Osama (23 page)

‘I saw you talking to Finch.’ Hunter’s voice was slightly strained, as if he wanted to distract Joe from what was going on outside. Joe closed the window – the noise deadened slightly – and turned back to him.

‘Who’s Finch?’ he demanded.

‘He’s from Northern Ireland.’

Joe remembered the man in the breakfast queue.

‘Give you a word of advice for free?’ said Hunter.

‘What?’

‘Finch thinks he’s top dog. Least, he wants other people to think that. But he can’t touch Hennessey. Don’t matter
where
he is . . .’

‘Who the fuck’s Hennessey?’

‘He’s in the Seg Wing,’ Hunter said. ‘Solitary. Often is. Reckon he prefers it that way. Don’t stop him running the place.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You think the screws are in charge here?’ Hunter snorted dismissively. ‘That’s bullshit.
Hennessey’s
in charge. Ain’t afraid of nothing or nobody. Up to his eyes in drugs and killings when he was on the outside. Done three murders since he’s been banged up. Knows he ain’t never getting out.’

‘Who did he kill?’

‘Scoobies wouldn’t give him his own cell up in Hull when he got banged up. Bumped his cellmate off first night he was in. Smashed the bloke’s skull against the wall, that’s what I heard. Done it another two times before they give him his own room. Fucking stupid, some of these screws, if you ask me. Anyway, what Hennessey says goes. Even the scoobies do what he tells them, and there ain’t a single inmate won’t follow his orders. Except Finch and his crew, of course. But they’ll learn. He’s a clever bastard, Hennessey, on top of everything else. Sly. Knows how to make things work for himself.’

Another pause. Hunter started examining his fingernails.

‘Does he get visitors?’ The more information Joe could get on this Hennessey, the better.

‘Why you so interested?’

Joe gave him a dangerous look.

‘All right, all right,’ Hunter said quickly. ‘There’s a woman, least that’s what I heard. Comes in once a month. Scoobies let them hook up, dunno where.’

‘Know her name?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone else get the same treatment?’

Hunter shook his head. ‘Special privileges. Word is, the only thing that’s stopping Hennessey’s lot rioting is his say-so. Take away his privileges . . .’ He made a sign with his hands like a bomb going off. ‘Like I say, clever bastard. Knows how to fix things. Course,’ he added quietly, ‘it’s because of Hennessey that I’m not in the Seg Wing with the others.’

‘What others?’

‘The others that are . . . in here for the same as me.’

‘The sex cases?’

Another sniff. ‘If that’s what you want to call us. Got the scoobies in his pocket, ain’t he? Knows he’ll never get us all out into the general prison population, so he’s doing us one by one. Last fella they done in the showers. Cut him to ribbons, his dick and all. Broke both his arms. Didn’t kill him, though. Dunno why. Young lad. Nice fella.’ He sniffed again. ‘I’m next. They already had a go, didn’t they?’

‘The train tracks on your neck?’

‘You been eyeing me up?’

Joe immediately stepped forward and grabbed the disgusting little nonce by his hair. Hunter squealed like a frightened girl. ‘What did they use?’ Joe hissed.

‘A shiv.’

‘What the fuck’s a shiv?’

‘A weapon,’ the nonce babbled. ‘Home-made. The block’s full of them . . .’

Joe let go of his hair in disgust. ‘How did they make it?’ he demanded.

‘The one that done me? I think it was a toothbrush they used. Two razor blades superglued to the end.’ Hunter scrambled up into a kneeling position, then made a swiping gesture with his right hand. His eye burned brightly as he did it, but when his imaginary slice was complete, he shuddered and put his fingers to his neck, as though reliving the pain. ‘But they done me with a power cord off the telly once, too. Blades tied to it.’ He made a whipping gesture to explain how that worked. A frown crossed his face. ‘Reckon they’re playing with me. You know, like cats and mice.’

‘You got a shiv of your own?’

Hunter shook his head timidly. ‘The scoobies don’t want me to defend myself,’ he said. ‘They search me more than the others.’ But Joe had immediately noticed the way his eyes darted towards the wall behind him. He looked over his shoulder, to see Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus grinning back. Joe marched over to the posters and was about to rip them from the wall, when Hunter spoke quietly.

‘Don’t do that, fella . . .’

Joe’s hand stopped inches from the top of Justin Bieber’s gay haircut. Hunter looked anxiously over at the locked door, then carefully peeled back the Blu-tack fixing the bottom corner of Miley Cyrus to the wall so that Joe could see the back of the poster. There were two strips of masking tape, each about two inches long, stuck to the shiny paper. Underneath each strip, Joe could see the outline of a razor blade. ‘I won’t go to the showers,’ he admitted. ‘I wash in here. Reckon this is where they’ll try to do me, when the time comes.’

Hunter lowered the poster and stuck the Blu-tack to the wall again. He waddled back to his ladder and climbed up into the top bunk. His lips spread, fat and toad-like, as he watched Joe return to his own bunk.

‘Do the other inmates see newspapers?’ Joe said.

‘Course. If they pay for them. What d’you want, Page 3?’

