There was no one to listen for his whimpered call. He was isolated from the living, breathing world of a thousand souls who eked out their existence beyond his cramping cell.

He wrapped his arms across his body, squeezing at the pressure that engulfed his heart, as if he might spirit away the growing wound.

But he was no fool, this man. He knew the meaning of the pain. A few brief hours earlier, he could have described to his companions in the exercise yard or the Recreation hall the classic symptoms of the cardiac attack. Often they came to him as a counsellor, tapping at what they regarded as his superior knowledge. He told one man of the treatment necessary for hernia and abscess, he told another man of the letter he should write to the solicitor who had acted in defence, he told another how he should conduct himself at the next visit with the wife who was being bed-humped by the lorry driver next door… All the cons came to his cell.

They asked and he answered. He would know the sign posts of the coronary. It would have been expected of him.

He lay very still on his bed because movement aggravated the pain and his legs were useless things.

A man lying in an upper-landing cell of Her Majesty's Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, and watching death scurry closer.

Just a small snapshot kept him company, a wallet-sized picture stuck to the cream-painted brickwork beside his face. A woman with fluffy blonde hair that had been combed before the wind caught at the strands. A woman in a short-sleeved blouse and a dowdy grey skirt. The photograph had been sent to him after conviction and sentence, after the stripping of his cover. The photograph dug out his buried history. The woman posed before the red-stone mausoleum containing the few earthly remains of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He had taken her there on the last day before he had left Moscow. A spring day with summer closing on them quickly, and they had made the pilgrimage down the steps into the hushed sepulchre, made themselves a microcosm of the slow shuffling queue.