'I wouldn't worry about it now,' said the warder. 'It's the gallows would put me in a sweat if I were in your shoes.'

'I have every faith in the fairness of the court,' said the Bishop.

'They haven't been used for twenty years,' continued the warder. 'They're not safe.'

'No?' queried the Bishop. 'Is that unusual?'

'They've got the death watch beetle. You'd be lucky to get up the steps alive, if you ask me,' said the warder and shuffled off down the passage to let Luitenant Verkramp and Konstabel Els into Bottom. The interrogation was about to begin.

In spite of the fact that he was still feeling the effects of his injuries, Luitenant Verkramp was determined to apply the standard South African technique to the prisoner.

'I'll butter him up,' he told Konstabel Els, 'and make him feel I'm sympathetic and you can be the hard man and threaten him.'

'Can I use the electric-shock machine?' Els asked eagerly.

'He's too important,' said Verkramp, 'and you're not to beat him up too much either.'

'What are we going to do then?' said Els, who couldn't imagine getting a confession out of an innocent man without some violence.

'Keep him awake until he's ready to drop. I've never known it to fail.'

Luitenant Verkramp seated himself behind the desk and ordering the prisoner to be brought in, assumed what he supposed to be an air of sympathetic understanding. To the Bishop, when he entered the room, the expression on the Luitenant's face suggested only a pained and vicious hostility. In the hours that followed, this first impression proved if anything to have been over-optimistic. Luitenant Verkramp's attempts at sympathetic understanding inspired in the Bishop the conviction that he was locked alone in a room with a sadistic homosexual suffering from an overdose of several powerful hallucinatory drugs. Certainly nothing else could explain the overtures the Luitenant was making nor the distorted version of his own life which Verkramp insisted he corroborate. Everything the Bishop imagined he had done took on an entirely contrary character as seen through the eyes of Verkramp.

He had not for instance been an undergraduate in Cambridge studying theology. He had, he learnt, been indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist theory by a man whom he had previously imagined to be a leading Anglo-Catholic professor, but who had apparently been a Moscow-trained theoretician. As the hours dragged by the Bishop's faint hold on reality grew fainter. The illusions he had nourished for a lifetime slipped away and were replaced by the new certitudes his deranged interrogator insisted he subscribe to.

By the time they had arrived at the events of the previous day, the Bishop, who had eaten nothing for thirty-six hours, and who had been standing with his hands above his head for six, was prepared to admit to murdering the entire South African Police force, if doing so would allow him to sit down for five minutes.

'I shot them with a multi-barrelled rocket launcher supplied by the Chinese consul in Dar-es-Salaam,' he repeated slowly while Verkramp copied the admission down.

'Good,' said the Luitenant finally, 'that seems pretty conclusive.'

'I'm glad to hear it. Now if you don't mind I would like time to think about my future,' the Bishop said.

'I think you can safely leave that to us,' said the Luitenant. 'There's just one more matter I want to get straightened out. Why did you shoot your sister's cook?'

'I discovered he was a CIA agent,' said the Bishop, who by this time knew the lines along which Verkramp's mind was working. He had long since discovered that there was no point in arguing with the man, and since Verkramp's imagination had evidently been nurtured on spy-thrillers, this seemed the sort of explanation he would swallow.

'Oh, was he?' said Verkramp, and made a mental note to investigate the cooks of Piemburg to discover how many more were in the pay of the Americans.

By the time Verkramp had finished with him, the Bishop had decided that his only hope of escaping execution on the scaffold reserved for him by his grandfather lay in concocting a confession so absurd that it would either be thrown out of court by the judge, or allow him to plead insanity. 'I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,' he said to himself when Els came to take over the interrogation and wondered what new crimes he could add to the list he had already agreed to. Konstabel Els was glad to suggest some.

'I hear you want us to go around marrying kaffirs,' Els began. He knew he was supposed to be questioning a Communist and the only thing he knew about Communists was that they wanted white people to marry blacks.

'I can't remember having advocated it in public,' the Bishop said cautiously.

'I don't suppose you would in public,' said Els, whose own advocacy of sexual intercourse with blacks had always been undertaken in strictest privacy. 'You'd get arrested for it.'

The Bishop was puzzled. 'For what?' he asked.

'For advocating a black woman in public. What about in private?'

'It's true I have given the matter some thought.'

'Come on, admit it. You haven't just thought about it. You have done it too.'

The Bishop couldn't see much harm in admitting it. 'Well, once or twice I have raised the matter. I've brought it up at meetings of the parish council.'

'At meetings, eh?' said Els. 'Sort of group gropes?'

'I suppose you could put it that way,' said the Bishop who had never heard the expression before.

Els leered at him. 'I suppose you put it other ways too?'

'I put it to them straight, man to man,' said the Bishop, wondering what all this had to do with murdering policemen.

Konstabel Els had difficulty imagining how you could put it man to man and call it straight at the same time.

'I didn't beat about the bush.'

'I don't suppose you'd have to with men,' Els agreed.

'Oh, there were women present too,' said the Bishop. 'It's the sort of question where a woman's viewpoint often helps.'

'You can say that again.'

'Funnily enough, I found the women more receptive to the idea than the men.'

'I should think you would.'

'Of course, it's not something most people will accept at one go. I put it to them gradually, but on the whole they could see there was something to be said for it.'

'Hell,' said Els, 'you must have had some parties.'

'I hope I'm not boring you,' the Bishop said hopefully.

'I'm never bored by sex,' said Els.

'Do you mind if I take a seat?' the Bishop said on the spur of the moment, taking advantage of Els' evident interest.

'Help yourself.' Els couldn't get enough of the Bishop's tales of group gropes and similar perversions.

'Now then,' said the Bishop, when he was seated, 'where was I?'

'You were saying how the women liked it in the tail,' said Els.

'Was I really?' said the Bishop. 'How extraordinary. I had no idea.'

As the night wore on, Konstabel Els sat rapt in admiration for the prisoner. Here at last, was a man after his own heart, a man for whom there was no shame, no remorse, no regret, only a dedication to lust unequalled in Els' experience.

The difficulty for the Bishop was that his imagination was hardly adequate for the task Els set it. Faced with such rapacious curiosity, he stuck to his calling and Els listened fascinated to descriptions of midnight orgies involving chasubles and albs. Among the other invaluable pieces of information that the Konstabel picked up there were three facts which were particularly damning. The Bishop, he learned, wore a frock, possessed a rubric and owned a biretta.

'What the hell is a rubric?' Kommandant van Heerden asked him in the morning when he read the Bishop's signed confession.