Alan Millet had thought many times of Michael Holly in the months since those first sparse reports had seeped into Century House from the camps at Barashevo. It had seemed so bright, so promising, the opening of the Holly file. But the brightness had been scrubbed clear and all because a man had been struck by coronary failure in his cell in a London gaol.
Millet lit a cigarette, drew once on it, dropped it, and crushed it under his foot. He walked towards the 'Arrivals' door. It would not be hard to identify the passenger.
Chapter 1
The distance between the steel-faced door and his bed mocked the man. A few moments before he might have quarried the strength to crawl across the floor to the door, might have gathered the will to beat his fists below the spy hole. But the chance had gone. He lay on his tousled blanket and the soft pillow, and the pain in him swelled and blustered like an autumn stormcloud.
There was always a light burning from the ceiling of a cell for men like him. Bright in the evening, dimmed in the night after lock-up. A dull light now, but his eyes fastened on the wire webbing around it, as if that small bulb was a talisman.
A terrifying loneliness because he could not reach the door, and his voice had fled in defeat from the surging agony that consumed his chest and left arm, and that ebbed at the pit of his throat.
His mind was alive. Thoughts and memories competed with the crushing weight on his upper ribs, the pressure of a pitiless binding that pinioned him to his bedding. Thoughts of the screw who would be sitting in his cubicle at the end of the landing with the central heating pipe against his feet and his newspaper on the table. Memories that were laced in a foreign tongue, wreathed in foreign smells, dinned by foreign sounds, wrapped in foreign tastes. The thoughts and the memories were the intruders because the pain was creeping wider and would win.