“Wallis is a gin drinker, is he?” Cyril pulled a face. “Is this how I live out the rest of my days?” The truth of it struck him then, and he began to shake. “I suppose I should be grateful that I get to. But mother and sons, Ari. This’ll hold wine about as well as a sieve.”

“You aren’t frightened, are you?” Ari sent a flirtatious glance sideways beneath the brim of his flat cap, and suddenly his disguise had the air of a stage costume. Cyril remembered watching him strip, peeling away the layers of his character in unexpected ways, becoming something different with each item he removed.

He swallowed against a feeling that wasn’t quite arousal; there was too much sadness in it, and too much nostalgia. “I suppose it won’t be any worse than Liso.”

“Fewer botflies, anyway. Hop back in the van.”

“It’s not a bit conspicuous?”

“We’re going to dump it in a couple of miles and walk to Tarbycliff Station.”

“The train?” asked Cyril, incredulous.

“Of course,” said Aristide. “Who would think to look for a DePaul in third class?”

The laundry truck lay hidden at the bottom of a deep ditch off a lane, its front bumper sunk in the mud. New growth forest had crept close, and at least in the dark it would be hard to spot the abandoned van from the road. Cyril wondered if anyone lived in the house at the other end of the drive.

The moon was new. That would help them go unnoticed. In the countryside quiet, he could hear the rill of the little stream along the road: some unnamed tributary to the Heyn. He wondered what time it was, and when the first train left.

It all felt horribly familiar. He could almost smell the gunpowder on his hands, the remnants of a hasty assassination. Briefly, he thought of Finn Lourdes dead in his bathtub, of the guards shot to the ground this afternoon. How many more people lay ruined in his wake?

“Let’s stroll,” said Aristide, and started down the lane. Cyril did not follow him.

His conscience had been left behind in the back of the prison van when the prospect of freedom presented itself so nakedly. Now it had suddenly caught up with him, and hooked the back of his collar so he choked on it.

“Don’t you feel guilty?” he asked.

Aristide paused on the footbridge to the road. “What for?”

“Whisking me away like this? What about everything I did? I’m going to disappear and leave that all lying on the ground behind me for other people to pick up.”

“Gedda hates you,” said Aristide, turning so they faced one another across the plank bridge, water running between them. “Neither prison nor a hanging will change that.”