"Strauss?"

Priestley was at the open door, staring into the cell. Beside him, on the wall some wit had scrawled: "If you feel horny, kick the door. A cunt will appear." It was a familiar joke-he'd seen the same gag or similar on a number of cell walls-but now, looking at Priestley's thick face, the association of ideas-the enemy and a woman's sex-struck him as obscene.

"Strauss?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Mr. Somervale wants to see you. About three-fifteen. I'll come and collect you. Be ready at ten past."

"Yes, Sir."

Priestley turned to go.

"Can you tell me what it's about, Sir?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

Somervale was waiting in the Interview Room at three-fifteen. Marty's file was on the table in front of him, its drawstrings still knotted. Beside it, a buff envelope, unmarked. Somervale himself was standing by the reinforced glass window, smoking.

"Come in," he said. There was no invitation to sit down; nor did he turn from the window.

Marty closed the door behind him, and waited. Somervale exhaled smoke through his nostrils noisily.

"What do you suppose, Strauss?" he said.

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"I said: what do you suppose, eh? Imagine."

Marty followed none of this so far, and wondered if the confusion was his or Somervale's. After an age, Somervale said: "My wife died."

Marty wondered what he was expected to say. As it was, Somervale didn't give him time to formulate a response. He followed the first three words with five more:

"They're letting you out, Strauss!"

He placed the bald facts side by side as if they belonged together; as if the entire world was in collusion against him.

"Am I going with Mr. Toy?" Marty asked.

"He and the board believe you are a suitable candidate for the job at Whitehead's estate," Somervale said. "Imagine." He made a low sound in his throat, which could have been laughter. "You'll be under close scrutiny, of course. Not by me, but by whoever follows me. And if you once step out of line..."

"I understand."

"I wonder if you do." Somervale drew on his cigarette, still not turning around. "I wonder if you understand just what kind of freedom you've chosen-"

Marty wasn't about to let this kind of talk spoil his escalating euphoria. Somervale was defeated; let him talk.

"Joseph Whitehead may be one of the richest men in Europe but he's also one of the most eccentric, I hear. God knows what you're letting yourself in for, but I tell you, I think you may find life in here a good deal more palatable."

Somervale's words evaporated; his sour grapes fell on deaf ears. Either through exhaustion, or because he sensed that he'd lost his audience, he gave up his disparaging monologue almost as soon as it began, and turned from the window to finish this distasteful business as expeditiously as he could. Marty was shocked to see the change in the man. In the weeks since they'd last met, Somervale had aged years; he looked as though he'd survived the intervening time on cigarettes and grief. His skin was like stale bread.

"Mr. Toy will pick you up from the gates next Friday afternoon. That's February thirteenth. Are you superstitious?"

"No."

Somervale handed the envelope across to Marty.

"All the details are in there. In the next couple of days you'll have a medical, and somebody will be here to go through your position vis-à-vis the parole board. Rules are being bent on your behalf, Strauss. God knows why. There's a dozen more worthy candidates in your wing alone." Marty opened the envelope, quickly scanned the tightly typed pages, and pocketed them.

"You won't be seeing me again," Somervale was saying, "for which I'm sure you're suitably grateful."

Marty let not a flicker of response cross his face. His feigned indifference seemed to ignite a pocket of unused loathing in Somervale's fatigued frame His bad teeth showed as he said: "If I were you, I'd thank God, Strauss. I'd thank God from the bottom of my heart."

"What for... Sir?"

"But then I don't suppose you've got much room for God, have you?"

The words contained pain and contempt in equal measure. Marty couldn't help thinking of Somervale alone in a double bed; a husband without a wife, and without the faith to believe in seeing her again; incapable of tears. And another thought came fast upon the first: that Somervale's stone heart, which had been broken at one terrible stroke, was not so dissimilar from his own. Both hard men, both keeping the world at bay while they waged private wars in their guts. Both ending up with the very weapons they'd forged to defeat their enemies turned on themselves. It was a vile realization, and had Marty not been buoyant with the news of his release he might not have dared think it. But there it was. He and Somervale, like two lizards lying in the same stinking mud, suddenly seemed very like twins.

"What are you thinking, Strauss?" Somervale asked.

Marty shrugged.

"Nothing," he said.

"Liar," said the other. Picking up the file, he walked out of the Interview Room, leaving the door open behind him.

Marty telephoned Charmaine the following day, and told her what had happened. She seemed pleased, which was gratifying. When he came off the phone he was shaking, but he felt good.

He lived the last few days at Wandsworth with stolen eyes, or that's how it seemed. Everything about prison life that he had become so used to-the casual cruelty, the endless jeering, the power games, the sex games-all seemed new to him again, as they had been six years before.

They were wasted years, of course. Nothing could bring them back, nothing could fill them up with useful experience. The thought depressed him. He had so little to go out into the world with. Two tattoos, a body that had seen better days, memories of anger and despair. In the journey ahead he was going to be traveling light.

The night before he left Wandsworth he had a dream. His nightlife had not been much to shout about during the years of his sentence. Wet dreams about Charmaine had soon stopped, as had his more exotic flights of fancy, as though his subconscious, sympathetic to confinement, wanted to avoid taunting him with dreams of freedom. Once in a while he'd wake in the middle of the night with his head swimming in glories, but most of his dreams were as pointless and as repetitive as his waking life. But this was a different experience altogether.

He dreamed a cathedral of sorts, an unfinished, perhaps unfinishable, masterpiece of towers and spires and soaring buttresses, too vast to exist in the physical world-gravity denied it-but here, in his head, an awesome reality. It was night as he walked toward it, the gravel crunching underfoot, the air smelling of honeysuckle, and from inside he could hear singing. Ecstatic voices, a boys' choir he thought, rising and falling wordlessly. There were no people visible in the silken darkness around him: no fellow tourists to gape at this wonder. Just him, and the voices.

And then, miraculously, he flew.

He was weightless, and the wind had him, and he was ascending the steep side of the cathedral with breath-snatching velocity. He flew, it seemed, not like a bird, but, paradoxically, like some airborne fish. Like a dolphin-yes, that's what he was-his arms close by his side sometimes, sometimes plowing the blue air as he rose, a smooth, naked thing that skimmed the slates and looped the spires, fingertips grazing the dew on the stonework, flicking raindrops off the gutter pipes. If he'd ever dreamed anything so sweet, he couldn't remember it. The intensity of his joy was almost too much, and it startled him awake.