Bobby flew into the bar before I had even opened up. It was his day off, which made it doubly surprising. I was flushing the pipes on the southern half of the bar. We did half each day.

‘Shut the pub,’ he sputtered, barely catching his breath. ‘Shut it for the day.’

He looked deadly serious, never mind that what he was saying was totally insane.

‘What are you on about?’ I asked, pulling on the final pump and bringing Joshua’s wonder-fluid bubbling through the short but vital run of pipework. ‘I can’t shut the place. It’s the middle of Winter.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ he snapped. ‘They’ll survive. Do them good. There’s always The Heretic or The General. Anyway, we’ll be back before evening, if we get going now.’

He left me with no choice, such was his insistence, even though he wouldn’t let on where it was we were headed. I was swept along on his tide of immediacy. I tidied up my mess, wrapped up for the outside and shut the door behind me. An unlit fire sat in one of the hearths. I didn’t have the nerve to leave a note.

‘Where the hell are we going?’ I asked, as soon as we set off. We took the path towards the brewery, I noted.

‘It’s important, don’t worry,’ he replied without looking at me. I felt sure there had been times when I had run slower than we were now walking.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said, not knowing whether to walk or jog. ‘But is it going to disappear if we don’t get there in the next five minutes?’

He slowed to a sensible walking pace. ‘Sorry,’ he apologised as I moved alongside. ‘It’s been burning a hole in my head since last night. I couldn’t wait to tell you.’

‘You haven’t told me anything yet,’ I pointed out. Last night, he had said. What had happened the night before? It had been cribbage night. Bobby had found his way on to the B team – old John McGovern hadn’t won his place back, after all. It was probably for the best: he was an abysmal cribbage player; Bobby was a considerably more reliable team man, if not quite as successful as Rimmer had been. Where had they been? The A team were aboard the redundant ferry, playing the port. The B team had been… of course: at the prison. How could I have forgotten? The annual trip to the most famous recreation room in the land, the room which had witnessed both the fatal severing of “Young” Jemmie Fernandez’ jugular with a disembodied thumbnail grown in the prison lab, and the signing of the Forced Rehabilitation Act of 1947 was the highlight for most of the players in the league. Bobby had been banging on about it for weeks: he had never visited, in all his time on the island.

We had turned right at the crossroads, heading towards the brewery, which we passed in silence. My hunch was right: we were heading towards the prison. Bobby must have organised an appointment while he was there the night before. But I couldn’t imagine why, what could be so important that I had had to close the pub? Close the pub? In Winter?? I tried not to think about the angry faces that would be congregating outside, some time in the next hour.

‘How was last night’s game?’ I asked him. The A team had triumphed handsomely, I had already heard, despite Kev relegating himself to the Bs. His macabre side couldn’t resist the lure of the prison game.

‘Good, I suppose’ he grunted, unconvincingly. ‘I lost my doubles and my singles, but we scraped a win. Kept us 3^rd in the table. They would have gone above us if they’d won.’ I knew him. He would have been mortified at losing his games, and the team win would barely have compensated for his personal failure. I grinned to myself.

‘And why are we going back there now? Did you see something amazing?’ I slipped the words into the air between us as if letting them drip from an overflowing bucket. He turned and smiled at me, without dropping his pace.

‘Not bad,’ he said as we crossed the stone bridge over the Rhine. The Mountain in front of us reared up like a polar bear’s fist through an ice-hole, only in reverse.

‘Well, there’s one mystery solved,’ I said. ‘But the other question remains: why?’

‘I’ve arranged a full tour for you,’ he told me, disingenuously. ‘I don’t think you’ve visited yet, have you?’

He was right. But I was unaware I needed to. Still, I had found time to visit the school, the lighthouse and the brewery. Why not the prison? I supposed that the opportunity had simply not presented itself like the others had. Anyway, I was about to put that right, and if my experiences in the last months had taught me anything, it was that everything would become clear when it decided the time was right.

We reached the Robertson Memorial Gate at the end of the path. The installation was as close to ornate as you would find on the island, sporting carved masonry stylisations of hop plants on the lintels, and jambs shaped as beer bottles. It was integrated into the grandest of all the watchtowers strung around the demilitarized zone. Bobby confirmed what I was thinking: on this very spot, or nearby, his great-grandfather had met his end at the hands of a poorly-maintained shotgun. Sentimentality hung around it like a millstone on an emaciated mendicant.

Bobby lifted and dropped the vast knocker, twice. I could hear the thud resound inside the grounds, yet we were totally insulated from it on the outside. An acoustic miracle. The hatch within the small door opened and shut. Then the door itself swung back gracefully; a well-dressed man of something over 50 was revealed. His eyes smiled, his tie was knotted in a complicated but entirely appropriate fashion, his grey speckled single-breasted suit was cut in such a way as if to deny it had been cut at all. The effort required to gain that effortless effect must have been astronomical. A thin rectangle of deep yellow handkerchief showed from his breast pocket, echoed in the escaping flash of sock visible above his mirror-like patent-leather pumps as he stood back and ushered us in with the word “Gentlemen!”

