“Well, I couldn’t.” I suddenly noticed how much rage Andrew was suppressing. Veins that stood out on his forehead looked as if they’d split under the pressure. “And he couldn’t. He has to go to school. Oh, all right, we teach him but we need books, we need a school curriculum. We’re prisoners here. And things happen outside that we’re powerless to do anything about. I mean, my father dying. I can’t even go and bury my father.” The anger began to pour out of him, but in measured words, not incoherently. His face was very flushed. “I’ll tell you what a typical day is like here—in this place. In prison. Starting first thing in the morning. It’s like this. We might as well stay in bed but we can’t because Jason gets us up at seven. One of us makes tea, usually me because I’m a morning person and Alison isn’t. She and Jason will be having their morning love-in, their cuddle.” This rather pretty sentence he uttered scornfully and Alison looked away. You could see how imprisonment was straining their relationship. “Then it’s getting up and having showers and getting breakfast. Once, at the beginning of April, by the way, and April was bloody cold if you remember, the heating went off. We hadn’t any hot water. We couldn’t send for a plumber and the downstairs people have their own water heaters. We had to get in touch with Louis in Cannes and eventually he sent his grandson round. He’s not a plumber but he fixed it. We’d been without hot water for a week. And then we had the added worry of someone else now being in the know.”

“Now, darling, you know Joel Robinson is completely trustworthy.”

“You mean he’d lie to the police for our sake and they’d believe him? I don’t think so.” The scathing tone he used chilled my blood. “I’ll go on with the timetable. We have breakfast, we do some housework. This place is very clean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed? It’s clean because we’ve nothing else to do, and when the vacuum cleaner packs up, as it’s threatening to do, housework will take up more of our time because we’ll have to use a dustpan and brush. Jason’s probably watching a video while this goes on. We record our own videos for him, children’s programs, animal stuff, so-called classic serials”—he looked at me—“so long as they don’t have too much bum and tit in them.