'How about back to fucking France?'

Trojan actually smiled. 'Ah, the boats are reserved for SS and Party members.'

'That doesn't surprise me.'

There was a crash; the whole bunker shook, and the civil servants screamed as plaster rained down from the roof. Gary heard an engine roar, a grind of pulverised concrete, a scream of twisted metal. And then a big gun barked, unmistakably the Sherman's seventy-five millimetre.

Trojan said, 'Your tank is inside the stronghold – well, the game is up, yes?'

Gary heard English voices calling. 'Put it down!' 'Hands on heads!' 'Back up, against the wall. Back up!' The gunfire ceased all over the building, as if a rainstorm was ending.

XII

George, uniformed, plodded through the heart of Hastings, looking for Julia.

It was late afternoon. It had been a day from hell. And it wasn't over yet.

Not a single Allied soldier had yet set foot in the town. But the battle raged all around. You could hear the boom of the big guns firing out at sea as the Kriegsmarine struggled with the Royal Navy to keep open the evacuation corridor across the Channel. In the air, Luftwaffe fighters flying from France were trying to fend off the Allied bombers striking at the harbour. You could hear air battles going on inland too, as the RAF attacked the columns of German personnel and vehicles heading for the coast. Royal Navy ships out at sea were also using their heavy guns to strike at the harbour, but their accuracy was predictably poor. You would see great waterspouts thrown up where the shells fell short – and, worse, some of them fell into the town.

Caught in the crossfire, Hastings was having its worst day since the invasion itself. There were few civilians around, nobody out of doors who didn't need to be, and the air raid shelters built earlier in the war were all full once more. The ARP and the fire service, the WVS and Home Guard and ambulances were all out in force at each bombed-out house.

And meanwhile the Germans were all over the place. The town swarmed with Party members and SS, crowding to book places on the last boats to the continent, men who had so brutally imposed their own sort of rule now running in fear of the 'Tommies' and 'Amis'. And in these last hours the SS were going crazy. Bodies dangled from the lamp-posts of Hastings, most of them English civilians punished for some misdemeanour, but some in the uniforms of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, even the SS themselves. The only fresh soldiers George had seen thrown into the defence of the town today were the wretched children of the Jugend, and the Legion of St George, English volunteers fighting for the occupying army under the banner of the SS, men with no future.

For a policeman this final collapse of order was a nightmare made real. George felt as if he were the only sane man left in a town of lunatics. He longed to cut down the corpses from the lamp-posts, but he knew he dare not while the SS still had any vestige of authority.

In the end he spotted Julia close to the town hall. Here a line of muddy-looking men, probably resistance brought in from the country, were being roughly lined up against a wall by the SS. The wall was already pocked and splashed with blood. A nervous-looking SS officer walked along the line offering cigarettes and blindfolds. A gang of civilians, watched over by armed Waffen-SS, stood by uneasily, no doubt detailed to remove the bodies when the work was done.

Julia, in her uniform, stood watching this spectacle, her arms folded.

George hurried to her. 'Julia, for God's sake-'

'George.' She turned to him, oddly calm. 'I've been expecting you. Believe it or not, I'm glad to see you.'

'What do you mean? – Look, everything's unravelling. The British will be here in an hour. What's the point of this? Can't you stop it?'

'I could not if I wished to. These deaths mean nothing.'

He saw the bleak coldness in her then. In some sense none of this was real to her; the men being shot might have been mannequins. He wondered, not for the first time, how he had managed to share her bed for three years. 'The game's up,' he said. 'You won't get out of here. It's already too late.'

'I don't think so.' He felt something press at his belly. It was the muzzle of her silver pistol.

'You can't be serious-'

'I have a car waiting,' she said. 'You see how it'll work. Our two uniforms will get us past any barrier we are likely to encounter. And if we cross into Allied territory I will change out of my uniform – I am English after all; we can concoct some story or other.'

'My job is here. I'm a copper, for Christ's sake.'

'Well, you will be a dead copper unless you do as I say, and what good will that be to anybody? I will kill you if you refuse, you know.' And he knew she was telling the truth. 'Come with me now…'

There was a commotion among the doomed men. One of the civilians waiting to process the bodies, a burly older man, came rushing forward, limping a bit, breaking past the line of SS men. George could hear him call, 'Jack! Jack Miller! It's me!'

'Dad? No… go back…' There was horror in the younger man's voice, even as he embraced his father.

A young SS man came up, pistol drawn, and tried to pull the older man away. But he stood his ground, hanging onto his son. 'Shoot him and you shoot me, you black-hearted bastards.'

The SS man tried a bit longer, and the son tried to push his father away. But the old man was stubborn. At length an officer snapped an order, and the trooper pushed the old man against the wall beside his son. Father and son clung to each other, both weeping now, until the rifle shots echoed.

XIII

The German prisoners were marched along the coast road from St Leonards into Hastings. It was evening now, the sun casting long shadows through air laden with dusty smoke from the bombings. And as the day ended, so did the battle, it seemed. The gunfire on the land had stopped, though you could still hear the deep guttural booming of ships' guns rolling in from the sea like distant thunder.

This was a road Ernst had walked many times, but never as he walked it now, one of a hundred or so prisoners, all stripped of their helmets and weapons, and some of boots and belts taken by the Tommies as souvenirs, walking with their hands on their heads. Nobody spoke, and it was hard to tell what the men thought as they plodded along. Ernst himself longed for sleep. But aside from that he felt only relief that he was alive, and that he would presumably see out the rest of this wretched war in a prisoner-of-war camp rather than be shipped off to an even more brutal front. Relief, mixed with a good dose of shame, that so many had died where he still lived.

On the outskirts of the town they came on a German column that had evidently been caught in the open by RAF planes. The tanks, guns, trucks, horse-drawn carts were blown up and burned out, and bodies were littered everywhere, sprawled over dashboards or dangling from the back of the trucks. Horses had died too, their great bodies smashed and splashed. You could see where some vehicle, a bulldozer perhaps, had cut right through this mess to clear it, leaving track-marks stained with engine oil and the brown of drying blood. The men walked through with eyes averted. You could shut out the sights but not the smells, the endless stink of blood and cordite and oil and soot that seemed to soak through all of this corner of England. The Allied guards allowed the Germans to lower their hands and hold handkerchiefs to their faces.

It was only a hundred yards past the destroyed column that they started to come into the town.

British flags hung out of the windows of the houses, and Ernst wondered where they had been hidden all these years. People leaned out of upstairs rooms and shouted at the British troops as they walked by below, women came out with trays of tea, and the soldiers were given kisses and handshakes. One girl in bright lipstick called as they passed, 'Any Americans? Have a go, Joe! Any Americans here?'