Jack heard Sam's voice through the closed living room door.

"Get it into your head, it's nothing to do with you."

He heard his mother crying. Not loud weeping, not crying for sympathy. Real crying, real misery.

"Whatever the bastard's done, Hilda, whatever he's going to get, that's not your concern."

He turned to close the front door. Behind him was wretched, normal Churchill Close. Nothing ever happened in the dead end road where the cherry trees were in blossom and the pavements were swept and the mowers had been out once or twice already on the front lawns and the rose beds were weeded. Tudor homes set back from the road, where nothing ever went bad and sour. You could get a funeral moving out of neo-Elizabethan Churchill Close with half the residents not knowing there'd been a death. Jack dosed the door behind him.

"He's gone out of your life." He heard the anger in Sam's voice.

Jack knocked and went into the living room.

His mother sat on the sofa beside the fireplace. Yesterday's ashes. She had a crumpled handkerchief tight in her fist and her eyes were red and swollen. She still wore the housecoat that was her early morning gear. Sam Perry was at the window. Jack didn't think that they could have been rowing between themselves, they hardly ever did, and never when Will could hear them.

Jack was 26 years old. His quiet love for his mother was the same as it had been from the time he could first remember, when there had only been the two of them.

"What's happened, Mum?"

Sam replied for her. "There's been a letter."

"Who from?"

"There's been a letter come from a gaol in South Africa."

"Will you, please, tell me who has written us a letter from South Africa."

"A letter to your mother from a condemned cell in Pretoria Central prison."

"Damn it, Sam, who wrote it?"

"Your father."