Instantly, his eyelids shoot back, and he snatches hold of the hand in a claw-like grip, his heart thumping.

‘Dad?’

His vision clears, sleep falling away, and he sees his son’s face, eyes filled with alarm. Anton loosens his grip. The hand slithers away.

‘Sorry,’ Mark mumbles. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘That’s all right,’ he says, struggling to get up. ‘Sorry if I frightened you, son. I didn’t mean to.’

He says this with real feeling, but Mark is looking at Anton’s legs, which are lying outside the bedclothes. One of his trouser legs has ridden up to reveal the electronic ankle bracelet. Mark is staring at it.

Anton swings his feet to the floor and slips them into his shoes. ‘I just lay down for five minutes,’ he explains, reaching for his watch on the bedside locker. It’s mid-afternoon. ‘Where has the day gone?’

More of his possessions are lined up neatly – aftershave, glasses, a half-drunk glass of water. On the back of a chair nearby, a pair of slacks is draped. Apparently Mark notices all this because he remarks: ‘Have you moved in here, or what?’

‘Sort of. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, but wouldn’t you prefer your old room?’

He knows what Mark is thinking. After nineteen years’ sleeping in a cell, what is he doing bedding down in a child’s room at the back of the house? There’s still Mr Men paper on the walls, for Christ’s sake. But his old room is full of ghosts.

‘It’s quieter here,’ is the explanation he gives.

Mark skulks in the doorway, a bruised look on his face as if he’s done something wrong and is now worrying about the punishment. But Mark is no longer a boy and Anton has missed out on most of his childhood. For a moment, he thinks the look Mark is giving him is not anxiety but suspicion. Does Mark think it’s true what they say, that he killed Charlotte? Does he believe that conviction? Sometimes the urge to know is so strong that he almost blurts out the question. But Anton is wise enough to hold back, or perhaps he’s just frightened of the answer.

‘When I came in just now and saw you lying on the bed –’ Mark stops, assailed by some hidden emotion.

‘What?’

‘Just the way you were lying there. I thought you were dead.’ He smiles, clearly embarrassed by his admission, but seriousness lies beneath it and touches something inside Anton.

‘You thought I’d killed myself?’

Mark shrugs. ‘Something I read. About how some people can experience depression, heightened levels of anxiety post-release. Suicide rates are high among ex-cons.’