Gerald Sappke was, I came to learn, the sort of Governor who would open his own prison door. He took great pride in his ability to personally discharge any of the various roles he might ask his staff to perform. He greeted us and ushered us into the administration block with an easy formality. We encountered two of his team on our trip across the Great Vestibule. One, the PT instructor, a mountain of a woman with buckets for hands and the most outrageously delicate features that I presumed she had taken, by force and with menaces, from their rightful owner. She wore her frost-coloured hair in a defiantly Germanic plait and responded almost militarily to Sappke’s innocuous questioning. Two, another immaculate man simply introduced as Heinz-Gert, who carried a number of unidentifiable gadgets which he checked in turn as he spoke to the Governor in fluent and guttural German. My school-level understanding of the language was hopelessly inadequate and they lost me before the first interminable sentence was out. He bowed respectfully as he took our leave, but we exchanged no words.

Inside the Administration Block, we left Bobby, who apparently had some pre-arranged business to attend to. Sappke’s assistant led him to a room behind the main office.

Sappke and I started the tour. His manner was every bit as polished as his appearance. Despite his obvious pride in his spotless and tranquil institution, he confined himself to the factual and historical in his commentary. His soft voice, which despite his surname and his obvious mastery of German betrayed no overseas accent whatever, matched the spongy light perfectly and I often found myself marvelling in the captive ambience rather than taking in his undoubtedly erudite narrative. It was a beautiful place to walk around of a Winter’s morning, not to mention bewildering. We came to a natural halt as we reached the end of a long, straight corridor, and I noticed we were not 30 yards to one side of where we had started, outside the Office. I retraced our path from there and realised we had completed a giant horseshoe. I had had no sense of turning any corner as we had walked. He chuckled at my stunned silence.

‘A simple optical illusion, I assure you,’ he patronised me charmingly with his manicured hand on my elbow. ‘Speaking of which, how do you like our lighting system?’

I looked up. The ceiling was covered in one vast fluorescent bulb, or so it seemed, which let out the most organic and sun-like glow imaginable. It figured: as we had been walking around the horseshoe, I had been struck by the impression that we were outside. Only when I concentrated on my surroundings was I able to confirm that was not the case. This time, though, I was one step ahead of him.

‘Some form of light tube?’ I suggested. There was no way this light was artificially created.

‘I can see where you’re coming from,’ he nodded. ‘The light is certainly natural. However, your solution can’t possibly work. The sun isn’t shining. And if it were, we wouldn’t need a light tube to get it into here. Above this roof is nothing but sky.’

I grunted. My stab at the answer had been infantile, and I was a little embarrassed. I got the sense he enjoyed toying with his guests, but in a good way.

‘It’s unfair of me, of course,’ he continued, ‘especially given that I can hardly take any credit for the conception or implementation of the solution. I apologise for coming over so supercilious. My pride in my jail often leads me to behaviour of which I’m not particularly proud.’

It was nothing, I told him.

‘It’s what we call capacitised glass. Invented right here in our labs. The glass has an active element which stores surplus sunlight during the good weather, mostly the summer months, of course. Then it lets it out when necessary, at night or during the Snows. It effects what you might call a smoothing, or a normalisation, of the sunlight. The effect is that the lighting is totally consistent at all times. 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year. During leap seconds the building is thrown into complete darkness, I’m afraid.’

‘Really?’ I shot him a glance of incredulity.

‘No. I’m sorry. I was joking about that.’ He looked slightly abashed. I laughed out loud at my own idiocy.

‘So how do the inmates know if it’s night or day?’ I wondered out loud.

‘They don’t,’ he said, plainly. ‘They’re allowed out sometimes, during daylight hours, so they can maintain their acquaintance with the sky, but most of the time they roam around here. They sleep when they’re tired. They eat when they’re hungry. Night or day, it doesn’t matter.’

I tried to picture a life like that. It didn’t sound all bad. I guessed that my problem would be one of sleeping too much. I would miss the sky, though.

‘We sold our idea recently,’ Sappke continued. ‘To a hotel in Las Vegas, of all places! They had read our paper in a journal and decided it was exactly what they needed. It’s in their interests, apparently, to give the impression of permanent daylight. They came over, lots and lots of them. It caused quite a stir here, that’s for sure. And,’ he lowered his voice a touch, ‘we made an awful lot of money from it. The island’s exchequer is looking rather healthy as a result. That rainy day, whenever it might come, holds no terror for us any more, I’d say.’

We moved along a set of corridors which had a hidden agenda. I felt slightly uneasy and hemmed in: there was a space-station feel to the architecture, at least internally. I had noticed nothing of the sort from my various outside views of the place. The gravity was fine, though.

