His hands cupped her rear lightly and he dropped his head until his forehead rested against hers. For some reason he felt like crying, all choked up so that he couldn’t speak, just like being a kid again, uncertain in a cold world.

‘Don’t rub it in, lass.’

She tilted his chin and kissed him very gently on the mouth. He pushed her away firmly and held her off, a hand on each shoulder. What he said next surprised even himself.

‘None of that now. You don’t want to be mixed up with a bloke like me. Nothing but a load of trouble. I’ll have a cup of tea and something to eat and then I’ll be off. You and the old girl had better forget you ever saw me.’

‘Why don’t you shut up?’ she said. ‘Go and sit down by the fire and I’ll bring the tea in.’

He sat in the easy chair and watched her arrange the tray with a woman’s instinctive neatness and pour tea into two cups. ‘What about the old girl?’

‘She’ll be hard on till noon,’ Jenny said. ‘Needs plenty of rest at her age.’

He sat there drinking his tea, staring into the fire and she said softly, ‘What would you do then if this was an ordinary Sunday?’

‘In the nick?’ He chuckled grimly. ‘Oh, you get quite a choice. You can go to the services in the prison chapel morning and evening – plenty of the lads do that, just to get out of their cells. Otherwise you’re locked in all day.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Read, think. If you’re in a cell with someone else you can always play chess, things like that. If you’re at the right stage in your sentence they let you out on to the landing for an hour or so in the evening to play table tennis or watch television.’

She shook her head. ‘What a waste.’

He grinned and said with a return to his old flippancy, ‘Oh, I don’t know. What would I be doing Sundays on the outside? Spend the morning in the kip. Get up for three or four pints at the local and back in time for roast beef, Yorkshire pud and two veg. I’d have a snooze after that, work me way through the papers in the afternoon and watch the telly in the evening. What a bloody bore.’

‘Depends who you’re doing it with,’ she suggested.

‘You’ve got a point there. Could put an entirely different complexion on the morning in the kip for a start.’

She put down her cup and leaned forward. ‘Why not go back, Gunner? There’s nowhere to run to. The longer you leave it, the worse it will be.’

‘I could lose all my remission,’ he said. ‘That would mean another two and a half years.’

‘Are you certain you’d lose all of it?’