"Really, Marty-" he said, "-I don't want to pry. I'm only concerned that we understand the full facts of the situation. Were you to be employed by Mr. Whitehead, you would be required to live on his estate with him, and it would be a necessary condition of your employment that you could not leave without the express permission of either Mr. Whitehead or myself. In other words you would not be stepping into unconditional freedom. Far from it. You might wish to consider the estate as a sort of open prison. It's important for me to know of any ties you have that might make such constraints temptingly easy to break."

"Yes, I see."

"Furthermore, if for any reason your relationship with Mr. Whitehead was not satisfactory; if you or he felt that the job was not suitable, then I'm afraid-"

"-I'd be back here to finish my sentence."

"Yes."

There was an awkward pause, in which Toy sighed quietly. It took him only a moment to recover his equilibrium, then he took off in a new direction.

"There's just a few more questions I'd like to ask. You've done some boxing, am I right?"

"Some. A while back-"

Toy looked disappointed. "You gave it up?"

"Yes," Marty replied. "I kept on with the weight training for a while."

"Do you have any self-defense training of any kind? Judo? Karate?"

Marty contemplated lying, but what would be the use of that? All Toy had to do was consult the screws at Wandsworth. "No," he said.

"Pity."

Marty's belly shrank. "I'm healthy though," he said. "And strong. I can learn." He was aware that an unwelcome tremor had slipped into his voice from somewhere.

"We don't want a learner, I'm afraid," Somervale pointed out, barely able to suppress the triumph in his tone.

Marty leaned forward across the table, trying to blot out Somervale's leechlike presence.

"I can do this job, Mr. Toy," he insisted, "I know I can do this job. Just give me a chance-"

The tremor was growing; his belly was an acrobat. Better stop now, before he said or did something he regretted. But the words and the feelings just kept on coming.

"Give me an opportunity to prove I can do it. That's not much to ask, is it? And if I f.u.c.k it up it's my fault, see? Just a chance, that's all I'm asking."

Toy looked up at him with something like condolence in his face. Was it all over then? Had he made up his mind already-one wrong answer and the whole thing goes sour-was he already mentally packing up his briefcase and returning the Strauss, M. file into Somervale's clammy hands to be slotted back between one forgotten con and another?

Marty bit his tongue, and sat back in the uncomfortable chair, fixing his gaze on his trembling hands. He couldn't bear to look at the bruised elegance of Toy's face, not now that he'd opened himself up so wide. Toy would see in oh yes, to all the hurt and the wanting, and he couldn't bear that.

"At your trial . . ." Toy said.

What now? Why was he prolonging the agony? All Marty wanted was to go to his cell, where Feaver would be sitting on the bunk and playing with his dolls, where there was a familiar dullness that he could take refuge 'n. But Toy wasn't finished; he wanted the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.

"At your trial you testified that your prime motivation for involvement in the robbery was to pay off substantial gambling debts. Am I correct?"

Marty had moved his attention from his hands to his shoes. The laces were undone, and though they were long enough to be double-knotted he never had the patience to work at complicated knots. He liked a simple bow. When you needed to untie a bow you pulled and behold-like magic-it was gone.

"Is that right?" Toy asked again.

"Yes; that's right," Marty told him. He'd got so far; why not finish the story? "There were four of us. And two guns. We tried to take a security van. Things got out of hand." He glanced up from his shoes; Toy was watching intently. "The driver was shot in the stomach. He died later. It's all in the file, isn't it?" Toy nodded. "And about the van? Is that in the file too?" Toy didn't reply. "It was empty," Marty said. "We had it wrong from the beginning. The f.u.c.king thing was empty."

"And the debts?"

"Huh?"

"Your debts to Macnamara. They're still outstanding?"

The man was really beginning to get on Marty's nerves. What did Toy care if he owed a few grand here and there? This was just sympathetic camouflage, so that he could make a dignified exit.

"Answer Mr. Toy, Strauss," Somervale said.

"What's it to you?"

"Interest," said Toy, frankly.

"I see."

