‘And please tell him that I won’t be coming back tonight to collect my dog and that, if my wife calls him, just to tell her that I’ve lost my phone.’

The custody sergeant raised his eyebrows a tad at that last comment, but he passed the message on to Charles nevertheless. Then he listened for a moment. ‘The admiral has asked whether you want him to organise a solicitor.’

I didn’t really believe I needed a solicitor because I hadn’t done anything wrong. But, so far, nothing else had quite panned out as I had expected. Better to have and not need, I thought, than to need and not have—just like those pesky nuclear weapons.

‘That would be great,’ I said, and that message was passed on as well.

‘Right,’ said the sergeant, putting down his phone. ‘Cell seven.’

‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

‘Never you mind.’

And so I had been marched off unceremoniously down the corridor to cell number seven, thrust inside, and then the cell door had been slammed shut behind me with a great metallic clang.

It was no wonder that Chico had referred to prison as ‘the slammer’.

If the noise was designed to intimidate the inmate, it was working.

CHAPTER

38

AFTER A WHILE, maybe half an hour or so of me staring blankly at the sickly cream cell walls—I had no way of telling the actual duration—the cell door was opened again and a young woman came in. Sadly, she also brought with her one of the burly male constables, who stood on guard by the open door.

‘I’m Dr Grossi,’ the young woman said with a slightly detectable Italian accent. ‘I’ve come to look at your hand.’

And about time too, I thought, but I refrained from saying so. I needed to be on good terms with this medic if she was going to stitch me up.

However, she only had to take one look before telling her chaperone that I needed to go to hospital for treatment. He, in turn, put his head out of the door and shouted some instructions down the corridor. He then returned and resumed his position on guard by the door.

‘I tried to tell the custody sergeant that it was bad,’ I said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen.’

‘The damage is worse than I can repair here. You need to be seen by a plastic surgeon.’

I laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘I used to have a plastic hand.’

She looked somewhat confused, so I asked her to roll up my left sleeve, revealing the ugly zigzag join on my forearm.

‘The transplant was three years ago,’ I said.

Dr Grossi became suddenly far more interested in my left hand than in my damaged right.

She asked me all the usual questions about how well it could feel and how strong was the grip, but then she asked something that was far more erudite.