The Peacock Cloak

and watched her, fascinated, uncomprehending, but full of tenderness, while she once more dried her eyes.
    “I’ll tell you something,” Jenny sniffled. “I’m going to have a good time in Jamaica, whatever old misery guts decides to do. I’m going to have a good time no matter what.”
    She smiled.
    “Is that an atomic truth do you reckon?”
    Richard laughed loudly.
    At the far end of the carriage someone else laughed too, but it was nothing to do with Richard or Jenny, nothing to do with anything present.
    “Thank you,” Jenny said again. “You really are very kind.”
    She had done with crying. She passed Richard his packet of tissues, smiled at him one more time, and pulled her goggles back down over her eyes.
    Richard settled into his seat, trying to avoid looking at Night Man, who he couldn’t help noticing was out there hovering over the dark fields like a giant owl, and staring gloomily in at him with its enormous fiery eyes. Gloomy old Night Man he could do without, but he felt he’d had a good day all the same.

Two Thieves

    Two thieves stood glumly at the railings of a ship, watching their destination slowly transform itself from a blemish on the horizon to a toy island with a single green papier-mâché hill and then, finally, to an actual place that was no longer ‘there’ but ‘here’. Dockhands waiting for the ropes, seagulls squabbling on the quay, weeds poking up between the flagstones: it would all be ‘here’ for a very long time to come, if this place’s reputation was anything to go by.
    “Oh crap,” muttered Pennyworth
    He was short, bald, fat and prone to sweat. His friend was slight and wiry, with a pockmarked face and shock of almost vertical ash blond hair that made him look a little like a toilet brush. Their full names were Penitence Worthiness Gestas II and Surefaith Solicitude Dismas III, but Pennyworth and Shoe were what they always called themselves.
    Shoe looked out at the settlement’s score or so of stone buildings, the vegetable gardens, the lighthouse. He looked down at the faces peering up from the quay, strangers, but soon to become all too familiar. He ran his hands through his spiky white hair and gave out a groan of despair.
    “Dear God, I swear I will die of boredom.”

    The police had ambushed their gang in a jeweller’s shop, acting on a tip-off from an informer. Three gang members were shot dead in the firefight. Another was wounded and died two streets away from loss of blood. But Shoe and Pennyworth were old hands and knew, or thought they did, when to play the game and when to throw in their hands. They’d surrendered themselves at once, expecting perhaps eight years in jail, with time off for not resisting arrest.
    But this time they’d got the calculation wrong, for when the panel of judges was reminded of their long records of extortion, pimpery, house-breaking, drug dealing and deceit, it decided the time had come for Last Resort.
    “ What? ” the two thieves bellowed in dismay.
    Up to that point they had been off-hand and nonchalant, acting as if the trial was a matter of indifference to them and they were keen to get on with more important business. Now they both leapt howling to their feet.
    “We never wanted to rob that shop in the first place!” protested Shoe. “We were set up!”
    “It’s not fair!” cried short, fat Pennyworth, “You let other people have another chance!”
    But the judges bowed to the court, and gathered up their robes, and filed out to their chambers.

    “Gentlemen,” said the voice of the ship’s captain over the pa system. “Please pick up your things and disembark.”
    A couple of dozen prisoners trudged down the gangplank onto the quay, some surly, some silent and alert, some trying to make light of their situation with jokes.
    “It doesn’t look such a bad place,” observed a tiny timid-looking little man, glancing anxiously at Shoe.
    And he was right. With its pleasant stone buildings, its blue sky and sea, its wheeling gulls, Last Resort looked more like a fishing village or holiday retreat than a penal settlement. Even the warders checking off their names on clipboards were informally dressed and could almost have been tour guides or couriers. For this wasn’t so much a place of punishment as a place of quarantine, a place where inveterate offenders could be sent indefinitely when they showed no sign of changing their ways, not for purposes of vengeance but to prevent them causing