The Governor waved his magnetic card against a reader when we reached the end of a corridor. The door opened, without sound effects, and we stepped through into a space so capacious that I had to hold on to the wrought iron railing in front of me to counteract the dizziness.

The chamber was circular and appeared to have four levels, if the configuration of gantries was anything to go by. In the middle stood a full-height cylindrical pillar, 10 or 15 feet in diameter, which my eyes followed upwards all the way to the apex of the domed ceiling. This must have been the central copper dome I first saw from the ferry.

‘This is the main cell block,’ whispered Sappke. ‘The oldest part of the jail, although we’ve made some cosmetic changes since its construction. As you’ll see, all the glass is capacitised. That isn’t an original feature.’

‘It’s a panopticon,’ I said, slowly, squeezing out each syllable. I had never vocalised the word before, and was in such a state of dumbstruck wonderment that it was quite possible my faculties had been temporarily hijacked by another consciousness.

‘Absolutely spot-on!’ Sappke spoke at normal volume. His voice reverberated lazily around the barrel-like interior, but I saw no stirrings of signs of life. ‘The original architect was a true believer in the merits of the panopticon; one of the few, it turned out. But this place has always operated on the principle. It has meant we have been able to keep surveillance staff to a minimum ever since we opened. Our inmates have no idea if they are being watched or not. Truth is,’ he dropped his voice right down once more, ‘they hardly ever are. We don’t bother.’

A face and then a body appeared out of a cell on the third landing. It was a woman. Long dark hair hung down past her shoulders and she wore a yellow and pink floral-print dress with no shoes. She stood and stared at us for a long minute, then slowly raised her hands in front of her face, pressed down a bent index finger and clicked a recognisable camera-shutter noise from somewhere in the back of her throat. The sound barrelled down effortlessly to us on the ground.

‘It leaves us with the capacity to supervise much more important activities,’ continued the boss. ‘Nowadays it’s even less necessary to keep an eye on them. I’d classify them as almost completely harmless, anyway, although we can’t be too complacent. They’re here for a reason and we have to be seen to be taking that reason seriously.’

‘Harmless?’ it was a natural question for me to ask. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Your picture of this institution might well be a little outdated, my friend,’ he said. ‘It’s not the hive of criminal iniquity it once apparently was. I’m not entirely convinced we ever deserved that reputation, if I’m honest with you, but it suited our needs very well to be seen that way. And nowadays we’re home to just ten of the World’s most wanted. Our staff outnumber our guests quite significantly.’

‘Ten inmates?’ I squawked. Like a parrot. The photographic woman turned to look at us again, pulling out an imaginary hand-cranked moving picture camera, which she trained deliberately on me. I looked around at the vast cell block. There must have been capacity for 80 or 100 on each level. Call it 350 in total. And there were countless other buildings within the complex, I already knew.

‘Yes, quite surprising, isn’t it, given our capacity and our history?’ he replied calmly. ‘We appear to be something of the forgotten black sheep of the penal system. We do, however, occupy a quite special niche. We specialise in what might be termed bizarre high-security mental cases. Our history as a top-security establishment counts in our favour there. We also host anybody from the island who has committed a crime. Very rarely that happens, but I can’t deny there is the occasional requirement.’

‘So… who’s here now?’ I croaked through a disbelieving dry throat.

‘Quite a selection!’ he claimed. ‘You’ve seen Susie up there already?’ he indicated the woman with the invisible camera. I looked at her once more. She was still recording our every move and our every sound.

‘Yes. Quite unsettling,’ I muttered. ‘Although she seems familiar. Do I know of her? Should I?’

‘I see no reason why you would have done,’ he shook his head. ‘Susie Quinn, MBE. Unless you were directly affected by her crime spree.’

‘What sort of spree?’

‘Arson. Of the most specific and vindictive variety. Printing or developing services, camera retailers, anything to do with the photographic industry. Mrs Quinn took it upon herself to torch a whole industry out of existence. Something to do with her own loss of memories to a house fire. Mad as blue cheese. But as long as you’re not the proprietor of such an establishment, you’re pretty safe. She’s really quite charming. It’s such a shame: she did try to not hurt anybody physically, but there was a casualty – a disgruntled ex-employee performing an amateurish burglary. She didn’t have a leg to stand on after that.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ I was watching her, all the way up there on the high gantry. She had now set up a tripod and had stepped back, holding a remote control. After each sentence she would press the button and a burst of three of four shots would click through. Her sound effects were superb. There was not a single sign of mania on her equable features. ‘An MBE, you say?’

‘Yes. She used to run a hostel; a refuge for forgotten children. Quite famous for it, she was. Rightly recognised, too, a few years before her unfortunate fall from grace.’

