Читать книгу Catching the Sun - Tony Parsons - Страница 15

‘Thomas Arthur Finn,’ said the young cop, and I didn’t get it at first, partly because my name sounded so strange in his mouth, and partly because of that middle name, hated and never used but there in my passport, and there on the computer printout the young policeman read from, the name of my father. About the only thing the bastard ever gave me, apart from eczema.

‘Here,’ I said.

Jesse’s sleeping head was resting on my shoulder. I edged away without waking him and got up, every limb stiff and aching. I suppose I must have slept at some point because the day had drifted by, the sun shifting across the small high windows at the top of the communal cell, and it was fading fast now as the island prepared for another spectacular sunset.

I picked my way through the bodies, most of them stuck somewhere between sleeping and waking, and I thought of the last time I had seen my dad. I was eleven, and he was leaving us for his new life with a woman a few doors down. She was leaving her home too. ‘You’ll understand one day,’ my father had told me, but by now I couldn’t even remember his face, and I still didn’t understand, and I knew I never would, and I knew I would never want to.

I followed the cop down a corridor to a small, clean room with a desk and a policeman sitting behind it. The cop behind the desk was the one who I had first seen standing alone on the balcony, staring at the infinity pool. I had thought he was just some young kid, but now I saw there were the three stripes of a sergeant on the grey sleeve of his uniform. He ran his pen down the list of names in front of him and yawned. There were other papers on the desk, many of them with the Wild Palm logo.