News of the arrest spread fast.

There had been, of course, nothing of it in the Party newspapers, nor on the radio, nor on the television news programmes, but then they were not the tried and tested sources. News moved in a different and more circuitous way, a constant process of dissemination. In the queues they heard of it while the sun was climbing high over the monuments and parks and lofty buildings that were the achievement of the regime. Queues waiting for the buses, queues at the food store where there was the delay in the arrival of the fresh baked loaves of the day, queues at the bank before it opened.

The talk of the arrest was neither loud nor furtive – just a subject of conversation amongst a bored and tired people – so that it rippled their lives momentarily, spreading the tedium of the day a little less harshly, easing the personal load because of the knowledge that somewhere in the city there was a being in great trouble, someone with a problem more real and more acute than any that the mass would face that morning, or that afternoon, or that night. And the thought of it sent an eddy of apprehension through those that knew.

They were a few who had seen him taken, seen the cruising black car of the militia come to a sudden halt in the midst of the traffic, the rear doors snap open and the men in the pale-brown uniforms weave a path through the other cars till they had reached the pavement and were sprinting for their quarry. He had walked casually and unaware of the risk till they were on him.

There had been one at his legs, pitching him forward, another to spread out his arms on the pavement, so that if he had had a gun secreted on his person, hidden impossibly beneath his trousers or his light summer shirt, he would not have been able to take advantage from it.