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ears.
    ‘This is Mrs Hogg, sir,’ Dewi said.
    McKenna coughed, throat rough with cold and thirst. ‘I’d like to see Mr Hogg.’
    ‘He’s not on duty ’til tomorrow.’
    ‘Where is he?’
    ‘Off duty.’
    ‘You’ve already told us that,’ McKenna said testily. ‘Perhaps you’d care to tell him we’re here?’
    ‘He’s not well.’
    ‘He was all right this morning,’ Dewi said.
    ‘He’s not now.’ She sounded wearied. ‘He’s had a terrible shock over that stupid boy getting himself killed.’
    McKenna sat on one of the hard upright chairs, tired of waiting to be asked, tired of standing out of politeness. ‘And what’s your job here, Mrs Hogg?’
    ‘Senior care officer.’
    ‘Is there a deputy?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then in Mr Hogg’s absence, you must be in charge.’
    ‘I can’t talk to you.’ Her face and body tensed. ‘I can’t tell you anything.’
    ‘We’ll see, shall we?’ McKenna countered. ‘Why don’t you sit down? I’ve no intention of leaving for quite a while.’
     
    Ignoring a muttered comment from the girl who escorted him to the children’s sleeping-quarters, Dewi shut the door of the room which had been Arwel’s billet. Created by partitioning a much larger room, of which the ornate ceiling cornice still showed on three sides, this room, Dewi thought, was like a cell, but one mocked-up for a film set to let cameras be mounted in the ceiling. Perspectives wrong, the floor area too small for the height, he began to feel as if the walls were closing in.
    Arwel’s bed, narrow and short, draped with a thin quilt, lay against one wall, a decrepit chipboard cabinet at its side. On the opposite wall, with barely room to move between the two, stood a wardrobe and drawer unit in the same chipboard, and a dirty washbasin below a small mirror. The window looked out to scrubby grass, the bulk of the hill rising oppressively close, and Dewi thought of meanness of spirit, of spite, of misery and wilful neglect. He lifted the quilt, exposing a crumpled greying sheet, then hefted the mattress, exposing only thin wooden slats and the little balls of dusty fluff his mother called ‘slut’s wool’, drifting about the linoleum tiles. Replacing the bedding, absently smoothing sheet and quilt as his mother had taught him, he opened the door of the bedside cabinet, to find dog-eared comics, a school exercise book, a Mars Bar wrapper, and a ball of dirty socks. He pushed the exercise book in his pocket, and turned to the wardrobe unit, then moved back to the bed, dragging it away from the wall, searching for secrets taped to the back of the headboard, wincing at the screech of bed-legs on lino, staring ruefully at black greasy tracks on the floor. He found nothing save the legend ‘Llewellyn ap Kilroy woz ’ere’, scored and inked on the cheap wood, nothing on the bedside cabinet, nothing secreted behind the wardrobe or underneath drawers. Putting the contents of drawers and wardrobe on the bed, he thought it a pitiful collection, of shrunken shapeless T-shirts, unpressed trousers, grubby underclothes, cheap socks with holes in toe and heel, a tattered plastic sponge-bag holding a worn toothbrush and a noxious flannel; only the meanest and barest of necessities. On hangers in the wardrobe, he found a bright red shirt, colour run to orange in places, and a bright red jumper, both bearing the name ‘Blodwel’ in large yellow letters and, like the bus in the photograph, a stigma to mark out the children from their peers. He was struck by the absence of graffiti, except for the hidden legend, and decided Ronald Hogg made his own marks upon the place and its accoutrements too powerfully for the children to dare their own.
    Pushing aside the heap of clothes, he sat on the bed. The mattress sank, and the metal bedframe bit deep into his thighs. Distant voices were suddenly raised in anger, words unintelligible, and he realized that until now, he had heard only the creaking of frost-brittle