Sod his interest, Marty thought, he could choke on it. They'd had as much of a confessional as they were going to get.

"Can I go now?" he said.

He looked up. Not at Toy but at Somervale, who was smirking behind his cigarette smoke, well satisfied that the interview had been a disaster.

"I think so, Strauss," he said. "As long as Mr. Toy doesn't have any more questions."

"No," said Toy, the voice dead. "No; I'm well satisfied."

Marty stood up, still avoiding Toy's eyes. The small room was full of ugly sounds. The chair's heels sc.r.a.ping on the floor, the rasp of Somervale's smoker's cough. Toy was shunting away his notes. It was all over.

Somervale said: "You can go."

"I've enjoyed meeting you, Mr. Strauss," Toy said to Marty's back as he reached the door, and Marty turned around without thinking to see the other man smiling at him, his hand extended to be shaken. I've enjoyed meeting you, Mr. Strauss.

Marty nodded and shook hands.

"Thank you for your time," Toy said.

Marty closed the door behind him and made his way back to his cell, escorted by Priestley, the landing officer. They said nothing.

Marty watched the birds swooping in the roof of the building, alighting on the landing rails for tidbits. They came and they went when it suited them, finding niches to nest in, taking their sovereignty for granted. He envied them nothing. Or if he did, now wasn't the time to admit to it.

6

Thirteen days pa.s.sed, and there was no further word from either Toy or Somervale. Not that Marty was truly expecting any. The chance had been lost; he'd almost stage-managed its final moments with his refusal to talk about Macnamara. That way he had expected to nip any trial by hope in the bud. In that, he'd failed. No matter how he tried to forget the interview with Toy, he couldn't. The encounter had thrown him badly off-balance, and his instability was as distressing as its cause. He thought he had learned the art of indifference by now, the same way that children learned that hot water scalds: by painful experience.

He'd had plenty of that. During the first twelve months of his sentence he'd fought against everything and everyone he'd encountered. He'd made no friends that year, nor the least impression on the system; all he'd earned for his troubles were bruises and bad times. In the second year, chastened by defeat, he'd gone underground with his private war; he'd taken up weight training and boxing, and concentrated on the challenge of building and maintaining a body that would serve him when the time for retribution came round. But in the middle of the third year, loneliness had intervened: an ache that no amount of self-inflicted punishment (muscles driven to the pain threshold and beyond, day after day) could disguise. He made a truce that year, with himself and his incarceration. It was an uneasy peace, but things began to improve from then on. He even began to feel at home in the echoing corridors, and in his cell, and in the shrinking enclave of his head, where most pleasurable experience was now a distant memory.

The fourth year had brought new terrors. He was twenty-nine that year; thirty loomed, and he remembered all too accurately how his younger self, with time to burn had dismissed men his age as spent. It was a painful realization, and the old claustrophobia (trapped not behind bars, but behind his life) returned more forcibly than ever, and with it a new foolhardiness. He'd gained his tattoos that year: a scarlet and blue lightning bolt on his upper left arm, and "USA" on his right forearm. Just before Christmas Charmaine had written to him to suggest that a divorce might be best, and he'd thought nothing of it. What was the use? Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed. In the light of that wisdom, the fifth year was a breeze. He had access to dope; he had the clout that came with being an experienced con; he had every d.a.m.ned thing but his freedom, and that he could wait for.

And then Toy had come along, and try as hard as he could to forget he'd ever heard the man's name, he found himself turning the half-hour of the interview over and over in his head, examining every exchange in the minutest detail as though he might turn up a nugget of prophecy. It was a fruitless exercise, of course, but it didn't stop the rehearsals going on, and the process became almost comforting in its way. He told n.o.body; not even Feaver. It was his secret: the room; Toy; Somervale's defeat.

On the second Sunday after the meeting with Toy Charmaine came to visit. The interview was the usual mess; like a transatlantic telephone call-all the timing spoiled by the second delay between question and response. It wasn't the babble of other conversations in the room that soured things, things were simply sour. No avoiding that fact now. His early attempts at salvage had long since been abandoned. After the cool inquiries about the health of relatives and friends it was down to the nitty-gritty of dissolution.

