Prince

Prince is a policeman whose importance to Mary Lamb / Amy Hide lies less in any account of his professional methods than in the moments when he opens a way out of confinement and offers her a place to remain. He gets her released, notices the connection she has made to another refuge, and later makes room for her in his home. At the story’s far edge, he appears again beside Amy, taking her hand and guiding her behind a door. The movement from custody to shelter to threshold makes him a recurring figure of passage, though the book leaves the full meaning of that final guidance uncertain.

Identity and Early Encounter

Prince first appears in the evidence here in a conversation with Mary Lamb that turns to murder and the question of moral character. He laughs, warns her not to try murder, and asks whether she is good or bad. The exchange does not explain the circumstances behind the subject or establish a verdict about Mary; instead, it places Prince in a brisk, probing relation to her, willing to raise the distinction between goodness and badness without resolving it. His tone combines levity with a question that will acquire greater weight as Mary’s life becomes entangled with violence, police attention, and uncertainty about who she is.

The larger danger surrounding Mary is made clear before Prince’s intervention. Sharon abandons her to Jock and Trev, who treat her as something to be valued, exchanged, and used. The narrator identifies the two men as criminals and remarks that police are never far behind criminals, while hoping Mary will not have to tangle with them. This warning gives Prince’s later role a pointed context: the police are introduced as part of the threatening orbit around Mary’s encounters, but Prince becomes the person who helps her escape a different form of confinement. The evidence does not show him investigating Jock and Trev, so his importance rests on the specific acts of assistance the narrative gives him.

Release from Confinement

After Alan’s death, Mary passes through several days of disorientation and institutional custody. She rides the Circle Line without getting anywhere, sleeps among other people, is taken in a van to a place where she must empty her pockets and bag, and spends a night shut in with a weeping woman. The next morning, a woman makes her undress and examines her; Mary does not know by what right. She is transported again and held among women whose cries fill the night. Her possessions are returned in a brown envelope, and she is given yellow pills that make the present recede. During this period she can walk in a garden or sit in a green room, but these limited movements do not amount to freedom.

Prince comes and gets her out. The account emphasizes the institutional force he overcomes: the people holding Mary have to let him in, and then have to let him take her away. It gives no detailed explanation of the legal or administrative process. Instead, the scene makes the change legible through a simple reversal of access: Mary has been shut in, while Prince is admitted and able to remove her. His intervention is decisive because it ends her immediate confinement, not because it restores her memory or resolves the circumstances of Alan’s death.

A Place to Go

At his office, Prince tells Mary that he has finally understood her style and notices that she has taken up smoking. She has learned to smoke over the preceding days under the tutelage of the people around her. The cigarette gives her hands and mouth something to do; the detail connects her changed habits to the unsettled period she has just endured, without suggesting that Prince has caused or directed that change. His remark registers how much of her conduct is new to him and how visibly she is improvising a self in the aftermath of custody.

When Prince later tells her that there is nowhere she can go, Mary produces a piece of paper and says that she does have somewhere. Prince recognizes that she has made the connection. Mary explains that someone told her she could telephone and go there at any time. The exchange shows him responding to her own initiative rather than supplying the destination himself: she has held onto a possible route, and he understands what the paper means. The passage does not identify the place in this exchange, but it makes the paper a practical sign that Mary’s options are not entirely exhausted.

Prince’s assistance develops into hospitality. He telephones to ask how Mary is, and she replies that she is very happy. Later, she tells him she is grateful but cannot stay forever, asking him to tell her when it is time to leave. Prince tells her to stay, then more quietly says to stick around and admits that it is nice to have a woman in the house. The qualification softens an otherwise direct invitation, but does not cancel it. Their arrangement is marked by mutual attention: Mary tells him about the details of her new life every evening, and she enjoys doing so; he listens and insists that she leave nothing out. His care here takes the form not of solving her past but of making space for her account of the present.

The Final Threshold

In the final sequence represented here, Prince addresses Mary as Amy. When she says that she is going to die, he answers that this is not strictly the case, takes her hand, and says it is time. He then tells her that there is one last thing to do: they must go and see someone. The change in name marks the scene’s shift from the Mary who has been moving through the city and relying on Prince’s shelter to Amy, the identity bound to the story’s buried past. The evidence does not explain Prince’s precise relation to this scene or identify the person they are going to see, so his words should not be treated as a complete explanation of what is happening.

Prince leads Amy through a damp, uneven interior, where he says there are only rats. He pulls a cord, bringing a bare purple bulb to life, and guides her through deeper shadows toward a door. When he says they are going behind it, Amy says she is tired; he answers that he knows. The sequence gives his familiar guiding gesture a new and more enigmatic form. Earlier, he secured Mary’s passage out of a place where she was held; now he leads Amy toward a hidden boundary without promising what lies beyond it.

Narrative Role

Prince’s appearances form a spare but consequential line through the narrative: a question about whether Mary is good or bad, her release from custody, the recognition of a possible place to go, the offer of a continuing home, and the final movement behind a door. The sequence joins practical help to unresolved identity. He can secure an immediate change in Mary’s circumstances and offer her the ordinary continuity of a home and conversation, but he does not erase the past or explain it away. At the end, his hand remains a point of contact as the story crosses into uncertainty. The book gives him the work of opening passages; it withholds a definitive account of where the last one leads.