Osama (21 page)

The silence that followed was broken only by the pained swearing of the guy with the ginger moustache. As he tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose, he staggered backwards through the door behind the counter and out of sight. The thin screw gave a nod to one of the ARU. They lowered their weapons and withdrew to the entrance.

‘Stand up.’

Joe stood.

‘Look, pal,’ the screw said. ‘In twenty minutes’ time you’ll either be in a cell or in the hospital wing. The duty nurse is six foot three and called Albert. Lovely bloke. Family man. It’s a very funny thing, but last time he had a wife-beater in there, another inmate managed to stab the little shit with a dirty needle while Albert’s back was turned. Cunt got a nice case of Hep C off of it. Now I might be wrong, but I reckon someone who just killed his missus could find Albert’s got his back turned on him, too . . .’

‘I didn’t kill her,’ Joe muttered, his voice hoarse.

‘Save it for the beak, pal. Now take the rest of your fucking clothes off before we give Albert something to ignore.’

Joe blinked stupidly up at him. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Clothes!’ barked the screw. ‘Off?! And don’t look at me like that. There’s plenty of faggots on the block, but
we’ve
all got WAGs to suck us off at home. Your arsehole’s safe on this side of the door . . .’

Joe stood up slowly. Without taking his gaze from the screw, and aware that everyone in the crowded room – the two guards, the thin screw, the four armed police by the door – were watching him, he stripped, then stood up straight.

‘All right, He-Man, turn round.’

Joe turned.

‘Squat.’

Joe didn’t move.

‘
Squat!
’

Joe squatted.

‘Cough.’

He did as he was told.

‘All right, you’re clean. Put your fucking trousers back on. Just so’s you know, we’ve got a nasty habit of asking you to do that whenever we feel like it. Remember that if you get tempted to keister anything . . .’

Joe pulled his jeans back on, then felt himself being yanked towards the counter. The guy with the bloody nose was still missing. Another screw, bald and thickset, had emerged from the room behind the counter. ‘Hand,’ he said, and pointed to the scanner. Joe stretched out his bloodstained hand. The guy grabbed him by the wrist and looked at his palm. He didn’t seem at all bothered by the gore, other than to say: ‘Too much blood. Won’t work. Give me the other one.’

The next thing Joe knew, his clean hand was palm downwards on the scanner bed, and a fluorescent white strip was moving from top to bottom under the glass. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

‘Biometric ID,’ the screw said proudly as he held up the webcam, looked at the screen and pressed the button. ‘Matches your palm print to your face. Course, clever bloke like you won’t be thinking of no funny business.’ He seemed to find this amusing, and grinned at the others.

The thin screw started talking. ‘My name’s Sowden,’ he said. ‘You call me guv and you do what I tell you. Trust me, sunshine, we’ve heard it all and seen it all. You want a quiet life, put your head down and do as you’re told.’

Joe had zoned out. Sowden continued talking – a list of rules and regulations, something about a lawyer and remand custody. His words barely registered.

The bald man handed Joe a bundle of beige clothes, then took a set of keys, walked round to the other side of the counter and opened up the heavy metal door. It was a good eight inches thick with two sets of internal locking bolts each at least three inches in diameter. Joe felt himself being nudged through the door.

He found himself in what felt like a cell – three metres by three, with an identical metal door on the opposite wall. The two prison guards and Sowden joined him, leaving the ARU in the reception area. The door clanged shut behind them. Joe heard the bolts closing. Thirty seconds passed before the second door opened. Another screw was there, his keys attached to his belt by a length of cord. Joe’s guards pushed him out into the corridor beyond, and the door was locked behind him.

This corridor had yellow-painted concrete walls and bright strip lighting. After fifteen metres it led to a second set of double security doors, then to another courtyard, half the size of a football pitch and surrounded by imposing brick buildings four storeys high. Even though it was still night, the sky was bathed in light – Joe had the sense that the whole exterior was lit by floodlights. Every window he could see had bars over it. He counted four prison guards circling the courtyard, each with a German shepherd on a lead. One of the dogs looked in his direction, its ears flattened. Its handler yanked its lead sharply and continued to circle the courtyard.

