Two bobbies had taken on the job, in a minute they’d come on a bag of pepper, he’d stared, how the devil had that got there? The sergeant had cried What say you to that? and Ewan, half-blind with a headache, had said Rats. Some groceries I was buying for my mother, that was all, and the sergeant said by Christ, was that so? If his mother knew him when he finished with the Force she’d be a right discerning woman, she would: Take him off to No. 3 cell, Sergeant Leslie. See he doesn’t try to assault you again.

He’d thought that a lout joke, suddenly it wasn’t, three of them came into the cell behind him. And he’d minded in a flash of a story he’d read of the ghastly happenings in American jails. Rot: this was Scotland, not America, the police were clowns and idiot enough, but they couldn’t—

Two of them held him while Sim Leslie bashed him, then they knocked him from fist to fist across the cell, body-blows in the usual Duncairn way with Reds, one of them slipped in the blood and swore, That’s enough for the bastard, he’ll bleed like a pig. Lying on the floor, Ewan had heard a queer bubbling, himself blowing breath through bloody lips.

Then, the cell wavering, they’d picked him up and flung him down on the wooden trestle. Now, answer up or you’ll get the works—And they’d asked him again and again to declare it was he had caused the drowning of Edwards; and he’d bitten his lips, saying nothing, till their fumblings at last brought a scream shrilling up in his throat, a bit of it ebbed out and the bobbies left off, standing and listening, feared it might have been heard even down this deserted corridor of cells. Then they said they’d leave him alone for a while, they’d be back in a wee to the mucking Red sod….

And still he’d said nothing, setting his teeth, though the pain behind his teeth had clamoured to him to let go, to confess to anything, anything, they wanted, Oh God for a rest from this. But that real self that transcended himself had sheathed its being in ice and watched with a kind of icy indifference as they did shameful things to his body, threatened even more shameful, twisted that body till his self cowered in behind the ice and fainted again…. And now, as he thought, the morning was near.