Jack pushed his chair back and stood up. His lather was going to hang. He thanked his mother for dinner. He said he had some work that had to be sorted by the morning. In a gaol on the side side of the world, dear God. He said he'd go to his room and put his head into his papers. Was so alone that the one he wrote to was the one he had most hurt.

He told Will that he should learn to kick with his left foot if he ever wanted to be any good. He had no sense of his father's face. He rested his hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam patted it. The man he didn't know was his father, and his father was going to hang.

He went up the flower-carpeted staircase to his room.

It was a little under four miles to work, across on the London side of the town. Jack Curwen was employed by Richard Villiers and his son, Nicholas. The office was an unlikely place for D amp; C Ltd (Demolition and Clearance). There was no yard for JCB diggers and bulldozers and heavy earth-transporting lorries; there weren't any cranes; there weren't any workmen. Villiers was a shrewd man, which made him a good employer, and he'd long before decided that the way to the maximum profit and minimum outlay was to be in the art game of sub-contracting out. He hunted out the business and then pulled in the freelance operators that he needed. A few local calls could bring in a million pound's worth of plant and transport whose maintenance and upkeep was some other bugger's headache. D amp; C Ltd liked to boast that nothing was too small, nothing too large. They could clear the foundations of a 5000 square yard warehouse in dockland. They could take out the stump of an oak tree.

Villiers came into the office in the morning to ferret into the balance sheets and retired with a huge handicap to the golf course for the afternoon.