‘I can’t stay here.’ It was the first complete sentence he’d said in months, and it felt strange in his mouth, alien. ‘They’ll come for me.’ He didn’t say who.

The man’s smile widened.

‘Just do as I say, lad.’

‘They’ll come.’

It was three whole days before they came.

In that time, Michael had had four more baths – the smell of the prison cupboard seemed to hang around him – and he had slept in an old-fashioned room with big windows, filled with a blank, white autumnal sky. At night he kept the light on and slipped out of bed repeatedly to check that the door hadn’t been locked. He couldn’t keep it open, because he could see a sliver of stairs beyond it. During the day he had been allowed to wander the house, feet moving silently out of habit, and he quickly realized that the man was alone here, apart from the dog, and that the rooms seemed endless. Some of them were locked, which gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, but Michael turned his back on those doors and headed elsewhere. Sometimes, he would catch the big black dog watching him, an indistinct shape at the top of stairs or across the landing, and he would beckon to it, but the dog did nothing but grin wetly at him.

When they came, Michael was in the room where he slept, his hands full of a pack of cards the man had given him. There was a crunch of boots against gravel and he knew, he knew immediately who it would be, and for a few dangerous seconds his eyelids flickered and his fingers went numb; he was suddenly close to passing out. But a sharp bark from the dog somewhere in the house acted like a slap, and instead he scrambled over to the window. A doorbell rang.

His father, a bow-legged man with thinning black hair, was standing in front of the porch, but he was alone; no red coat against the gravel, no sharp white fingers. His sister wasn’t here. Michael leaned heavily against the sill, briefly too relieved to think or move, even though he knew that if his father spotted him in the window he would be dead. And then his father vanished from view, and a door slammed.