That’s what’s bugging him, it’s nothing to do with you.’

‘When’s the shoemaker due to come out? He’s going crazy already.’

‘Too right! He’s got three years to go yet. But he sucks up to everyone, and secretly mends the warders’ shoes, and now he wants to join the Catholic Church; he’ll get out on probation all right.’

‘Yes, he’ll fix it, he knows what’s what.’

They were walking up and down under the wall in the warm May sunshine. Not a blade of green grass, not a leaf to be seen, but the sky was deeply blue, and after the bleak cells the sun seemed doubly bright and warm. It warmed them to the bones, their limbs loosened; their tense, watchful and defensive mood was relaxed, and they both became easy and quiet.

‘Hey, Willi,’ said Bruhn.

He was a plump, friendly young man, only just twenty-eight, who had been in prison since he was seventeen. With his light blue eyes, his ruddy round face and his flaxen hair he looked like a large child. But on the card in his cell was written ‘Robbery and murder’, and he had received the maximum sentence for those underage, at that time—fifteen years. And yet he did not appear as anything of the kind; he was a pleasant young man and popular with everyone. He had never tried to ingratiate himself, and yet he was liked by all.

In fact, when he mentioned the subject, which he did very seldom and with an air of hopeless resignation, he maintained that he had been unjustly convicted. It had not been murder for robbery, but manslaughter in a fit of fury and despair; he had killed the captain of the barge, who tortured him, his cabin-boy, beyond all human endurance. The fact that he could not bring himself to leave the gold watch on the corpse when he threw it into the water was in his view quite a separate matter. He had not killed the man to get his watch.

So the two young men walked up and down in the sunshine, with five, and eleven, years of jail behind them; in two days all would be over, and life would smile on them again.

‘Hey, Willi,’ said little Bruhn.

‘Yes, Emil?’

‘I asked you this before, in the toilets: why don’t you stay here? In this town, I mean. No, don’t answer yet; we might take a room together, it would be cheaper. And if you don’t get a job at once, you could cook and wash and do the housework. I’ll be earning good money. And in the evenings we could smarten ourselves up and go out.’

‘But I must get a job, Emil. I couldn’t do your housework for ever.’

‘You’ll get a job all right. Just at the beginning, I meant. If you were stronger I would fix you up at the timber yard, but you’ll have to get some sort of clerk’s job for a start . . . The old man likes you, he’s sure to help.’

‘Oh, the governor? But he can’t do just what he likes. And, Emil, this is such a hole, warders around everywhere, and the lads on outside work, and there’s the prison always under your nose, and in three days the cops would all know where you’d come from. And there’d be talk, and the landlady would hear about it, and she’d give you notice . . . ’

‘But we’ll find a landlady that doesn’t mind.’

‘Yes, but even if we could she’d pile on the rent.’

‘I don’t think so, Willi, really I don’t think so. There are some. But I’ll try to get hold of a decent girl, not a tart, and marry, and have a shop of my own, and children . . .