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Two nights later he used his sharp toothbrush to prize the board away from his window. The mortar around the bars was softer than that in the walls and, by the time the sky started to lighten, he had exposed two inches at the base of one of the bars. It was tampering that would have been spotted almost immediately in any cell in the prison. Any cell, that is, that had not had its window boarded up on the express orders of Dr. Leaver. In two years nobody had ever removed the board and Avery saw no reason why they would start now.

Avery did not place any great faith in his own plans. He understood that disappointment was proportionate to the gulf between expectation and realization. He didn’t like to hope—didn’t even like the word, which implied some sort of helpless kowtowing to the vagaries of fate. He preferred to call what he had “options” and, as his desire for escape grew into a burning need, he took pains to leave no option unexplored.

Always one to stay in his cell when he was not required to shower or eat, Avery now started to lean on the railing opposite his door, like the scum did, to observe prison life. Of course, the scum smoked while they did this and Avery didn’t. Filthy habit. He saw their yellow-stained fingers and shuddered. God knows what their toilet habits were like.

Avery wished he hadn’t thought of that. It made the bile rise in his throat. The thought of being dirty made him shiver, but actual bodily functions and fluids had the power to make him clammy and nauseous, and the feeling of nausea—with its implicit threat of vomiting—could force him into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He breathed deeply and focused on the man nearest to him, who happened to be Sean Ellis—he of the hot wife and the stolen photos.

Avery glanced at Ellis’s fingers and found them a healthy pink, so—more to allay his own nausea than anything else—he nodded briefly at the man and raised his eyebrows in a neutral greeting.

“All right,” Ellis returned, indicating to Avery that he was new enough to Longmoor not to know what he had done, or bad enough not to care. Avery hoped it was the latter; he was mightily sick of having stupid, common criminals look at him as if he was shit on their shoes. He didn’t want or need their friendship but—even after eighteen years—he was still genuinely uncertain as to why some killers got respect in prison while he was vilified. It fed his feeling of having been cheated out of what should have been his due—awe in deference to his crimes at the very least.

Ellis was certainly new to the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit. Avery wondered idly what he had done which required that he be protected but he also knew that information would seep out eventually—however hard a nonce or a snitch tried to keep it to themselves.

“Smoke?” offered Avery.

“Nah, don’t smoke. Thanks.”

Avery appraised Ellis quickly. He was a tall, powerfully built man with the squashed nose of a gangster but careful brown eyes with incongruously lush lashes. Avery did not know or care that they were the last eyes two bank tellers had ever looked into. He only knew that his first attempt for several years to speak to a fellow con as an equal had started rather well.

“Dirty habit.” He shrugged. “Only keep them to be sociable.” It was the truth. Three days after seeing SL’s photograph, Avery had bought half a pack of Bensons from Andy Ralph, just in case he needed a way into the kind of conversation he was now embarking on with Sean Ellis.

Ellis nodded, then turned his idle attention back to the game of Ping-Pong clattering on three floors below them, watched through a crisscross of safety netting designed to thwart the long drop of murder or suicide.

Under normal circumstances, Avery would have been happy to end the interaction right there. He didn’t crave company or conversation. But now he had a purpose, he knew he needed to make more effort.

And suddenly it was an effort. For what seemed like forever, Avery scoured his brain for an opening gambit that would not seem forced. Or suspicious. Or queer. Finally Arnold Avery—serial killer, outsider, freak of nature, observer of no rules but his own—turned his face to the dirty skylights that let grudging daylight into the wing and observed like a commuter: “Fucking awful weather.”

Ellis cocked an eyebrow at him and then glanced upwards, bemused by the observation. “To be out in,” quipped Avery, breaking into a smile.

Ellis got it, thank god, and snorted a small laugh. “Lucky we’re in here, then,” he said, and Avery grinned some more to let Ellis take ownership of the joke. The great ox.

Ellis was new on the block. He might know what to do with the impression of a key made in soap. He might not. But he might.

“Arnold,” he offered, extending his right hand like a lawyer at a conference.

“Sean,” said Ellis, his big, rough hand squeezing Avery’s smaller one. Avery didn’t like that—being made to feel small and weak—but he smiled through it.