The building to which the guards led Joe was on the opposite side of the courtyard at his ten o’clock. This time they passed through a single security door, which Sowden carefully locked behind them. They were in a small annexe with a sign on the opposite wall: ‘Category A’.

‘You said remand,’ Joe muttered.

‘We’ve been advised you’re a flight risk. You’re under observation. Do yourself a favour and keep your head down.’ Joe opened his mouth to argue. He didn’t get the chance. ‘Give me any more trouble, fella, I’ll stick you with the fucking Irish. I reckon they’d make short work of a nice army lad like you. Trust me, mate, you’re better off with Hunter.’

Joe didn’t ask who Hunter was. He figured he’d find out soon enough.

The block Sowden and the two guards led him to consisted of three landings, each with a set of security bars at intervals of fifteen metres and lined with solid metal doors with shuttered peepholes every seven or eight metres on either side. Joe’s guards led him to the third door on the right of the ground-floor landing. One of them rapped on the door – three heavy thumps – then unlocked it.

‘In,’ said Sowden.

Joe entered: he had no other option. The cell door clanged shut behind him. He found himself in almost total darkness.

Silence.

In the corridor outside he heard the rattling of a set of security bars dissolve into nothing.

Silence again.

Joe realized his muscles were tense. He didn’t know who this guy Hunter was, or why he was here. But he
did
know that he couldn’t afford to display a moment of weakness in front of whatever fucking maniac he was banged up with. He expected Hunter to be in the bottom bunk – that, he knew, was where the dominant cellmate traditionally installed himself. Joe considered pulling him out and forcing him to the top – to show he didn’t intend to take any shit – but before he could do anything, there was a voice.

‘Ain’t
someone
been a bad boy?’ A nauseating sound, somewhere between a giggle and a snort.

Joe peered through the darkness, trying at once to see his cellmate and work out what his voice said about him. Hunter sounded older than Joe, probably in his fifties. London accent – east, not south. Probably white. He didn’t sound very hard. Quite the opposite. Almost effeminate, and it was clear he was already occupying the top bunk . . .

‘
Very
bad boy, to end up with old Hunter.’

Joe managed to pick out some dark shapes in the room. A table along the right-hand wall with a small TV on top. A set of bunk beds along the left. The outline of a window at the far end, about a metre square and with the shadows of six metal bars just visible. A toilet at the near end, with a tiny sink next to it; a wardrobe to his right. The cell smelled of bleach. Joe installed himself on the bottom bunk.

‘A bad, bad boy, to end up in here with me,’ the voice persisted. It had a sing-song lilt to it, the voice of a man doing what he could to sound like a child. Joe had a flashback of another voice, so far away but with the same rhythmic sing-song:
Amer-ee-can motherfucker. Amer-ee-can motherfucker
. . .

‘You speak again,’ Joe said, his voice level, ‘I’ll break every bone in your fucking body.’

His cellmate sniggered, then fell silent. Five minutes later Joe heard the deep breathing of sleep.

As for Joe, it still didn’t matter if he kept his eyes open or closed. Either way, he relived the night’s events, over and over, like a film loop in his head. Like a knife being stabbed into his own guts, withdrawn and then thrust in again.

Just as he had done to Caitlin.

He could hardly bear to think of it, and yet he couldn’t think of anything else.

And, in another corner of his brain, questions. The sortie through the minefield that had killed Ricky: was that just an accident, or had they been manoeuvred into position? But manoeuvred by who? The Americans? Was the car that had tried to run him over anything to do with it? The driver hadn’t
looked
American. Middle Eastern, if anything. And the intruders in the SOCO suits, who’d tried to make it look as if he’d killed Caitlin before committing suicide. Who were they? How had they tracked him down? No one knew he was there.

