I cleared my throat with a cough and said meekly that I recognised I had caused trouble in the past, but all I wanted was a chance at rehabilitation. ‘I really want to apologise for my prior negative behaviours,’ I said. ‘I’d like to be able to return to my work in the safe space.’

The plea for therapy clinched it. ‘We can certainly see about authorising a decrease in your medication if you’re feeling stable,’ Kumar conceded, with a glance at White. White wasn’t happy about it, but he had backed himself into a corner.

*

To have my wounds dressed, I had been taken to a medical unit at a different part of the site. At the time, I’d been too brain-fogged to take advantage of the looser security, but the change in medication heralded the return of greater mental acuity and I began thinking that if I were ever to escape, the medical unit would be the likeliest exit. The knowledge that I couldn’t avoid Roberts indefinitely was an additional incentive. He’d been sent to the seclusion cells, but in a matter of days he’d be back among us. He would be labouring with the handicap of a depot injection of Largactil and would probably be a lot less sprightly, but sooner or later he would return to finish what he’d been sent to do.

I took a little comfort from the knowledge that Webster had read my testimony. White knew it too. It had increased the pressure on everyone. The arrival of Roberts was the proof of that. But I worried about Webster as well. I hoped she had had the sense to take at least rudimentary precautions for her personal safety.

There were two keys on Webster’s key ring. One was for the door of her office, up on the second floor of the DHU and now completely out of bounds to me. The other, it turned out, was for one of the supply rooms close to the common area, which included basic first-aid equipment. I was able to slip in there after one lunchtime and soak my shirt with surgical spirit.

We had a microwave in the common area which was theoretically for the inmates on restricted diets or with food intolerances. It was supposed to be supervised, but, though secure, the DHU was not a penitentiary. Morale among the staff was low. Shifts were often understaffed and personnel from other parts of the hospital, who were more lax in their observance of correct protocol, would be rotated in to fill some of the gaps.

I chose the period after lunch because there was a shift change then. It was also the time of day when a kind of post-prandial ennui settled on the unit, bringing a consequent decline in vigilance. Around two fifteen in the afternoon, stinking of surgical spirit, I put one of Caiaphas’s Watchtowers in the microwave along with a generous handful of cutlery and turned it on. The arcing from the metal set the thin paper alight. I took out the flaming magazine and held it to my shirt. It lit with an energising whoosh. My intention had been to wrap myself in some curtains as soon as possible to extinguish the flames and minimise the actual damage to me. I had put on a pair of vests underneath the shirt with this in mind. I reasoned that, after a spectacular enough accident, the staff would send me to the infirmary irrespective of the severity of my injuries. From there I could make my escape.

What I hadn’t foreseen was Caiaphas’s coming into the room as I was holding the burning magazine aloft. When he realised what was alight, he uttered a terrible shriek and tried to jump on me. We wrestled for a moment. My shirt was by now entirely ablaze with leaping flames. I could feel the heat against my torso and smell my burning hair. The fire alarm sounded and Caiaphas snatched the magazine and ran whooping, waving it like a flag across the common area, pleading for God’s forgiveness on behalf of both of us.

Far from extinguishing the flames, the curtains turned out to be flammable and I continued to burn until the duty nurse arrived with a blanket. While I lay wreathed in choking black smoke on the floor of the unit, the ward was evacuated and the inmates filed out past me.

I was taken to the medical clinic for treatment, but in other respects it wasn’t exactly the outcome I had planned. The injuries were much worse than I had intended. I had partial second-degree burns on the front and back of my torso as well as my upper arms.

What surprised me was that I seemed to be able to tune out the pain. I mentioned this to the nurse.

‘It’s a side-effect of the nerve damage,’ he said gently, as he tweezed out a piece of charred shirt from my skin.

But that wasn’t the case. I could feel the action of his tweezers and it certainly wasn’t pleasant, but I could disown it in a way that diminished its hold on me. I could make it not mine.

That evening, when I was left on my own to eat my supper, I took my fork and inserted its tines into the top of my right thigh. It hurt, but by the exercise of my will, or perhaps more accurately by an operation of my consciousness which involved withdrawing my identification from the right leg, I was able to discount the pain to the point where I could push the fork all the way in, up to the arch at the top of the prongs. It was the fear of infection and of puncturing a large blood vessel more than the pain itself which persuaded me to pull it out. It emerged from my thigh with a faint squelch.

I’ve always been a coward, physically – though not, I would hope, morally. Yet here I was, suffering objective physical agony, and finding myself untroubled by it. Something had altered in my relationship to my body. I found myself able to behave with a thrilling disregard for its well-being. This body wasn’t there to be cosseted and protected, but to be flung with abandon into every calamity, to be bounced like a rubber ball on concrete, hurled like a racing car around hairpin corners. What was it Leonora said when I pranged the Renault on our second worst holiday ever, in Salies-de-Béarn? Yes – nothing handles like a rental. And this disregard for my physical integrity held out the possibility of freedom. For all that I loved my old carcass, it wouldn’t have been up to what came next.

*

The drop from the clinic window was about twenty-five feet, but I cut off six of them by hanging from the sill before I let go. A change of clothes, a spongebag with fourteen pounds in loose change inside it, and a travel-card that I’d stolen from one of the nurses preceded me. I went out just after midnight and lost consciousness on impact. I had sprained my right ankle, fallen backwards and knocked myself out cold.

For a brief moment I dreamed of flying. I was pulling the trigger of a rifle and a white bird was dropping from a branch. I was the bullet. I was the bird falling. I swooped through space, past blurring starlight, and seemed to hear a strange, consoling music and soft human voices. I was on an armchair in Ron Harbottle’s study; a carriage clock ticked heavily in the silence; I was squeezing up a tiny climbing frame to rescue an infant Lucius from the top of a slide; I was breaking apart a dried fish with my fingers; I was on parade with shaven-headed conscripts; a woman I’d never seen before was admonishing me outside a metro station in Russian: ‘Tebya sglazili!’ Someone has laid a curse on you!

I woke to find that I had landed in a puddle. The icy water brought me round and the pain – my ankle, the burns, the ache at the back of my head – focused my consciousness. In the sky above me, the Plough and the Bear gleamed faintly through the light pollution. The air was, in that evocative phrase of Lermontov’s, as fresh and clean as the kiss of a child. After the stink of the DHU and the neon and antisepsis of the medical clinic, it was like being born anew.

The first police siren wasn’t audible for almost fifteen minutes, which suggests a blameworthy lack of vigilance on the part of whomever was monitoring the security cameras. No doubt they unpicked the footage fully later that morning. I like to think of White in attendance as they screened the pictures to the staff responsible and the police. The images would have shown a bundle coming out of the second-storey window of the clinic, followed a beat later by a long figure dropping and lying still for a moment. He gets slowly to his feet and hops awkwardly around to the delivery entrance at the rear of the unit. There he equips himself with a broom for a crutch, takes a loaf of white sliced bread from the pallet of deliveries to the kitchen, and disappears into the early morning darkness.