He spoke sadly, as if an indulgent godfather. ‘This gentleman,’ he directed his attention and mine to a bespectacled man, seated at a table at ground level, not 20 yards away from where we stood, ‘you are more likely to have heard of.’ The man had slicked-back jet-black hair and wore a brown boiler suit. He smoked a cigarette, his legs were easily crossed and he was engrossed in a book. The words on the cover looked like Hocus Pocus. ‘Donald Rosewater, CBE.’

‘Donald Rosewater?’ I stuttered.

‘The very same,’ Sappke purred.

He was right. I knew his history very well. Everybody did. Well, everybody on the mainland. He had been incarcerated a number of years earlier, yet his actions remained legend. “Cleaning up our screens” he had put it, coarsely, during his trial. His speciality had been stalking, imprisoning and finally disposing of over-exposed television notables. Often he would target a number of such unfortunates at once, and his most laudable, or notorious, exercise culminated in the disappearance of the entire bloated presenting cast of a daytime consumer rights programme. The graphic retelling of that particular story at the trial gripped me so much that I, along with the majority of the country, completely forgot my natural antipathy toward him. His barrister, writing in his autobiography, claimed he even sensed the seeds of an unthought-of victory while the tale was developing. Only a frantic last-minute reality check from the judge ensured that sense prevailed. The bodies of those presenters had never been found.

‘Wow,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m impressed. Who else?’

We left the main cell-block and cut through to the recreation room. This was where Bobby and the B team would have been the previous night. It was accessible from the back gate without having to cross the main block. A couple of men in Savile Row pin-stripes and bare feet sat at the cribbage table, playing a violent hand. Sir Jeremiah something-or-other and Sir Thomas something-and-something-else, the Governor explained. Both knights bachelor, both formerly chief executives of well-known high street banks, both disgraced after the extent of their 30-plus-year frauds was slowly, then with increasing swiftness, exposed to an open-mouthed public, which declared itself outraged and morally violated, before settling back to allow exactly the same to happen once more. It had no idea how to prevent it. And as long as house prices were increasing, things couldn’t be all that bad, could they? The two gentlemen in question pleaded total innocence and ignorance of any illegal activities. Their intractable denials had led to their transfer here, among the similarly disturbed and delusional.

‘Does everybody here have some form of title or post-nominal?’ I asked him.

‘Almost everybody, yes,’ he replied, after some thought. ‘How peculiar!’ he exclaimed, a delighted smile spreading across his symmetrical face. ‘I had never given it any thought before. Yes. Quite incredible. It’s not a policy of ours, I must add. We even have an OM,’ he announced proudly. ‘The artist, Djonathan Richards.’

‘He’s in prison? Here??’ this was shocking news to me. Richards had been a hero of mine; a brilliant sculptor who had, apparently, led the life of a hermit since around the age of 40, when he had been awarded the Order of Merit. That must have been 30 years ago.

‘Of course. I wouldn’t lie about an inmate. You’ll see him later, when we pass through the art room. He’s always in there. Poor man. In the meantime, you should see these chaps. A real success story of ours.’ We stopped in front of an imposing wooden structure, around four feet in height and taking up a large corner of the vast recreation room. Two men were working diligently, whittling matchsticks away and gluing them precisely into place. It was a replica, to scale, so it seemed, of the Forbidden City. Another consulted a library of photographic and technical texts that had been laid out on trestles beside the growing mini-city.

Sappke expanded on his success story: ‘The two men working within the complex are both VCs, both suffering from the most acute cases of post-traumatic stress disorder,’ he explained. ‘They were initially put away for taking out the entire east coast mainline railway through a series of trackside explosive devices. During their hearings, it became apparent they had also booby-trapped the Humber Bridge and set up a cell of highly-trained commandos in a boarding house in Mablethorpe. Apparently they were trying to isolate Market Rasen, which they believed was the headquarters of a quasi-Abrahamic sect that had vowed to return Western Europe to the early medieval period, which was the era they claimed last represented true purity of art, belief and human endeavour. The address they gave for the sect’s Mr Big, their primary target, was the home of a man who worked in the planning office in Lincoln. His wife ran an upmarket shoe boutique. Their architect, there among the books, is Robert Herron, OBE.’

‘The man who escaped the death penalty?’ I asked, as if by reflex.

‘You’ve got it,’ he confirmed. ‘There was a very real possibility of it, until the Crime and Disorder Act came to his rescue. Good thing, too, I say. He’s proved a force for good over the last few years, after he worked through his anger.’

I studied him for a few minutes. There remained the manner of a shop steward about him, but none, it seemed, of the rampant confrontationalism that had landed him in such hot water. He directed the VCs calmly and benevolently, guiding their movements precisely, silently removing obstacles from their paths. All they needed to do was concentrate on the next matchstick. His appreciation of the whole tableau was truly remarkable. That such a talent could have been misused to the extent that he was imprisoned for treason during a round of seemingly simple union negotiations might have seemed a waste. But it was just possible he had found the happiest place he ever could have. It was hard to imagine any other society with the patience and capacity to absorb his tempestuous raving, leaving him free to express himself in more appropriate forms.