It all led back to that night in Abbottabad. He was sure of it. And if whoever was behind all this had had their way, Conor would be dead too.

The sick, distraught, unreal feeling that was running through his body grew stronger. He didn’t give a
fuck
what the Yanks were trying to hide. As far as he was concerned they could have nuked the compound and good fucking riddance.

But who could he tell? Who would listen? He was surrounded by the impenetrable walls of a Cat A prison. There wasn’t a single person in the world that he could trust.

A chill fear started to descend on him. He counter-attacked with thoughts of revenge.

Somehow, he told himself, someone was going to pay.

It was not the grey light of morning seeping through the barred window of the cell that roused Joe from his open-eyed trance, nor was it the rustling and heavy breathing from the top bunk. It was the rattling noise from the corridor outside and the subsequent scrapes and shouts of the prison population waking up. He turned onto his side and faced the wall. A minute later the overhead rustling stopped and he was aware of his cellmate getting ready to climb down. Joe slowly turned. He took in the details of the cell. The textured beige tiles on the floor that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the changing rooms of a public swimming pool. The exposed pipes running along the bottom of the wall opposite, their grey paint peeling. The graffiti scribbled on the wall, detailing the names of inmates past and present who were cocksuckers, motherfuckers and cunts.

His cellmate climbed down and stood beside him. He was in his fifties. He wasn’t much more than five foot tall, and had a pasty, pallid, jowly face with thin, moist lips that looked like they were permanently on the edge of laughter. He wore brown trousers and an open-necked shirt, presumably the prison uniform. One of the buttons was missing, and the hair on his fat stomach protruded through the gap. His thin, greying hair was combed over to make it look thicker, and he wore unfashionable, black-rimmed glasses, with lenses so thick that they slightly distorted his eyes. A smell wafted off the man: a musty, pungent, unwashed odour. The wall behind him was covered with magazine centrefolds. Not the beaver shots Joe was used to in military installations where the tits-only rule was regularly disobeyed, but brightly coloured pictures of pop-star kids not much older than Conor. Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. Joe felt sick. He looked back at the guy. He had two thin scars just below his jugular, raw enough for Joe to deduce that they had been recently sustained.

‘They ain’t given me a little friend for ages,’ said the man.

His eyes lingered on Joe’s torso for a few seconds, before noticing his unfriendly look. But it didn’t seem to worry him much. He smiled at Joe and walked over to the toilet at the end of the bed. Joe donned his khaki shirt to the sound of his cellmate pissing thunderously against the steel pan.

‘Hunter’s the name,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Four years. Won’t bother you with the details. Sure you’ll find out. The ladies here do love a little gossip.’ He sniggered again before turning around with his dick still on show, licking his lips slightly, then zipping up his fly and continuing. ‘So, what’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?’

Something exploded inside Joe.

The force with which he grabbed Hunter and thrust him up against the door was enough to make the door itself echo. The smarminess instantly disappeared from Hunter’s flabby face. He looked like he might cry. ‘You even
speak
to me,’ Joe breathed, ‘I’ll see to it that you get another pair of scars on the other side of your neck, only these ones won’t heal up so pretty. Got it?’

Hunter nodded. When Joe let go of him, he didn’t move, but stared at him, a frightened rabbit.

There was the sound of the door being unlocked. It opened a couple of inches. Hunter looked like he was about to say something, but then he thought better of it. He disappeared from the cell, leaving the door ajar. Joe kicked it closed, then stood at the sink. He turned on the tap and a trickle of scalding water ran out.

Caitlin’s blood had dried to his hands. He had nothing to scrub it off apart from the hot water and his own fingernails. He started slowly, scraping hard at his palm and the back of his hand. But the stain refused to budge. After two minutes he was soaping his skin in a kind of frenzy. Pink water ran into the steel sink – he watched it circling down the plughole – but his skin remained stained pink. He couldn’t get it off, and as he rubbed harder he started to feel dizzy.