"You should be at work, Jack."

"He was your husband, he's my father."

"Sam's right. It's nothing to do with us."

"Mum, it's killing us, just thinking about him. Talking about him can't hurt worse."

Hilda Perry couldn't remember the last time that Jack had come home in the middle of a working day. He hadn't told her of his visit to the Foreign Office, nor about the embassy, nor about the visit to the newspaper's library.

They were in the kitchen with mugs of instant.

"Mum, he's in a death cell. Can you think of anywhere more alone than that. He's sitting out the last days of his life in a gaol where he's going to hang."

She said distantly, "I've hated him for more than twenty years, and since I had his letter I can only think of the good times."

"There were good times?"

"Don't make me cry, Jack."

"Tell me."

He brought her a drink. Two fingers of gin, three cubes of ice, four fingers of tonic. She normally had her first of the day when Sam came back from the office.

She drank deep.

"Your grandfather was stationed in Paderborn, that's in West Germany. He was a sergeant major. I was seventeen, just finished school. I used to nanny for the officers' wives.

Jeez was on national service. He was a cut above the rest, not classy, not like an officer, but Jeez was always correct.

Treated me like a lady. He always stood in a cinema for the national anthem, stood properly. We didn't go out much, a lot of evenings I was tied with the officers' kids and Jeez was a sort of batman and driver to the colonel. He was well in with the colonel. After we were married we used to get a card from the colonel each Christmas, not after Jeez went.

Jeez went back to the UK, demobbed, we used to write a bit, and then Mum and Dad were killed in the car accident, it was in the papers. Jeez wrote by express, gave his address.