On this landing all men were solitaries. Why should he bother to peep through the other spy holes, at men who slept or played with themselves or read trash books? Why bother to look in on a man whose chest was crushed by a granite weight?

He called again and could not hear the reed voice. There was no echo from the shining white tower of the corner lavatory, nor from the oakwood table made by an earlier generation of prisoner, nor from the metal chair, nor from the books, nor from the transistor radio. A silence kept company with his short bursts of breath, and he thought he could hear the perspiration running to the pits of his arms.

He was dying and there was no witness.

The footsteps dragged closer to his door. Measured, confident steps. No way to stop the pain, and his body could not outlast the hurt. They would find him dead. They would stand in the cell and talk in quiet, controlled whispers of his age, fifty-one years. They would speak of his weight, seven kilos over. Of his smoking, two packets minimum a day. Of his exercise, the least that he could escape with. Of his eating, all that was put before him, and wiping up with bread the slicks of fat left on his plate. Textbook abuse and textbook penalty.

To die alone, that was an obscenity. To die without a hand to hold.

The footsteps reached his door.

The man tried to move on his bed, he failed. He tried again to shout, and there was only the thin wheeze of his breath.

There was the scrape of a drawn bolt, the hiss of a turned key in an oiled lock, the tinkling of a light chain cascading loose. He saw the face, shadowed by the steep black peak of the cap. Ironed shirt, pressed uniform, polished boots, bright splash of a medal ribbon. The man saw all of that and could not speak. A voice was directed towards him, there was the command for an answer. Slowly he moved his head as if that were a gesture of respect in itself. The moving of his head brought new agony, and his cheeks twisted. The uniform spun into a blur as it stepped back into the brightness of the landing. The man heard the voice, registered the urgency.