Sappke ushered me past the construction site. I had been engrossed for too long, I admitted to myself. This wasn’t a freak show. We exited into some kind of ante-chamber, then took the rightmost door into a studio. It couldn’t have been more a pastiche of a Parisian atelier had you asked Victor Hugo to conjure one up after a bottle or two of Chambertin. Around the edges, outsize easels presented sprawling canvasses of emotional outpourings. I had never seen an angrier collection of therapeutic fallout. Was that how Robert Herron, OBE, had worked off his issues? Some of them were stunningly good.

‘Scary, eh?’ he interrupted. ‘Some are Robert’s, if you were wondering. The better ones are Djonathan’s, though. He’s not sculpted since he arrived, but he proved to be equally gifted with the brushes. He’s still at it now, look.’

Sure enough, a man sat inside a full-length smudged smock at a chair by the window. He was smoking a cigar under his bushy top lip, contemplating his latest work. I wheeled around unobtrusively to get a better view of it. I looked at the Governor, who nodded his approval. What I saw took my breath away. The canvas in progress was half-filled with the most uncoordinated childish daubings of passionless primary colours I had seen since my son’s first term at school. I half expected to find a spidery caption of “My Mummy” added above what purported to be the content. The artist was either giggling or crying as he surveyed the damage, I couldn’t tell which. I gaped at it, then at Sappke.

‘Not what you expected?’ he read my mind. ‘I’m not an expert, but I’d say Djohnny was moving through an important psychological gate currently. All of his creations recently have been similar to this one. I suppose it’s some kind of self-imposed regression thing. I’ve seen him traverse similar phases in the past. He always comes out of it and starts producing the serious work again. It’s like he has to rest awhile. It must be tiring to be such a genius. Besides, we can’t prescribe how they express themselves. I’ve been told that the creative outlet is good for the serious mentalists, so we encourage it. Nobody really understands what they do, although everyone can tell Djonathan’s work from the others. Different league.

‘Now,’ he looked around, ‘it seems no sign of Teddy today. He’s either in his cell or in here. Maybe it’s a bit early for him. Do you know him? Wing Commander Teddy Peters-Petersen, DFC and Bar.’

‘The spy?’ I asked. His name rang a bell and I had the impression he was something to do with some convoluted espionage-related incident that had made the news.

‘Yes, sort of,’ the Governor replied. ‘He wasn’t actually a danger to the country, because the secrets he was feeding the Russians were totally bogus. He made them up, every last one. But the point was he was acting like a spy, had the entire set-up in his hand, and was in a position to pass some quite damaging information, if he had ever felt like it. The fact that he didn’t was just lucky. They had to lock him up, for the good of the country, not to mention himself. He made a few unpleasant enemies as a result of his actions.’

The episode came back to me. I remember finding the whole thing hilarious in a surreal way. Nobody was sure what his crime had been. He took his incarceration with surprising good grace. Almost as if he had no idea of its significance.

We left the room. It had been a fascinating tour of the personalities, but I was still in the dark about why I had had to rush there on that very day. The Governor took me into the air-locked zone leading to the prison’s lab complex, which I figured out, from the pictures I had formed during previous views, would have been the majority of the low buildings making up the giant equation on the face of the island. The space required for the housing and recreation of the ten inmates was unsurprisingly little. He took me no further, though: he doubted I was that interested in the specifics of what went on in there, and it would have been far too dangerous to expose a layman.

I considered protesting and demanding a tour, but he had probably been right. And he was not the sort of person with whom one argued. Instead, we turned back towards the administration block and into a bright, totally empty room, about 15 feet square.

‘I’ll leave you here,’ he said. ‘When you’re ready, just open the door there,’ he nodded lightly at a door set into the opposite wall from where we had entered, ‘and go in. There will be a buzzer on the table and one by each door. Buzz that if and when you want to leave. You can’t open the doors from inside.’ A man I hadn’t seen before came in through the door we had used, carrying a small wooden box. It was empty. ‘Just one thing,’ Sappke continued, stony-faced ‘can you place all valuables, sharp objects, anything metal, that sort of thing, in here? It’s for your own safety.’ I complied robotically. I was at a loss to understand what was in store for me. For all I knew, this could have been the final moments of my freedom, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I went through my pockets and emptied everything I had, which was little, into the box.

‘Shoes and socks, too,’ the man barked, without looking at me. My shoes went into the box, on top of my sorry collection of other objects: a pencil, a bottle opener, keys to The Griffin, a pocket telescope, Joshua’s glasses, which he had left on the bar the night before. They were just a pair of standard reading glasses that Bobby had brought over from the mainland. Joshua liked to don them sometimes, late into a long night.

