The film ends, it’s only nine o’clock and I’m working myself into a real temper about the noise from downstairs. I could go out, but I’ve promised myself that I won’t. I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t read. I can’t work. The only thing I can think of is going to bed. I take my usual Valium but it doesn’t do a thing so I take another and I suppose I sleep because the next thing I know the alarms going off and it’s time to go to work all over again.

Six

A letter from Princess Marys RAF Hospital, Halton, Bucks, otherwise known as the loony bin. The envelope had not been tampered with.

Dear Michael

I am allowed to write one letter from here where I am ‘under observation’ which means lots of tests and interviews with the doctors and ‘art therapy we do pottery and drawing and so on which beats bull and drill any day.

I will be here for a couple of months and then return to civvy street which means London for me yippee. If I may I will send you from there my new address when I have found one as I would very much like to hear your news. Do not write to me here I am not allowed to receive letters but will be a better correspondent when once I am set up in town.

Hoping all is well with you

Stephen Poynter

That covered four sheets in Stephens curly scrawl. I read it twice, looking hard between the lines for some assurance that he had not dropped me in the soup, for an apology for using me in the way that he did, then shredded it and dumped it behind the cookhouse as usual. It wouldn’t do for that to fall into the wrong hands. Although speculation has finally died down about the identity of the Man in the Blanket, any hint that I was corresponding with Stephen would be enough to make it flare up again. My position at Reville is difficult enough without that.

Wright hasn’t spoken to me, or even acknowledged my existence, for four weeks, not since Blackpool. He’s been promoted to Aircraftman First Class, and will soon be a Leading Aircraftman, they say, so proud is the old man of his prize fighter. He’s putting in his flying hours, training hard in the gym, and spending his leisure time with the Mervyn Wright Fan Club, who surround him at all times. I don’t get a look in. I have to make do with my memories of a Blackpool boarding house and a set of photographs that I dare not look at. The pictures I took that night are still in the camera, undeveloped.

I spent those weeks at work in the SSQ, the evenings at lectures or in the library, the nights awake, feverish. I didn’t take any leave. I can’t face going home, and I can never go back to Blackpool. What else is there?