It was the blonde he didn’t like. He didn’t trust her.

It wasn’t just because she’d got the job instead of him. It was something else: he knew a trickster when he saw one. He followed her on the ship, but she swung round sometimes, sharp, as if she knew he was on her trail. And she didn’t drop clues, like Miss Benson did. He had a special page for her in his notebook and, so far, all it said was Enid Pretty. He wasn’t even convinced that was her real name.

Mundic had managed to stay a few days in his hiding place on the RMS Orion. No food, but he was used to that—in Burma, he’d survived weeks on a bit of rice, and not white rice but yellow stuff that was crawling with weevils. On the Orion, if he’d needed water, he’d crept out from the tarp and taken it from a tap. But then a couple of boilermen found him, and he’d thought it was over.

“Hey! Hey!” He’d tried to run, but he hadn’t a chance. He was still weak, even after five years of freedom. They’d come after him and pulled him back. “You could go to prison for this.”

There was no point in fighting. He’d thrown a punch but it barely landed. He reckoned one of the chaps had been a POW. It was a thing that had happened since the war: you knew who’d been one, and who hadn’t. And the chaps who hadn’t got caught looked down on the ones who had, like they weren’t real men. That was another thing that had happened since the war.

The two boilermen had walked away to talk it over. He’d heard them arguing about what to do. One said they’d have to turn him in. But the older chap said, “No. I’m not going to do that. Look at him. You’ve heard about the camps. Haven’t you? You’ve heard how many of them died? It’s a crime the way they’ve been left to fend for themselves.” The one who wanted to turn him in had left, and the other had come over and said Mundic would be okay, no one would rat on him, but he’d need to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. And he held out his hands as he said it, like Mundic was a cornered dog.

After that, the boilerman left him bits of food, and when Mundic asked for soap and a razor, he fetched those as well so Mundic could shave his head. A clean shirt. Leftovers from the galley. Some nights they’d played cards. They didn’t talk. Then the boilerman said he knew of an empty cabin, and why didn’t Mundic sleep there? If he was careful, no one would know. So Mundic moved into the free cabin and it had a little bed and a desk, and he put his notebook and the map of New Caledonia on the desk. When the cleaners came, he said he was a private detective working undercover, so he didn’t want any trouble, and the man with the mop said, “Yes, sir,” like he was important.

It was the first time he’d ever had a room of his own. As a kid he’d shared with his mother, just sleeping on the other side of the bed, though when he got too big, she’d moved to the chair. Sometimes in the camp, he’d see a man huddled in a corner, not moving, and he’d say to himself the man wasn’t dead, it was his mother, curled up in the chair, and it would be daytime soon, and she’d be passing him a lit cigarette, saying, “Wake up, sonny. It’s another day.” It got easier, if he cut off from things like that.

After a couple of weeks on the ship, Mundic felt stronger. He left the cabin when it was safe and stole a haversack, and another time he took a yellow towel, just as a souvenir, and a Panama hat and a pair of sunglasses, and he began to collect things to take with him to New Caledonia. He wrote about it in his notebook, and he listed what he ate, too, and when the ship stopped at Aden, he took a boat ashore to keep his eye on the blonde. She made her way straight to the Royal Hotel and rushed up the steps, as if she were a proper guest, and he watched her taking up a bundle of British newspapers and skimming through them, page by page, like she was hunting for something. After that, she sat for a while deep in thought until the headwaiter asked if she would care to come this way and escorted her off the premises. Then she made her way to a market and bought a cheap radio, and he thought, Something fishy’s going on here, but he didn’t know what, so he got out his notebook. But she must have given him the slip because he didn’t know where he was: he was just in this alley all on his own, and hundreds of faces were staring out at him, and hands were poking through curtains, and he began to run but he couldn’t get away, because all he could see in his mind were the faces of the men in the camp at Songkurai, and he couldn’t tell anymore. He couldn’t tell if he was still in the camp, or if he was free, until he took out his passport and looked and looked at it and said to himself he was a free man. He was free.

But today was a good day. He went on deck and he couldn’t believe his luck because Miss Benson was asleep in a deck chair, and there wasn’t a sign of the blonde. He watched from the shadows where she couldn’t see him. It was like he was so empty there wasn’t a thought or feeling inside him, and a strange peace came over him, and he wished he could have spent his whole life like that.

He stayed, for a long time, just watching.