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could not have been committed. A gun in the mud. Someone else throws it there. A gardener thinks Duncan has dropped something, perhaps it was a cigarette butt discarded, and the police come upon a gun. What they bum to ask their son is: does he know why the man was killed? But that, too, is not possible, for different reasons: the warder, the policeman, is there as the three chairs and table are, but one must remember that the warder hears although his face is composed in the sulky distance of incomprehension: what the answer might be could be used in damaging evidence, the nature of some circle—how could they know—in which the son moves. Once grouped around an act of violence, anything and everything becomes suspicious.
    At least, as a doctor, she has something to say.
    â€”How much exercise are you getting? Do you manage to sleep all right?—
    Either to satisfy them or in defiance, he makes light of this concern.—Well, it’s not the five-star accommodation I’d recommend.—He laughs. This room is not used to laughter; it comes back at them from the walls as a cry.—There’s some sort of yard I walk around twice a day. Oh—about the dog. I suppose Khulu or someone is feeding him, but—
    â€”Because I can speak to the medical officer and prescribe a mild sleeping pill. And better exercise facilities.—
    â€”No. Don’t. It’s not necessary. What about the dog?—
    This is something for his father; these parents are appealing for tasks.
    â€”I’ll find a solution; I’ll fetch him. And books?—
    â€”Philip has brought me a few and I can buy newspapers. But you could get some of mine. From the cottage—and clothes.—
    â€”What about a key?—
    â€”Khulu.—
    Time must be nearly up, this produces a new height of awkwardness in the awareness of each of the three: the dread of his going back down the corridors of concrete and steel and their driving away to leave him abandoned there; and the shameful impatience to have the visit come to an end.
    The warder signals. The parents don’t know whether to linger or quickly leave; what the protocol is for this kind of parting, what makes it endurable. They embrace him and his father feels a hand press three times on his shoulder-blade. As their son is led away, there’s an aside, delaying for a moment the warder who accompanies him.—Don’t bring anything I was in the middle of reading.—

    What he must think of us!
    Think of us?
    Well, what did we say to him? So cold, matter-of-fact.
    He glanced aside from the road ahead and saw her hands in her lap, the thumbnail of one twisting beneath the short fingernails of the other.
    What could be said?
    The warder standing there. We’ll have to see if we can’t meet him alone with the lawyer, lawyers have privileges of consulting privately with the person they represent.
    That’s not it.
    The capsule in which they were contained moving between the irreconcilables, prison and life, was suddenly filled with their voices let loose. The fact is, we don’t know what it is we ought to be discussing.
    We don’t know what his entanglement is in this whole terrible—thing—he doesn’t give any sign. He says he’s going to have a first-class advocate but we don’t have any idea of what he’s going to give him; what line of defence the advocate’s going to be able to follow, what he’s going to prove, when he pleads.

    What about the advocate.
    They had heard it at once, in the shock of the name; the choice of a black man. She’s not one of those doctors who touch black skin indiscriminately along with white, in their work, but retain liberal prejudices against the intellectual capacities of blacks. Yet she is questioning, and he is; in the muck in which they are stewing now, where murder is done, old prejudices still writhe to the surface. Looking at the appointment of someone called