He missed the gentle tapping of her knitting needles, the soft reedy tooting of the stale air of his cell as it went in and out of her squashed nostril. He realised that from the moment he woke up in the mornings, he was listening for her quick light step in the street outside. From the moment Knapp pushed his oatmeal through the bars and reached in for his potty, he was looking over at the office door and waiting for it to open. She was the only person in the world who did not recoil from him in disgust. In the courthouse people had held themselves against the wall, gawping at his dirty black hair and straggly vagabond’s beard, shaking their heads as if they had seen the devil. This one, with her neat hair and her long plain face and her flat polished shoes, sat there straight and stiff and looked him in the eye. He felt bad about calling her an old lady and being rude about her nose. He missed the way she gathered the silence of his cell about her like something warm that did not exclude him from it. He’d even come to enjoy the strawberry cordial.

Slowly, inch by careful inch, and with the greatest difficulty, he began working his hands loose from the tight coils of the rope.

‘Forgive me, Mr. Pike,’ said Patience when she came in the morning.

She would have come yesterday, she said, but the mayor had turned down their application for the hostel. He said it would be ‘a blister in the eye of any visitor to Piper City and an affront to the respectability of its inhabitants’. Afterwards her spirits had been so low she’d gone straight home. ‘My company would have been very poor I’m afraid, Mr. Pike, even for someone who makes as few demands on it as you.’

Pike wished Knapp wasn’t there. He hated the way the fat jailer spied on them. ‘Ain’t that a shame,’ he said, his voice low, hoarse.

‘Yes.’

Suddenly there were tears in Patience Haig’s eyes. Her plain narrow face looked even longer than ever, pulled down by the twitching corners of her thin mouth.

Pike studied her. He didn’t know what to say.

Knapp had edged closer, attracted no doubt by the soft sound of Patience Haig crying. When Pike saw him he jumped up with his chair on his back and shook his chains and roared and rushed towards the bars like a gorilla, sending the terrified Knapp scurrying back to his stove on the far side of his little office. When Pike returned to the table he found Patience laughing quietly.

‘He’s like the winged lion in the Book of Revelation,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘Full of eyes before, behind and within.’

‘Ain’t that the truth.’