She stopped. ‘You’re the coward,’ she said.

Vernon made no reply. Couldn’t if he wanted to.

‘Where’s the car?’

Vernon shook his head, tried to mumble something.

‘Shit. Shit,’ Sharon said. She swept back her hair and held the back of her neck, pacing the cell. ‘I’m sorry. Vernon? I’m sorry.’ Coming back to him, she reached out to place a hand on his shoulder but Vernon, mustering his pride, managed to shrug it off.

Vernon found his voice. ‘It’s downriver.’

‘Where?’

‘At the turn-off toward Port Napier. Boat launching spot.’

Sharon stood seemed to want to say something else but instead she undid the cuffs, gentle with his bent wrist. Then she left the cell, locking the door again.

‘If it checks out I’ll come back and let you out,’ she said through the bars.

‘My boy,’ Vernon croaked.

Sharon looked hard at him. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s getting beaten.’

Sharon sighed. It seemed genuine. ‘I know.’

‘So Ernie did tell you.’

‘Yes.’

‘What will happen to Brendan?’

He felt like he was staring through a haze. He’d collapsed beside the bench, one hand on it, his chest near the floor. He imagined he made a sorry picture. Mangled and broken like so many soldiers, so many skeletons crawling from the wasteland, so many pelicans choking on plastic.

Sharon said, ‘Nothing. But he’s been told to stop.’ A moment. Then she said, ‘I’m going to check the car’s there. If it is I’ll come back and let you out.’

He understood now why he’d been sitting there so long. She’d needed Jack’s shift to finish. He heard her walk down the corridor, which sounded like it stretched on forever. In his haze, he struggled to decipher the sounds: her footfall, the opening of the door, the whisper of the heating unit humming elsewhere, the electricity in the walls. The thrum of his heart, the goodbye of Sharon’s car.

Vernon levered himself up and fell upon the bench, one arm crooked beside him, the other dangling to the floor. A sharp knife in his chest with every breath. He breathed.

They sat in Sharon’s car in the dark outside his house. It hadn’t taken her long to return to his cell, to help him stumble to her cruiser. There were no lights on and he knew that Penelope was still at Margie’s. He couldn’t look at Sharon sitting in the driver’s seat because in this woman was the embodiment of all the terror in the world he had ever felt. Not being aware of impending affliction, not having the slightest sense about what had been coming, felt to Vernon like a betrayal of his years. By now he should know some things. It had been just like he was back in the war, traipsing through mud, jungle, never knowing when he might stumble into the enemy. Their rifles, their bayonets. Men beside him, Weymouth, getting shot to shit. Without warning. This woman beside him unchecked in her rage had borne this same fear into him, like he was five decades younger. He wasn’t scared of her. He was scared of how her boots had shown him how little he really controlled things. He was still struggling to breathe. His lap, hands crossed. The radio on, a distant drone.