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a cell with a stone floor and no glass in the window – this is January , mind – and then, he says, they just put a uniform beside you and they wait to see how long it’ll take you to give in. Of course I was worried sick, I thought he was going to get pneumonia, but actually he said in his letter it wasn’t the cold that bothered him, it was being watched all the time. The eye in the door.’ She laughed. ‘I didn’t know what he meant.’
    She looked past Prior’s shoulder, and he turned to follow her gaze. He found himself looking at an elaborately painted eye. The peephole formed the pupil, but around this someone had taken the time and trouble to paint a veined iris, an eyewhite, eyelashes and a lid. This eye, where no eye should have been, was deeply disturbing to Prior. For a moment he was back in France, looking at Towers’s eyeball in the palm of his hand. He blinked the image away. ‘That’s horrible,’ he said, turning back to Beattie.
    ‘’S not so bad long as it stays in the door.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘You start worrying when it gets in here.’
    ‘Anyway, go on. He was talking about William.’
    ‘Yes, he kept bringing the conversation round, and of course I was worried, and out it all came. It wasn’t just our William that was bothering me, it was all of them.’
    ‘All the conchies?’
    ‘You know I don’t mean that.’
    No, he thought. She was one of those who felt every death. She’d never learnt to read the casualty lists over breakfast and then go off and have a perfectly pleasant day, as the vast majority of civilians did. If she had learnt to do that, she mightn’t have been here. ‘Go on,’ he said.
    ‘He could see I was getting upset and he says, “Why don’t we have a drink?” Well, money was a bit tight, you know, with feeding Tommy as well, but he says, “Don’t you worry, love, this one’s on me.” And he went into the scullery and came back with two bloody great big jugs, and off he went. Eeh, special brew. Well, you know me, Billy, two glasses of that, he was me long-lost brother, and I did, I talked , I played me mouth. I cussed Lloyd George, I cussed the King, I don’t know what bugger I didn’t cuss, but I was lonely , Billy. I’d had nobody to talk to except Tommy for months, and he was no company, poor little bugger, his nerves were gone. And of course at the trial it all got twisted. He said I kept dropping hints Lloyd George was going to die. I can remember exactly what I said. I says, “That bloody, buggering bastard Lloyd George, he’s got a head on him like a forty-shilling pisspot, but you mark my words he’ll come to rue.” There. That was it. That was the death threat.’ She shook her head. ‘It was nowt of the sort. Anyway we were half way down the second jug – or I was – and he says, “Can I trust you?” I says, “Well, you’re in a pretty pickle if you can’t.” And then he starts telling me about this detention centre where the regime was very bad. Worse than Wandsworth. And you know all the stuff he was telling me was stuff I’d told him , about being naked in the cells and all that, but I was too daft to see it. And then he says, him and some of his mates had found a way to get the lads out. They had a contact inside the centre, one of the guards it was supposed to be. But, he says, the problem was the dogs. They had these dogs patrolling the perimeter fence. I says, “Well, poison. ” He says, well, yes, but there was a problem about that. It had to look like an outside job because of the guard. You see, they didn’t want the detention centre to twig about him . So I says, “Curare.”’
    ‘Fired through the fence in a blowdart?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Fired at the dogs?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Of course,’ Prior said, ‘you do realize, don’t you, a lot of people wouldn’t know about curare?’
    For the first time she looked uneasy. ‘Yes, well, I read about it in a book on South America, and then I happened