Haslet returned, alone this time, and sat down beside me at the desk as before. He had removed his jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves. His hair was tousled. He looked more boyish than ever. He too had a mug of tea, the mug looking enormous in that small, white hand. I had an image of him as a child, out on some bog in the wastes of the midlands, stacking turf with his da: quake of water in the cuttings, smell of smoke and roasting spuds, and the flat distances the colour of a hare's pelt, and then the enormous, vertical sky stacked with luminous bundles of cloud.
Now, he said, let's start again.
We went on for hours. I was almost happy, sitting there with him, pouring out my life-story, as the shafts of sunlight in the windows lengthened and the day waned. He was infinitely patient. There seemed to be nothing, no detail, however minute or enigmatic, that did not interest him. No, that's not quite it. It was as if he were not really interested at all. He greeted everything, every strand and knot of my story, with the same passive air of toleration and that same, faint, bemused little smile. I told him about knowing Anna Behrens, and about her father, about his diamond mines and his companies and his priceless art collection. I watched him carefully, trying to judge how much of this was new to him, but it was no good, he gave nothing away. Yet he must have spoken to them, must have taken statements and all the rest of it. Surely they would have told him about me, surely they were not protecting me still. He rubbed his cheek, and gazed again into the corner of the ceiling. Self-made man, is he, he said, this Behrens? Oh Inspector, I said, aren't we all? At that he gave me a peculiar look, and stood up. I noticed again that brief grimace of pain. Bad knee. Footballer. Sunday afternoons, the shouts muffled in grey air, the flat thud of leather on leather. Now what, I said, what happens now? I did not want him to leave me yet. What would I do when the darkness came? He said I should give the guard my solicitor's name, so he could be told I was here. I nodded. I had no solicitor, of course, but I felt I could not say so – everything was so relaxed and chummy, and I did not want to create any awkwardnesses. Anyway, I was fully intending to conduct my own defence, and already saw myself making brilliant and impassioned speeches from the dock. Is there anything else I should do, I said, frowning up at him seriously, is there anyone else I should tell? (Oh, I was so good, so compliant, what a warm thrill of agreeableness I felt, deferring like this to this good chap!) He gave me that peculiar look again, there was irritation and impatience in it, but a certain ironic amusement too, and even a hint of complicity. What you can do, he said, is get your story straight, without the frills and fancy bits. What do you mean, I said, what do you mean? I was dismayed. Bob Cherry had suddenly turned harsh, had almost for a moment become Mr Quelch. You know very well what I mean, he said. Then he went off, and Hogg came back, and he and the elderly guard – oh, call him something, for God's sake – he and Cunningham, old Cunningham the desk sergeant, took me down to the cells.
Am I still handcuffed?
I do not know why I say they took me down (well, I do, of course) for we simply walked a little way along a corridor, past the lavatory, and through a steel gate. I confess I felt a qualm of fear, but that was quickly replaced by surprise: it was all just as I expected! There really are bars, there really is a bucket, and a pallet with a striped, lumpy mattress, and graffiti on the scarred walls. There was even a stubbled old-timer, standing white-knuckled at the door of his cell, who peered out at me in wordless, angry derision. I was given a piece of soap and a tiny towel and three pieces of shiny toilet-paper. In return I surrendered my belt and shoelaces. I saw at once the importance of this ritual. Cowering there, with the tongues of my shoes hanging out, clutching in one hand the waistband of my trousers and holding in the other, for all to see, the fundamental aids to my most private functions, I was no longer wholly human. I hasten to say this seemed to me quite proper, to be, indeed, a kind of setting to rights, an official and outward definition of what had been the case, in my case, all along. I had achieved my apotheosis. Even old Cunningham, even Sergeant Hogg seemed to recognise it, for they treated me now, brusquely, with a sort of truculent, abstracted regard, as if they were not my jailers, but my keepers, rather. I might have been a sick old toothless lion. Hogg put his hands in his pockets and went off whistling. I sat down on the side of the cot. Time passed. It was very quiet. The old boy in the other cell asked me my name. I did not answer him. Well fuck you, then, he said. Dusk came on. I have always loved that hour of the day, when that soft, muslin light seeps upward, as if out of the earth itself, and everything seems to grow thoughtful and turn away. It was almost dark when Sergeant Hogg came back, and handed me a grubby sheet of foolscap. He had been eating chips, I could smell them on his breath. I peered in bafflement at the ill-typed page. That's your confession, Hogg said. Feel like signing it? The lag next door cackled grimly. What are you talking about? I said. These are not my words. He shrugged, and belched into his fist. Suit yourself, he said, you'll be going down for life anyway. Then he went off again. I sat down and examined this strange document. Oh, well-named Cunningham! Behind the mask of the bald old codger a fiendish artist had been at work, the kind of artist I could never be, direct yet subtle, a master of the spare style, of the art that conceals art. I marvelled at how he had turned everything to his purpose, mis-spellings, clumsy purpose, mis-spellings, clumsy syntax, even the atrocious typing. Such humility, such deference, such ruthless suppression of the ego for the sake of the text. He had taken my story, with all its – what was it Haslet said? – with all its frills and fancy bits, and pared it down to stark essentials. It was an account of my crime I hardly recognised, and yet I believed it. He had made a murderer of me. I would have signed it there and then, but I had nothing to write with. I even searched my clothing for something sharp, a pin or something, with which to stick myself, and scrawl my signature in blood. But what matter, it did not require my endorsement. Reverently I folded the page in four and placed it under the mattress at the end where my head would be. Then I undressed and lay down naked in the shadows and folded my hands on my breast, like a marble knight on a tomb, and closed my eyes. I was no longer myself. I can't explain it, but it's true. I was no longer myself.
That first night in captivity was turbulent. I slept fitfully, it was not really sleep, but a helpless tossing and sliding on the surface of a dark sea. I could sense the deeps beneath me, the black, boundless deeps. The hour before dawn was, as always, the worst. I masturbated repeatedly – forgive these squalid details – not for pleasure, really, but to exhaust myself. What a motley little band of manikins I conjured up to join me in these melancholy frottings. Daphne was there, of course, and Anna Behrens, amused and faintly shocked at the things I was making her do, and poor Foxy as well, who wept again in my arms, as I, silent and stealthy about my felon's work, pressed her and pressed her against that door in the empty, moonlit room of my imagination. But there were others, too, whom I would not have expected: Madge's niece, for instance – remember Madge's niece? – and the big girl with the red neck I had followed through the city streets – remember her? – and even, God forgive me, my mother and the stable-girl. And in the end, when they all had come and gone, and I lay empty on my prison bed, there rose up out of me again, like the spectre of an onerous and ineluctable task, the picture of that mysterious, dark doorway, and the invisible presence in it, yearning to appear, to be there. To live.