On a Tuesday afternoon in March 1886, a coachman in a Devon village called Bishopsteignton hung his overcoat in the saddle-room. By the next morning it was gone. A few hours earlier, a constable had seen a stranger wandering the same village in the full uniform of a Prussian infantry regiment, two medals on his chest, playing an accordion. Those two facts turned out to be the same story.

He sold the coat in a Teignmouth pub for five shillings. Within a year he'd stolen a five-pound bicycle in Worcester, in broad daylight, through the window of the smoke-room the owner was drinking in. Six weeks after coming out of prison he was caught in Somerset wheeling a pair of stolen handcarts down the street, then sitting down on them to wait. The constable's words in court were "drunk, and stupid."

His name was Bernard Piepho. He was Prussian, in his forties, and across three and a half years of wandering rural England he told the magistrates he was a tailor, an artilleryman, a musician, and a deserter trying to reach a brother in Aldershot. In the summer of 1888 he broke into a chapel in Herefordshire and got twelve months hard labour. On the fourteenth of October 1889 he was released from Hereford Prison. The destination column on his discharge record says one word. Germany.

After that, nothing. No more courts, no more newspapers, no more accordion in a Devon village. This is his story, told through the records he left behind.