Dismembered, I watched them leave. The walls were a flat white and the ceiling capacitised glass. There were no shadows. In fact, now that the other men had left, there were no reference points at all. It was a room with no dimensions. I could picture my head, like a cartoon, unfolding and flattening out as it attempted to find some common ground with its surroundings. No matter how far it stretched itself, it found none, and finally refolded itself carefully and retook its usual perch on my shoulders and neck.

‘The door,’ a ghostly voice came from somewhere above the ceiling. The sound did the opposite of echo against the walls and floor. I approached, wrapped my hand uneasily around the doorknob, and turned. I felt the tendons and muscles tighten in my forearm.

The door opened, as a direct and complaisant response to the electrical pulses moving along my radial nerve. Equally obediently, I entered the room it revealed. This one was less empty. A simple table occupied a rectangle of the floor at its exact mid-point. It was made of gorse wood and seemed well worn, although not untidily so. Behind, its real function was clear. A man sat in a chair, his head bowed. Both he and the chair were chained to the floor, without even six inches of leeway in the slack of their shackles. He wore an unpressed grey shirt and worn blue jeans, much like I did. His feet were as bare as the other inmates’, and mine. His head was still bowed and I couldn’t make out his features. His hair was thin, although covered the top of his head consistently. I got the impression it might have been darker a short time previously.

A chair waited for me on my side of the table. I hung back a bit.

‘Allow me to introduce Mr Rimmer,’ the voice came from the ceiling, much clearer than it had been in the other room.

So, this was why Bobby had been so adamant about me coming here immediately. I supposed he was right. This was a discovery of enormous significance, to me more than anybody else. Rimmer looked up at me. His eyes picked me up and deposited me in the empty chair.

‘I see,’ he said quietly and without a hint of anything apart from the two words that came out. This was a feeling I was learning to savour as I spent more time on the island: the simplicity of a conversation with no agenda. ‘Mr Rimmer. Pleased to finally meet you.’

I was taken aback. ‘Errr, forgive me, but I’m not Rimmer. I was under the impression you were,’ I said, without conviction.

He laughed his prisoner’s laugh. ‘Was a time I was. Might have been still, if things were different. Never are, though, are they?’

I looked around at the walls and at the ceiling. I thought there might be some sign of a camera, or a loudspeaker even, that I could turn my confusion upon. Futile. I decided to go with it.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked him.

He looked at me more intensely. ‘Might as well be. Where else have I got to go? These,’ he rattled his chains as best he could, ‘aren’t much fun, but they make a change. I like a change. I could be in the rec room playing crib with those bankers, but they won’t let me on the team.’

‘Who won’t let you?’

‘Governor. He says it might be dangerous for me. Also, remand cases aren’t allowed privileges, he says. Don’t believe a word of it. No good me arguing though. You tried arguing with him? Just look at his face. Nothing there to argue with.’

I tended to agree with him. Sappke struck me as a bottomless well. Any grievances, however justified, would have disappeared forever into that blackness. Rimmer had missed the point of my question, though.

‘I didn’t mean that, exactly,’ I countered, ‘I was more interested in what you were doing in the prison.’

‘Remand,’ he choked the word out. He looked back down at his gashed feet. A couple of those wounds looked nasty.

‘On what charge?’ I persevered.

‘On what charge…’ he repeated. ‘I appreciate your support, Rimmer, but you won’t do yourself any favours getting involved in my case. Keep your nose clean, if that’s possible. Do your time, let yourself sink in, forget about everything you knew before. You might just survive it. Too late for me, of course, and too late for all those others, but you’ve still got some hope. Don’t throw it away in here.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean. Why is it too late?’

‘How long have you been here?’ he asked me. I told him, as accurately as I could. He smiled patronisingly. ‘Figures,’ he sighed. ‘Still mostly full of whatever you came over with. Ditch it as quick as you can. Shed that skin. You’ll grow a new one before you know it.’ He was nodding his head manically as he told me this.

‘Bobby brought me here,’ I tried a new tack. ‘Bobby Robertson, from The Shipbuilders. You know him, don’t you?’

Rimmer seemed to perk up at this. ‘You mates with Bobby?’ he asked, leaning forward as far as his chains would allow. I told him I was, and that we were running The Griffin together this Winter. He seemed impressed and more animated than he had been. ‘Bobby’s the only one who might be able to help me,’ he added. ‘You can get a message to him, right?’

I nodded. ‘Of course. What kind of message?’

‘Ask him to speak to the Governor. He can tell him about me. He knows how I play. I’ve seen that lot in the rec room: they’re fucking useless. I can get this team to the top of the table if they only give me half a chance. I know all that shit about being on remand is just shit. He could put me on the team if he wanted. Bobby could convince him. I know he could. Sappke’ll listen to him.’

