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His mother’s voice was as matter-of-fact as it always was.
    That evening he had told me he would be late. There’d been some trouble. It was large scale looting by one of the Army contractors. He had all the papers with him to study. I think it was worrying him, a little. We had dinner together, and he left soon afterwards. I could see the window of his office. It was almost the only lighted one in the building. Then, suddenly, just like last night, when no one was expecting anything in particular, it happened.’
    The same sort of explosion as last night?’
    ‘Not really. They wouldn’t have the same sort of explosives in those days, would they? It was a sort of white glare. Then the crash. Then lots and lots of smoke. I knew that something awful had happened and I ran down and out into the street. I’d forgotten about curfew. There wasn’t a person or a car in sight. I ran all the way there, through the empty streets. It was nearly a mile, and I don’t remember feeling tired at all, but it must have taken some time, because when I got there, there was a cordon round the building and they wouldn’t let me in. They never let me see the body. I never saw Bill again.’
    Liz was silent, looking back at her more than thirty years younger self, a serious, rather squat black-haired girl, scudding through the empty streets of Cologne. She had wondered afterwards why it hadn’t killed the four-month old child she was carrying. Afterwards. Not at the time. At the time she hadn’t given it a thought. It had started to drizzle, she remembered. She had been glad, because people were unable to tell if the moisture on her face had been tears or rain. It had seemed important then.
    She was silent for so long that Tim said, ‘I shouldn’t go on if it worries you.’
    ‘It doesn’t worry me,’ said Liz. ‘I worried so much at the time that, in the end, I worried all the worry out of myself. I got calloused over. Nature’s like that, she breeds her own anti-bodies. I haven’t talked to you about it before, but it wasn’t because it worried me – at least, not that part of it. It was the thoughts which came afterwards.’
    Tim looked up sharply, but said nothing.
    ‘There was a Court of Inquiry and I suppose there was an inquest as well, but I don’t remember it. It came out that there had been a lot of explosive stored in the headquarters building. It seemed a bit odd. But I don’t think people were quite so careful about things then. We’d just finished the biggest war anyone had ever heard of and I expect people were still a bit casual. It came out that the engineers had been dismantling the charges which the Germans had laid under the Rhine bridges. The charges had never been used, because the war was over before we got near the Rhine, but they had to be dug out eventually and disposed of. I gather they were quite primitive things – slabs of gun-cotton and detonators – and, of course, they’d taken out all the detonators, or thought they had.’
    ‘But they hadn’t?’
    ‘So the Court of Inquiry decided. I didn’t understand it all. There was talk about some gun-cotton which had been protected and some which should have been but hadn’t.’
    ‘Sheathed, I believe we call it now.’
    ‘Something like that. It was just one of those ghastly mistakes that happens. The C.R.E. was the man I was sorry for. Brigadier Tom Havers. He was a nice little person, with a face just like a duck. It was the end of him, of course.’
    ‘He got the sack?’
    ‘Yes. I don’t think he was cashiered. Severely reprimanded and lost seniority. He took the hint and handed in his papers. I never thought it was his fault at all, and I said so. We were very good friends after he left the Army.’
    ‘Where is he now?’
    ‘He’s dead. He died a few years later – boredom, I fancy.’
    ‘Was it an accident?’ said Tim.
    His mother did not reply directly. She got up and went across to the cupboard in the corner of the room and