Those who had known Michael Holly at his home in the south-east of England, or had shared office and canteen space with him at the factory on the Kent fringes of London, might not now have recognized their man. A year in the gaols had left its mark. The full flesh of his cheeks and chin had been scalped back to the bone. A bright confidence at his eyes had been replaced by something harsher. Clothes that had hung well now fell shapelessly like charity hand-outs. A ruddiness in his face had given way to a pallor that was unmistakably the work of the cells. His full dark hair had been cropped in the barber's chair of the holding prison to a brush without lustre.

This was an old carriage, but still well capable of performing the task set for it when it had first joined the rolling-stock in the year that Holly had been born. It had carried many on this journey. It had brought them in their hundreds, in their thousands, in their tens of thousands along this track. It was a carriage of the prison train that ran twice weekly from the capital city to the interior depths of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Mordovia. On the floor, in the filth and the watery amber half-light, he scraped at the bolt that had felt the boots and slippers and sandals of the prisoners who had encompassed his life time.

Not easy to prise at the rim of the bolt, because this was a purpose-built carriage. No ordinary carriage, not subject to any hasty conversion to ensure its usefulness, but out of the railway factory yards of Leningrad and designed only for transporting the prisoners. A walkway for the guards, and compartments to separate the convicts into manageable groups, each fitted with small hatches for the dropping of their black bread rations, and unmoveable benches and shelves for a few to sleep on. The carriages had their name.