I stared at him, my mouth wide open. ‘The cribbage team?’ He looked at me and nodded, like he was a dog and I had the perfect stick in my hand. ‘You wouldn’t like anybody to work on, say, getting you out of here? You still haven’t told me what the charges are.’ I searched his face for any signs of normality. He sunk back into a funk as he considered his options.

‘Maybe the Governor’s right…’ he muttered. ‘Might be safer for me in here,’ and he darted a wide-eyed look around all corners of the room. ‘They can’t get in here. He won’t let them in. Bobby’s alright, and you. But he won’t let those others in. Knows how to look after his own, Sappke does. But if I’m on the team, they can reach me. They can almost touch us, you know. That’s how close they get. And he doesn’t need to touch you, even. Eyes are enough. I can’t deal with him now, not here. Not when I’m this weak. Fuck. No.’ He started to cry. His hands wouldn’t reach his face, and the tears rolled down and off his unshaven cheeks, staining his jeans momentarily.

‘Tears,’ came a stentorian voice from the sunlit ceiling. His weeping stopped immediately. He looked at me again in hope.

‘Can you come again?’ he pleaded. Before I could even think of an answer, he continued: ‘Could you bring me in some stuff? We’re allowed stuff.’

‘What kind of stuff?’ I genuinely wanted to know. What did he think I might have that he could use in here?

‘Jams,’ he said. ‘There’s no jam in here, but we’re allowed our own stash. There’s nobody else I can ask. There’s nobody here for me. I can’t believe you’ve been sent now. It’s like an answer to a prayer!’

Jams? ‘Jams?’ I mouthed. A noise came out. It sounded like “Jams?”. ‘What sort of jams?’

‘Anything – don’t care,’ he snapped back. ‘You can get some good gooseberry here, and even some raspberry if the crop has been good. Or you can get almost anything from The Other Side. Are you planning on going back at all? You could get some blackcurrant. Apricot, even.’

‘I can’t promise that. The ferries are out at the moment, but I’ll see what I can do,’ I reassured him. It was the least I could do.

‘Books?’ he suggested timidly. ‘I’d love some books. I haven’t read since I’ve been here. No proper books here.’

‘You mean novels?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, proper novels. Literature. Can you get me some?’

‘Maybe, yes. What do you like?’

‘D.H. Lawrence. Walter Scott. Natsume Soseki. Turgenev. Even… no it’s alright. Stupid of me. Just that lot.’

‘Go on,’ I prompted, ‘who else were you going to say?’

‘Scott Fitzgerald. Forget about it. There’s no way.’

I thought for a second or two about why Scott Fitzgerald would be any more challenging to lay hands on than, say, Soseki. I came up with nothing.

‘Leave it with me,’ I said. ‘I should be able to sort something out.’

‘And autographs of sportsmen?’ he was in the zone now.

‘Sorry?’ I started. ‘Autographs of sportsmen?’

‘Any sportsmen. Or women. I don’t mind. Bob Willis would be ideal, but anybody will do, really. And pictures of families. Do you have any of your family? It doesn’t have to be someone I know. Families. Any family.’

My finger moved involuntarily towards the buzzer on the table. There had been a time during the whole episode when I doubted it was even attached to anything, but I was more confident now. Sure enough, a loud buzzing noise filled the room. The chains attached to Rimmer’s wrists, ankles and neck tightened slightly. He sat, frozen, unable to move anything larger than a finger, and smiled fraternally in my direction. I looked at him, unable to draw any firm conclusion as to his mental state or the best possible treatment for him.

The door to the waiting room opened once more. I stood and turned to go. Before I exited, I turned back. ‘I’ll see what I can scrape together when my container arrives from the mainland,’ I said to him. ‘I should be able to get you some of the things you’ve asked for.’ He looked simperingly grateful. I shut the door behind me and put my socks and shoes back on.

Bobby was waiting for me in the office, with Sappke. We took our leave of the Governor without mentioning any follow-up visits. I was unsure whether or not I should even mention the requests Rimmer had made of me. They were probably both aware of them already. I took one last look at the gate as it shut slowly behind us, then ran to catch Bobby.

‘How did you manage to find him?’ I asked. ‘Did you see him at the game last night?’

‘No, they wouldn’t have been so careless. I had to piece it together. It was when Kev insisted on being part of the team that I really suspected, and things became clearer after that. I had thought for ages he’d got something to hide. When I’ve confronted him before on the subject he’s been flustered, and I saw him get hold of The Child once, too, after I’d grilled him badly. There’s no way he’d normally talk to him. Kev barely talks to anyone about anything but cribbage, and The Child would be the last person he’d approach for that. Then last night I caught sight of him chatting to Gerald Sappke and knew something had to be up. There was nothing they could have been talking about. It had to be dodgy.

‘I put them on the spot right away. They didn’t want to tell me anything, but in the end they had to. I hate to use my surname and my status to my advantage, but this was different. I made sure they knew I knew I could make life very difficult for them if I wanted.

