to go back to the stalag.'

She stood, setting down her coffee cup. 'Well, that isn't going to happen,' she said with a touch of steel in her voice. 'Not for now, at any rate.' She made for the door. 'Give it twenty-four hours. You'll have the house to yourself. Enjoy. Eat, shower. Watch the television. Wash your clothes, for heaven's sake. Walk around the village a bit; somebody will escort you. Twenty-four hours. Then, if you wish, I'll take you back to the homosexuals and madmen of your precious stalag.' She walked out, closing the door behind her.

He stood there, alone, confused. He grabbed the last of the biscuits off the plate and stuck them in his coat pocket, a prisoner's reflex. And he stared at the television, which gazed back at him, a glass eye focused on his uncertainty.

XIX

This November morning, as every Sunday morning, Ben was brought to Josef Trojan's office. Ben was made to sit on a hard upright chair while Trojan read intently through his latest test results. An SS man stood at the door, a heavy automatic weapon in his arms.

Ben had grown used to this routine. He was just as much a prisoner as in the stalag, but now he was sleeping for the Reich. Once that would have made him laugh. He had learned not to laugh, not at Trojan. He just sat still, trying to settle his breath.

And, out of his windowless cell for these precious minutes, he drank in every scrap of stimulus. They were in Trojan's research block at Richborough. He could hear no birdsong, not today; this was November. But there was a window high in the wall that revealed sky, a rectangle of bright blue, an intense colour never matched by any reproduction, and there was a feathering of high cloud, ice probably, which-

'Rubbish.' Trojan threw the file across his desk and sat back. 'A week's worth of results, and no correlation.'

Ben snapped to alertness, ready to pay full attention to every word, to every nuance.

Every morning, on the moment of waking, Ben had to recite whatever dreams he had had to a waiting psychologist. The transcript was analysed and matched with the results of deep interrogations of Ben's past life, as well as a register of likely future events, all in the hope of finding some evidence of psychic dream-wandering. But no significant evidence had turned up.

'I'm sorry, sir,' Ben said.

'You've been eating the programmed food, consuming the drink? The drugs – the aluminium cap?'

'Yes, sir.' The Nazi scientists had been varying the 'input' as they called it, his food and drink and other stimuli, even the stiffness of his mattress, to see if there was any change in the 'output', his dreaming. As if he were a machine producing sausages. And they had tried shrouding his skull in an aluminium cap, in order to see if there were tangible radiations that could be screened out, or perhaps focused.

Trojan got up and walked around the room, hands behind his back. 'I trust we're not wasting time. At least the negative results prove you're not lying about your dreams, which would be easy enough to do.'

'I wouldn't dare.'

Trojan looked at him, surprised, then laughed. 'I'm sure you wouldn't. And what's next on the list of trials?' He ran a finger down an open page in the files on his desk. 'Human contact. Gach. I see these gun-shy dolts I employ propose putting a companion or two in your bed with you. Girls, a couple of plump boys. You'd like that, wouldn't you, you repellent little faggot? Pah, what rubbish it all is. But I need this experiment to work. I need my Loom! And you need it too, or you're for the ovens, my friend.'

Ben flinched.

'If only you weren't a Jew,' Trojan mused now. He strutted around the room, a peacock. 'If only you were a good German, even an English. You would then perhaps have the mental discipline to control this talent of yours, if it exists, to tame it. Of course if you were French you would only dream of pornography. Ha! All right.' Trojan sat again. 'I have been reconsidering our approach here. After all this is an experiment in psychology, is it not? Your psychology in particular. And up to now you have been motivated entirely by fear. Would that be true to say?'