?My parents visited all the time, of course, and Sean and Dec, and sometimes the aunts and uncles. Richard came once, but he was so upset that it just made both of us feel worse. He had got it into his head that the whole thing was somehow his fault, that if he had pushed me to come back to work then I would have recovered faster (not true, and I told him so) and, more confusedly, that if he hadn’t been so angry with me about the Gouger thing then I wouldn’t have stayed late at work that night and wouldn’t have crossed paths with the burglars, or wouldn’t have been awake to hear them, or something. That one obviously wasn’t true either, but it came close enough to what a part of me believed that I had a hard time with it, which of course upset Richard even more. After that he wrote me every month like clockwork—scene gossip, descriptions of new artists he had discovered, wistful asides about what lovely things I would have done for the exhibition of found-object sculpture—but he didn’t come back, and I was glad of it.
Leon wasn’t around; he had moved to Sweden, where he was working as a tour guide and from where he sent me postcards of national monuments with a few perky, meaningless lines scribbled on the backs. Melissa didn’t come either. She wrote me long, very sweet letters: lots of funny stories about the shop, like the ones she used to tell me when I was licking my wounds in my apartment; awful Megan the flatmate had finally managed to run her chichi café into the ground, which of course was everyone’s fault but hers, and now she was setting up as a life coach; Melissa had run into Sean and Audrey in town and their baby was completely adorable, the exact same laid-back expression as Sean, they couldn’t wait for me to meet him! In spite of the huge amounts of time and consideration and care that must have gone into the letters, there was something impersonal about them—they could equally well have been written to a classmate she hadn’t seen in ten years—and I wasn’t at all surprised when she mentioned (delicately, not making a big deal of it) that she was going to some concert with her boyfriend. I rewrote my answer half a dozen times, trying to make it clear with equal delicacy that I wasn’t angry, that I wanted her to have every happiness and while I wished with all my heart that I had been able to give it to her, now that that was impossible I hoped she could find it with someone else. Maybe I got the tone wrong, or maybe the new boyfriend was understandably not crazy about the idea of me; her letters didn’t stop but they got further apart, shorter, more impersonal, more like letters to some guy she had picked off a charity website. Still, I was one of the lucky ones. A lot of the guys, especially the ones who had been there for a decade or two, didn’t get letters or visitors at all.
Martin, of all people, came to see me too. I had been playing table tennis—there was a complicated, ferociously fought tournament that had been going on for something like six years—and when they told me I had a visitor I took for granted it was one of my parents. The sight of him—his back to the window of the visiting room, scanning the place like he was checking for contraband—stopped me in my tracks.
“Surprise,” he said. “Long time no see.”
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. My first thought was that he had come to beat me up. The visiting room had CCTV, but I wasn’t sure what to do if he suggested a walk in the grounds.
“You’re looking in fine fettle.” He eyed me up and down, taking his time. He had got older, lines deepening, jowls starting to sag. “Got your tooth fixed,” he said. “My taxes at work, hah?”
“I guess,” I said. He hadn’t moved from the window. Behind him, faraway birds looped across a gray sky; the lawn had the rich green glow of coming rain.
“Wouldn’t want you having any trouble getting the ladies, when you get out.”
I stayed silent. After a minute Martin let out a small hard laugh and pulled something out of a manila folder. “Got something for you to look at.”
He didn’t sit down, or hand it to me; instead he tossed it onto the coffee table and let me go after it. It was a sheet of card with two neat columns of photos, numbered 1 through 8.
“Any of those fellas ring a bell?”
They were all chubby guys somewhere in their mid-twenties, most of them with greasy little skanger fringes. “Who are they?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
I did my best: went through them carefully, one by one, but none of them looked even vaguely familiar. “I don’t recognize any of them,” I said. “Sorry.”
“But then you might not. What with that awful brain injury and all.”
“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic.
“Life’s a bitch,” Martin said. He threw me another sheet. “Have a go of that one.”
These guys were younger and skinnier and halfway down the page he hit me like a jolt from a live wire. Rush of sweat and sour-milk stench, I would’ve sworn it was there in the room with me, clamped over my face like a chloroform rag.
Martin was watching me, expressionless. “Yeah,” I said, after a moment. My voice was shaking, I couldn’t make it stop. “This guy.”
“Where do you know him from?”
“He was, he, he, he—” I took a deep breath; Martin waited. “He’s one of the men who broke into my apartment. This is the one who attacked me. Attacked me first. The one I fought with.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yeah.”
“There you go. Told you I close my cases.” Martin tossed me a pen—too suddenly, I flinched and sent it flying, had to fumble on the floor for it. “Write down what number you recognize, how you know him, sign it, date it, initial by his photo.”
“Who,” I said. I sat down in one of the armchairs—I was glad of the excuse. “Who is he?”
“Name’s Dean Colvin. Twenty. Unemployed.”
Which wasn’t what I meant, what I wanted to know, but I couldn’t work out how to ask— “How did you find him?”
Another sheet, just one photo this time. Gold watch and chain, the worn luster of the gold holding its calm old silence intact even against the harsh light and the glaring white background. Ornately curled initials, CRH.
“Recognize that?” Martin asked.
I said, “That’s my grandfather’s watch. That he left me.”
“The one that was robbed from your apartment.”
“Yeah.”
“Write that on the sheet. Sign it and date it.”
I started with that one; I didn’t want to look at the guy’s face again. This is a watch that my grandfather left to me. The pen wouldn’t stop skittering; my writing looked like a drunk’s.
“Deano says,” Martin said, “he won that off some guy in a game of cards, a year or two back. Doesn’t remember the guy’s name, of course. With your ID, we might be able to shoot that story down. Although”—shrug—“an ID from you isn’t worth all that much. What with everything.”
“How,” I said, again. “How did you get him?”
“Deano liked that watch. Made him feel posh, he says.” A glance at my worn T-shirt and faded jeans: Not that posh now. “So he never tried to pawn it or sell it—or we’d’ve had him years ago; just hung on to it. Only a couple of months back his flat got raided because his brother was dealing, and the lads spotted that yoke there on Deano’s bedside table. They thought it looked a bit out of place. Brought it in, ran it through the system, your file popped up.” With a tilt of his chin at the paper: “Having some trouble there?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“You’ll get the watch back. When we’re done with it. The rest of your stuff is well gone; they sold it straightaway.”
“So he was a, a criminal, in the end.” When Martin said nothing: “You said, back when it happened, I thought you said if he was one of the, the regulars, you’d know who—”
“I did, yeah. We would’ve. Deano’s got a few priors for fighting, minor stuff. Nothing for burglary.”
“Then,” I said. “Why me?”