Stuff lowers his head, reaches into his pocket, plays with his keys. Looks round, starts playing with his watch-chain.

All of them are silent.

‘I’ll tell you something, gentlemen. I don’t know you, Henning, but I know you well enough. I’m in the picture.

‘The evening after the distraint of the cattle, Tredup comes up to me in high excitement, he wants to write a piece for me. Half a column. It turns into two columns. You must understand that Tredup doesn’t draw a salary from the paper, we pay him a commission on whatever ads he sells. Whereas if he writes for us, he gets five pfennigs a line.

‘I say to him: “Tredup, your piece is good, but it’s rubbish. I know you’re on your uppers, and you have a wife and children, but I’m not taking that piece. I’m going to personally put your piece in the furnace. This is a farmers’ matter and a government matter and it’s nothing to do with the town of Altholm and the readers of the Altholm Chronicle.”’

‘What did Tredup do? Was he angry?’

‘No, the opposite, really. He just said whenever he had anything good I wasn’t interested. And he went off. Since then he’s not said a word to me, or written me a line, or helped me in any way.’

Henning asks: ‘And he didn’t mention that he had a picture or pictures?’

‘That’s just it. Not one word about it.’

‘Then he’s got something up his sleeve.’

‘Or maybe the pictures didn’t turn out?’

‘He had no cause to keep quiet about that. He wouldn’t even have had them developed at that stage!’

Henning says: ‘Tomorrow is the court case, and by then we have to know whether there are pictures or not. You, Kalübbe, are in the clear. The train leaves at half past nine. By then you’ll have heard about your statement. You, Stuff, will leave now, and we’ll rendezvous at the corner of Burstah and Stolper Strasse. Tredup lives at 72 Stolper Strasse. We’ll be there by half past midnight. We’ll catch him asleep, and it’ll be easier to pull the wool over his eyes.’

‘What a tactician!—You must have fought? Sure you did.’

‘Only the last six months of the war. I wasn’t old enough. But I made up for it later, in the Baltic, the Ruhr, Upper Silesia, wherever there was anything going on.’

‘It shows. Well, that’s all for now!’

And at long last the bathroom is vacated.

IV

There are hardly any lights left burning on the Stolper Strasse after midnight. The two men approach one another in silence, and head off together.

Stuff asks: ‘What happened with Thiel’s ox, by the way?’

‘Caught and slaughtered.’

‘Of course. Keeping it somewhere would have been too risky.’

‘Of course. There are always traitors.’

They walk on in silence.

Stuff again: ‘I was only at the Front for six months myself. I spent the rest of the four years behind the lines, and not by choice either.