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to pay if you got bitten. Or fleas.”
    Ash began indignantly, “My dog doesn’t—”
    But Jerome interrupted. His lips smiled, but his eyes were focused intently on Ash’s and there was the sense that he was saying, or trying to say, more than the actual words. “I never asked you. What’s its name?”
    “Patience,” said Ash, surprised.
    “I had a dog once. Othello. That was its name. Othello.”
    “Really?” Ash didn’t know what else to say. “What sort of dog?”
    “A sniffer dog. Like you see at airports.”
    Ash frowned. There was something very odd about this conversation. It wasn’t often, these days, that Gabriel Ash felt to be in the company of someone less in contact with reality than himself. “A spaniel?”
    “Yes.”
    The policeman was growing restless. “Come on, Jerome. You can talk to your new friend and his dog after you’ve finished here. Your solicitor will be here soon. Till then, let’s leave Mr. Ash in peace, yes?”
    There seemed nothing else for it. Jerome Cardy went with the officer, who closed Ash’s door behind him. A moment later Ash heard another cell door close, and this time also lock.
    He sat on the edge of his bunk for some minutes, puzzling over the encounter. Patience had no suggestions to offer, and finally he came back to his first conclusion, which was that Jerome Cardy had been indulging in illegal substances. Satisfied with that, at least mostly, he pulled the blanket over him again and went back to sleep.
    *   *   *
    Again, he had no idea how long he’d slept, but he stirred to the urgent entreaties of the dog, which was whining and scratching at the door and butting his hanging hand with her nose. He blinked himself awake. “Do you need to go out?”
    But Patience was—when not dealing with thugs—a civilized dog, discreet about her personal requirements. This was different. Something had alarmed her.
    Ten seconds later, the whole of the cell block was in an uproar.
    *   *   *
    Every police station has a supporting cast of regulars who shouldn’t really be part of the criminal justice system, who wouldn’t be if there was any other agency to take responsibility for them, and Meadowvale was no exception. Old ladies who shoplifted because, having outlived their families, being arrested for theft gave them a brief respite from the crushing loneliness. Old men who weren’t so much drunk and disorderly as confused and still fighting battles they’d won sixty years before. Heroin addicts who, when they asked for help with their addiction, were put on a waiting list eighteen months long. People like Gabriel Ash, wandering around the town, mumbling to his dog, until he annoyed someone enough to take a swing at him. And people like Barking Mad Barclay.
    Barking Mad was not, of course, the name on his birth certificate. That was a much more prosaic, much less descriptive Robert.
    The other thing Barking Mad isn’t is a diagnosis. In fact, though he’d been arrested numerous times, committed twice, and examined by every psychiatrist within a fifty-mile radius, no one had ever come up with a convincing diagnosis. He wasn’t a psychopath or a sociopath; he understood absolutely the difference between right and wrong, and the effect his behavior had on others. He didn’t hear voices telling him what to do. He did what he wanted to do.
    As far as could be established, he hadn’t been either abused or overindulged as a child, nor was his father also his grandfather and his uncle. If life had been harsh to him, it was only acting in self-defense. Unless there was something amiss deep within his brain, where it would only be discovered by cutting it into thin slivers and putting it under a microscope—and don’t think that didn’t seem an excellent idea to those who knew him best—he was just a very angry man who responded with uninhibited aggression to anything that irked him.
    As luck would have it, he was also a very large and powerful man, known at