‘It seems that Rimmer had been making calls, early in the summer, to the pub from the phone in the prison. Every day. Trying to speak to whoever he could, talk to them, work out why they had turned on him. Kev was the only one who would take his calls. He felt bad for him, although he was in no position to do anything to help. In the end the calls stopped. Gerald wouldn’t tell me why, and wouldn’t tell Kev either, but I presume it’s got something to do with The Child. He’s the one who can make things happen without any questions being asked. I didn’t push it. I know not to put people under too much pressure where The Child’s concerned. But I was still in a good enough position to get him to agree to your visit today. I thought it might be an innocuous way to kick things off.’

‘What things?’ I asked, innocently.

‘Whatever things we see fit, now,’ he mused. He looked at me inquisitively. I got the impression he thought I’d have some things I was desperate to follow through on.

I didn’t satisfy his curiosity straight away. ‘So, what have you been doing while I had the grand tour?’ I asked, after we had crossed back over the Rhine.

‘Doing some research,’ he announced. ‘Gerald wouldn’t let me into the prison, but told me I was welcome to their library while I waited for you.’

‘What research?’ I wondered.

‘Legal research. Looking for statutes, laws, clauses, precedents, anything that might mean we can get things in motion.’

‘Things?’

‘Yes, things!’ he shouted. ‘Your mate Rimmer is being held there on no charges, not even trumped-up ones. I presume, and nobody can deny it, that it’s to do with Tony’s death, but there’s nothing written down, he’s not been formally charged with it. That’s the first step: getting someone to admit to the charges. If we can do that, we can start to think about what might come after.’ He looked at me seriously. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that nobody has been released from that prison for more than 50 years? It’s not a place you get out of. If we’re serious about doing something for him, we’ve got to get started now and try things nobody’s ever thought of before. There’s no chance of a trial: there’s no court or even legal system here. We need to do things the island way, and that means pushing like an elephant seal until the other seal falls off or jumps off his rock. In this case, you know who the other bloke is, so it couldn’t get much more difficult. Even if we get lucky, it might take longer than Rimmer’s got left just to get him out of there, but it would be worse not to even try.’

It was a surprise to see Bobby so animated on the subject. He had no connection with Rimmer: this was just a cause that had stuck to him, for some reason. As I listened to his rants, I became more and more detached. I remembered what Rimmer had said to me.

‘I’ll tell you what would make his life better,’ I interrupted, when I could.

‘Go on,’ Bobby looked interested.

‘Could you have a word with Sappke, get him to put Rimmer on the cribbage team?’

‘The cribbage team?’ interest changed to horror.

‘It would help him,’ I said, calmly.

‘You’ve got more chance of an unconditional pardon,’ he shook his head slowly. I was surprised at his response. I genuinely thought he would have had enough influence to arrange that. He seemed more interested, though, in the impossible task of having Rimmer sprung from the jail in which he belonged.

‘Well,’ I continued, ‘that’s what he wants. And I’d be inclined to go along with him. Honestly, I don’t think he even wants to be released. He didn’t even mention the fact that he was incarcerated for something he hadn’t done. It certainly wasn’t what I expected. If anything, he’d rather be in there. Seems there’s a bit of paranoia loose somewhere in his head. Being behind some hefty locked doors, with limitless genuine sunshine, is probably as good as he could hope for now. If I were you I’d drop the whole “Free Rimmer” campaign before you even get it started. He wouldn’t thank you for it.’

Bobby was stunned. He said nothing, just turned to look at me every now and then as we progressed downstream along the path. I understood his outrage: I would have felt exactly the same had I not met Rimmer in person, and the sense of injustice at the illegal and immoral actions of his homeland must have burned in his conscience. He clearly had not given his up as totally as the others.

‘He did ask me to bring him some stuff,’ I added. ‘It’s simple stuff – books, jam, that sort of thing. I might do that. Do you think I could organise another visit once my container arrives? How easy is it to do that?’

‘Now you’re being completely ridiculous,’ he mumbled. ‘Today’s visit was a once-in-a-lifetime. If it hadn’t been me, and the circumstances hadn’t been so singular, there’s no way you would have got in. Nobody else on the island has ever been in the main cell block, apart from those who have been locked up there. Even Santino has to pick up the bodies from outside when he buries them.’

I felt privileged, in a way. Yet, in reality, it set me apart even more from the locals. Bobby spent the remainder of our trip back to the pub trying to get information on the inmates. How many were there? Just men, or a mixture of men and women? Was it true that such-and-such was held there? How many to a cell? Was it true that they were all chained to tables when they ate? Was the official language German? I flat-batted his childlike questions with increasing humour.

There was a small crowd in the courtyard outside the pub. They weren’t as angry as I had feared. We opened up and settled in for another evening.