“Are you criticising the police?” said the female cop, folding her arms as she leaned back in her chair and stared at Clare. “You’re well within your rights to make a complaint, if it bothers you, what they did.”

Clare frowned. “Really?”

The male cop snorted with laughter. “Of course not. You waved goodbye to your rights as soon as you decided to get involved with another woman’s husband. I’ll put a note in your file that says you’re uncooperative.” He smirked. “Where did you live before?” He bent his head, and checked the ring binder again. “Oh, yes, a studio flat, for four adults… and a baby. I’m sure that felt very crowded. Very small. Don’t worry. It’ll seem like a mansion, compared to the accommodation you’ll get in the Manylove Quarter. We’ll see to it that you get one of the more, uh… run-down flats. In one of the worse areas.” He grinned at Clare, showing her all his stained teeth. “Thank you very much for your “cooperation,” Mrs Stratton. You’ll be going back to your cell for a little while. Not quite sure how long. Interview terminated at… seven thirty-eight a.m.”

The humid heat lay over the sagging rooftops like a thick damp quilt. High on the hill over the Free City of Eptonhay, Clare Stratton, her hands chapped and crabbed, twisted steaming water out of thin white linen.

She brushed a single sweaty strand of reddish brown hair out of her eyes and sighed. Out of her flat's single window, she could see the wall that ran around the quarter to which she was confined. She could see the wall, with its ramshackle plastered bricks and ragged graffiti, and, on the other side of the wall, she could see the Free City below.

She had been a seamstress once. No longer. Now she was a laundress, whose flat wore the carbolic-soap head-chord and the rising-damp heart-chord of misery's perfume. Now she was a laundress, who spent her days hunched over a tub of boiling water, up to her elbows in the washing her neighbours paid her a pittance to take care of. She'd been happy once. Free. No longer.

Clare lifted the basket of clean washing over to the window and began to peg it out to dry. The washing line ran across the street, from the front wall of her building to the front wall of the one opposite. Voluminous sheets, white and cream and grey and beige, blustered in the blistering sun. Clare leaned on the window sill and breathed deeply, searching for fresh air like the roots of a cactus search for water in the desert.

Down in the street, the July sun lazed on the cracked concrete pavements and smoked cigarettes that smelled of the dirty grey river: decomposing fish heads and rotting meat that washed by in sludgy droves, bobbing in time, with the rattling slag lorries running to and from the mine.

Richard and Paul had been sent to work at the mine when the three of them had first arrived in the Manylove Quarter. They'd been sent to work at the mine almost as soon as they'd climbed out of the covered truck that had wheezed its way up the hill's winding road.

Sometimes, Clare thought about the fact that their relationship, the whole reason they'd been sent to the quarter, had died the day of the rock-fall. For a while afterwards she'd wondered if she'd be released, sent back to live in the Free City, now that she was on her own. For a while afterwards she'd wondered if that would ease even a drop of her pain.

But a year had passed, and another year had passed, and now she was sure there was no hope for her either. Now she was sure that she'd die here.

Clare shut her eyes against the pain of that thought and sighed again.