Citizen

Prison Cell, Days After the 28th May

He sits on the cot with his back to the stone. The bandage on his side has bled through again. He doesn't call anyone.

Set up. That much is plain.

But when?

He goes back through it the way he'd go back through a job gone wrong. The docks. Sabini's first handshake. Kimber's table. The man with the tape measure in the prison, years ago, talking about what respectable men will pay for. Every step felt like his own. Every step was his own. He'd have sworn to it.

So where was the hand on his back?

He should have felt it. Not the hand. The floor.

A floor doesn't lie. Heat comes up through boards before anything goes. Fumes come before heat. He has walked into bank vaults with less warning and walked out again. He has smelled a copper's cheap tobacco through two closed doors. Forty years of noticing, and on the one night it mattered he stood in that room with a drink in his hand and noticed nothing.

Impossible.

Unless there was nothing to notice until it was too late. Unless whatever went up was sealed, and underneath, and nobody in that room knew there was an underneath at all.

He turns that over. It doesn't help.

They picked the place. The Harpies was theirs. So whoever did this knew where they'd be before they did — or knew the building better than the men who chose it.

Not one of theirs. Every one of theirs was in that room. He watched some of them stop moving.

Not one of the others either. The gentlemen from the West End walked in the same as his lot did — blind, armed, certain. Half of them are in the ground.

So a third man.

Somebody who wanted both sides in one room, and a floor under them that neither side had ever thought to look beneath.

Worth presses his palm flat against the stone wall, as if it might tell him something the floor didn't.

Who plays a game where he doesn't need to be at the table?

And how long had Worth been sitting at it, dealing cards, thinking the deck was his?

Keys in the lock.

Two guards. The older one leans on the doorframe.

“Your new room's ready. Warden's orders. Window, proper bed. You're moving.”

“No.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I'll stay here,” Worth says. “The writer is coming. I'll see him in this room.”

The guard looks round the cell, then back at him. “You'd rather this?”

“I'd rather this.”

A shrug. The door starts to close.

“The books,” Worth says. “From America. Have they come?”

The guard pauses with his hand on the door.

“Crate came in this morning. Heavy bugger.”

“Bring it here.”

The door closes. The key turns.

Worth sits back down on the cot and waits, one hand on his side, eyes on the floor.