He'd written to her in the early letters: You're beautiful, Charmaine. I think of you at night, I dream about you all the time.

But then her looks had seemed to lose their edge-and anyway his dreams of her face and body under him had stopped-and though he kept up the pretense in the letters for a while his loving sentences had begun to sound patently fake, and he'd stopped writing about such intimacies. It felt adolescent, to tell her he thought of her face; what would she imagine him doing but sweating in the dark and playing with himself like a twelve-year-old? He didn't want her thinking that.

Maybe, on reflection, that had been a mistake. Perhaps the deterioration of their marriage had begun there, with him feeling ridiculous, and giving up writing love letters. But hadn't she changed too? Her eyes looked at him even now with such naked suspicion.

"Flynn sends his regards."

"Oh. Good. You see him, do you?"

"Once in a while."

"How's he doing?"

She'd taken to looking at the clock, rather than at him, which he was glad of. It gave him a chance to study her without feeling intrusive. When she allowed her features to relax, he still found her attractive. But he had, he believed, perfect control over his response to her now. He could look at her-at the translucent lobes of her ears, at the sweep of her neck-and view her quite dispa.s.sionately. That, at least, prison had taught him: not to want what he could not have.

"Oh, he's fine-" she replied.

It took him a moment to reorientate himself; who was she talking about? Oh, yes: Flynn. There was a man who'd never got his fingers dirty. Flynn the wise; Flynn the flash.

"He sends his best," she said.

"You told me," he reminded her.

Another pause; the conversation was more crucifying every time she came. Not for him so much as for her. She seemed to go through a trauma every time she spat a single word out.

"I went to see the solicitors again."

"Oh, yes."

"It's all going ahead, apparently. They said the papers would be through next month."

"What do I do, just sign them?"

"Well . . . he said we needed to talk about the house, and all the stuff we've got together."

"You have it."

"But it's ours, isn't it? I mean, it belongs to both of us. And when you come out you're going to need somewhere to live, and furniture and everything. "

"Do you want to sell the house?"

Another wretched pause, as though she was trembling on the edge of saying something far more important than the ba.n.a.lities that would surely surface.

"I'm sorry, Marty," she said.

"What for?"

She shook her head, a tiny shake. Her hair shimmered.

"Don't know," she said.

"This isn't your fault. None of this is your fault."

"I can't help-"

She stopped and looked up at him, suddenly more alive in the urgency of her fright-was that what it was, fright?-than she'd been in a dozen other wooden exchanges they'd endured in one chilling room or another. Her eyes were liquefying, swelling up with tears.

"What's wrong?"

She stared at him: the tears brimmed.

"Char . . . what's wrong?"

"It's all over, Marty," she said, as though this fact had hit her for the first time; over, finished, fare thee well.

He nodded; "Yes."

"I don't want you . . ." She stopped, paused, then tried again. "You mustn't blame me."

"I don't blame you. I've never blamed you. Christ, you've been here, haven't you? All this time. I hate seeing you in this place, you know. But you came; when I needed you, you were there."

"I thought it would be all right," she said, talking on as though he'd not even spoken, "I really did. I thought you'd be coming out soon-and maybe we'd make it work, you know. We still had the house and all. But these last couple of years, everything just started falling apart."

He watched her suffering, thinking: I'll never be able to forget this, because I caused it, and I'm the most miserable s.h.i.t on G.o.d's earth because look what I did. There'd been tears at the beginning, of course, and letters from her full of hurt and half-buried accusations, but this wracking distress she was showing now went so much deeper. It wasn't from a twenty-two-year-old, for one thing, it was coming from a grown woman; and it shamed him deeply to think he'd caused it, shamed him in a way he thought he'd put behind him.

She blew her nose on a tissue teased from a packet.

"Everything's a mess," she said.

"Yes."

"I just want to sort it out."

She gave a cursory glance at her watch, too fast to register the time, and stood up.

"I'd better go, Marty."