The Damnation Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

and though they were long enough to be double-knotted he never had the patience to work at complicated knots. He liked a simple bow. When you needed to untie a bow you pulled and behold-like magic-it was gone.
    “Is that right?” Toy asked again.
    “Yes; that’s right,” Marty told him. He’d got so far; why not finish the story? “There were four of us. And two guns. We tried to take a security van. Things got out of hand.” He glanced up from his shoes; Toy was watching intently. “The driver was shot in the stomach. He died later. It’s all in the file, isn’t it?” Toy nodded. “And about the van? Is that in the file too?” Toy didn’t reply. “It was empty,” Marty said. “We had it wrong from the beginning. The fucking thing was empty.”
    “And the debts?”
    “Huh?”
    “Your debts to McNamara. They’re still outstanding?”
    The man was really beginning to get on Marty’s nerves. What did Toy care if he owed a few grand here and there? This was just sympathetic camouflage, so that he could make a dignified exit.
    “Answer Mr. Toy, Strauss,” Somervale said.
    “What’s it to you?”
    “Interest,” said Toy, frankly.
    “I see.”
    Sod his interest, Marty thought, he could choke on it. They’d had as much of a confessional as they were going to get.
    “Can I go now?” he said.
    He looked up. Not at Toy but at Somervale, who was smirking behind his cigarette smoke, well satisfied that the interview had been a disaster.
    “I think so, Strauss,” he said. “As long as Mr. Toy doesn’t have any more questions.”
    “No,” said Toy, the voice dead. “No; I’m well satisfied.”
    Marty stood up, still avoiding Toy’s eyes. The small room was full of ugly sounds. The chair’s heels scraping on the floor, the rasp of Somervale’s smoker’s cough. Toy was shunting away his notes. It was all over.
    Somervale said: “You can go.”
    “I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Mr. Strauss,” Toy said to Marty’s back as he reached the door, and Marty turned around without thinking to see the other man smiling at him, his hand extended to be shaken. I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Mr. Strauss.
    Marty nodded and shook hands.
    “Thank you for your time,” Toy said.
    Marty closed the door behind him and made his way back to his cell, escorted by Priestley, the landing officer. They said nothing.
    Marty watched the birds swooping in the roof of the building, alighting on the landing rails for tidbits. They came and they went when it suited them, finding niches to nest in, taking their sovereignty for granted. He envied them nothing. Or if he did, now wasn’t the time to admit to it.
     

Chapter 6
     
    T hirteen days passed, and there was no further word from either Toy or Somervale. Not that Marty was truly expecting any. The chance had been lost; he’d almost stage-managed its final moments with his refusal to talk about McNamara. That way he had expected to nip any trial by hope in the bud. In that, he’d failed. No matter how he tried to forget the interview with Toy, he couldn’t. The encounter had thrown him badly off-balance, and his instability was as distressing as its cause. He thought he had learned the art of indifference by now, the same way that children learned that hot water scalds: by painful experience.
    He’d had plenty of that. During the first twelve months of his sentence he’d fought against everything and everyone he’d encountered. He’d made no friends that year, nor the least impression on the system; all he’d earned for his troubles were bruises and bad times. In the second year, chastened by defeat, he’d gone underground with his private war; he’d taken up weight training and boxing, and concentrated on the challenge of building and maintaining a body that would serve him when the time for retribution came round. But in the middle of the third year, loneliness had intervened: an ache that no amount of self-inflicted punishment (muscles driven to the pain