It wasn’t the first German he had killed, but it was the first he had looked in the eye. The incident haunted him all the way back to his unit, but a few hours later he had convinced himself that he had done the right thing and put it behind him.

After the war the memory surfaced from time to time in dreams. Details changed, of course. Each time the soldier had a different face, for example. Once, Frank even reached forward and put his finger into the bullet hole. The soft, warm flesh felt like half-set jelly. He was sure he had never touched it in real life.

Another time, the boy spoke to him. He spoke in English and Frank couldn’t remember what he said, though he was sure it was a poem, and the words ‘I knew you in this dark’ stuck in his mind. But Frank knew nothing of poetry.

This time the bullet had gone straight through, leaving a clean circle the size of a ring, and Frank had seen a winter landscape, all flat white and grey, through the hole.

He still had the gun he had used that day. It was the same one he had got down from the high cupboard last night when he thought the burglars might still be in the house. It was the one he felt for now under the pillow beside him.

Had he got up that day? He couldn’t remember. He sat propped against pillows on his bed that night watching television as usual. He felt agitated, and whatever the figures on the screen were doing or saying didn’t register. For some reason, he couldn’t get the wedding ring out of his mind, the senselessness of its theft and the unimaginable value it had for him. He hadn’t realized it fully until the ring was gone.

Then he thought he heard some noise outside. He turned the sound off with the remote and listened. Sure enough, he could hear voices. Beyond his back garden was a narrow alleyway, then came the backs of the stores and low-rise apartment buildings on Queen Street. Sometimes in this warm weather, when everyone had their windows open, you could hear arguments, television programmes and loud music. These were real voices, Frank could tell. Television voices sounded different. There were two of them, a woman’s and a man’s, hers getting louder.

‘No, Daryl, it won’t do!’ he heard the woman shout. ‘Haven’t I told you before it’s wrong to steal? Haven’t I brought you up to respect other people’s property? Haven’t I?’

Frank couldn’t hear the muffled answer, no matter how much he strained. He dragged himself up from the bed and went to the window.

‘So if Marvin Johnson stuck his finger in a fire, you’d do that as well, would you? Christ, give me a break. How stupid can you get?’

Another inaudible reply.

‘Right. So how do you think they feel, eh? The people whose house you broke into. Come on. What did you do with it?’

Frank couldn’t hear the reply, though he held his breath.

‘Don’t lie to me. What do you think this is? It’s a gold chain, isn’t it? And what about these? Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly started wearing earrings. I found these hidden in your room. You stole them, didn’t you?’

Frank’s heart knocked against his ribs. Joan had a gold chain and earrings, and they were among the items that had been stolen. But what about the ring? The ring?

‘Shut up!’ the woman yelled. ‘I don’t want to hear it. I want you to put together everything you stole and take it back, or so help me I’ll call the police. I don’t care if you are my son. Do you understand me?’

There came another inaudible reply followed by a sharp smack, then the sound of a door slamming. After that Frank heard a sound he didn’t recognize at first. A cat in the garden, maybe? Then he realized it was the woman crying.

About five of the apartments in the building had lights on at the back, and Frank hadn’t been able to tell from which one the argument came. Now, though, he could see the silhouette of the woman with her head bowed and her hands held to her face. He thought he knew who she was. He had seen both her and her son on the street.

Frank sat in the coffee shop across from the apartment building early the next morning and watched people come and go. The building was one of those old places with a heavy wood and glass door, so warped by heat and time that it wouldn’t shut properly. He knew who he was looking for, all right. It was that peroxide blonde, the one who looked like a hooker.

At about eight-thirty, her son, the thief, came out. He had a spotty face, especially around the nose and mouth, and he obviously had a skinhead haircut, or a completely shaved head, under the baseball hat he wore the wrong way around. He also wore a shiny silver jacket with a stylized black eagle on the back under some red writing. Below his baggy trousers, crotch right down to the knees, the laces of his sneakers trailed loose. At the corner, he hooked up with a couple of similarly dressed kids and they shuffled off, shoving each other, spitting and generally glaring down at the sidewalk as they went.

At about ten o’clock Frank had to move to the next coffee shop, a bit more up market, as he kept getting nasty looks from the owner. He ordered a cappuccino and a doughnut and sat by the window, watching.

At about a quarter to eleven, she came out, the boy’s mother. She struggled with a shop cart of laundry through the front door and set off down the street.

Old though he was, Frank could still appreciate a good figure when he saw one. She wore a white tube-top, tight over her heavy breasts, revealing a flat tummy, and even tighter white shorts cut sharp and high over long, tanned thighs. But she wore too much make-up and he could see the dark roots in her hair. Common as muck, Joan would have said, in the Lancashire accent that had never left her, no matter how long she’d been here. A real tart, a piece of white trash. No wonder her kid was a burglar, a ring thief, a robber of memories, defiler of all things decent and wholesome.

Frank watched her totter down the street on her ridiculous high heels and go into the laundromat. It took about half an hour for the wash cycle and about as long again to get things dry. That gave Frank an hour. He paid his bill, crossed the street and entered the apartment building.

He hadn’t really formed a plan, even during the hours he had spent watching the building that morning. He knew from last night that the apartment was on the third floor at the back, right in the centre, which made it easy to find. The corridor smelled of soiled diapers and Pine-Sol. When he stood outside the door, he listened for a while. All he could hear was a baby crying on the next floor up and the bass boom of a stereo deep in the basement.

Frank had never broken the law in his life, and he was intelligent enough to recognize the irony of what he was about to do. But he was going to do it anyway because the absence of the ring was beginning to make his life hell. Nothing else really mattered.

For three days he had waited for the boy to return Joan’s jewellery, as his mother had told him to do. Three days of nail-biting memories: dreaming about the German soldier he had killed again; reliving Joan’s long illness and death; watching again, as if it were yesterday, the woman he had loved and lived with for nearly fifty years waste away in agony in front of his eyes. So thin did she become that one day the ring simply slipped off her finger onto the shiny pink quilt.

And now that he was on the brink of remembering the final horror, her death, the ring had assumed the potency of a talisman. He must have it back to keep his sanity, to keep the last memories at bay.