Joe didn’t answer. All he really wanted was to find out if the rest of the prison population had access to the article about him. It seemed they did.

‘There’s blow,’ said Hunter. He sounded desperate, as if he was trying to get on Joe’s good side. ‘If you know where to get it . . .’

But Joe didn’t want drugs, he didn’t want tobacco, and he didn’t want anything to do with the man he was sharing a room with. If Hennessey’s boys felt the need to do Hunter, they were welcome to him. All Joe wanted was to get out of this stinking, scum-infested shithole. Or, failing that, to protect himself.

He had access to two razor blades and nothing else.

It wasn’t much, but it would be enough.

Ten

It had been a good shift, Eva Buckley thought to herself. Tiring, but good.

She’d been on since midnight, working from her desk in Scotland Yard. Things had been quiet. She’d not been called anywhere or hassled by anyone. For a lowly, overworked DI such as herself, that was unusual. But it had meant she could spend the night dealing with the paperwork that had been piling up over the past couple of weeks. And anyway, she found herself less inclined to put herself on the front line these days. Maybe it was the first sign of growing old. Now she was winding down with a latte and a blueberry muffin in Starbucks at Victoria Station. At least that was the idea. But now the latte was cold, the muffin uneaten, and there was no doubt about it: her day had just taken a turn for the worse.

She read the article in
The Times
for the third time, grinding her molars absent-mindedly, as was her habit, and then her eyes returned to the picture of the fresh-faced young soldier – slightly blurred and spotted with age – that she recognized so well. ‘
Sergeant Joseph Mansfield of 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment is currently assisting the police with their enquiries,
’ the report said.

‘Joe?’ she whispered, shaking her head in disbelief.

Eva looked up, seeing but not registering the crowd of Japanese tourists that had just flooded into Starbucks. She was trying to work out when she had last seen him. Ten, eleven years ago? The afternoon of Millennium Eve. It should have been a happier occasion than it was. Her mum and dad, who still lived in Lady Margaret Road, Hounslow, where Eva and Joe had grown up, were having a get-together. All the old faces. Joe had shown up with his Irish girlfriend. She was beautiful and graceful. Everything Eva had hoped she wouldn’t be.

Eva looked back down at the paper. If anyone had asked her, she’d have pretended she couldn’t remember the girl’s name. But she could, of course. How many times had she wondered whether Joe had talked to Caitlin about her? Had he explained that, growing up, he and Eva had been like brother and sister? Had Caitlin ever felt a twinge of jealousy? Had he ever had to explain that he’d never even so much as kissed her on the lips, no matter how much she had wanted him to?

Or had it never come up?

Joe had stayed at the party an hour, then left. Eva had never heard from him again.

She’d thought about him, though. God knows, she’d thought about him. On his birthday – 22 April, she never forgot that. At Christmas. And when she was lonely, and wanted to talk to her childhood friend.

He’d been such a quiet boy, but none of their group took that as a sign of weakness. That was partly because of his dad. Reg Mansfield had a reputation. Now that Eva was in the Job, she knew his type well enough. A bit of door work, always happy to earn a few quid roughing up some poor sod who owed a couple of weeks’ rent or hadn’t paid their bar bill. Brought his work home with him too. Joe’s mum had the bruises on her face to prove it. Sometimes she’d make a go at camouflaging them with a bit of cheap foundation but most of the time she didn’t bother. It was no secret in Lady Margaret Road that Roberta Mansfield’s biggest concern was where her next bottle of vodka was coming from. You didn’t often see her sober, though best not to mention this in front of Joe.

Reg eventually got out of his depth when he found himself caught up in an armed robbery that went wrong. Eva had never got to the bottom of it, mainly because it was something Joe would never talk about. All she knew was that it had been a raid on a post office during which a police officer who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time had taken a hit. Two days on life support and a widow’s pension for his missus. Joe’s dad hadn’t fired the trigger, but that didn’t stop him from receiving a fifteen-stretch. The Scrubs – frankly the best place for him.

Joe couldn’t have been more different from his dad. Eva remembered a time, just a month before that last blag, when they had met at their usual hangout – the old bandstand in the recreation area at the end of Lady Margaret Road. It was wintertime, and Joe’s skin was flushed with anger. He was holding the knuckles of his right hand, and Eva saw that they were bleeding. At first he didn’t want to tell her what had happened, but after a few minutes of cajoling he gave in. His mum had been hitting the bottle. His dad had been hitting her. Joe had stepped in. It was a brave man that muscled up to Reg Mansfield, but Joe had done it and come out best. Eva remembered how she’d looked at him in a different light that night, how she’d realized that he was a teenager with a man’s strength and a man’s determination. Realized that even though he’d grown up in a den of thieves, he knew right from wrong.

She stared back at the article.

Joe knew right from wrong.

It was a surprise to everyone, Eva included, when he joined up at the age of sixteen. With his dad banged up and his mum now a slave to the bottle, nobody really believed he could make anything of his life. But Eva could tell, when he came back for his first home leave, that the life he had chosen was the right one for him. The quiet, steely manner had intensified. When their loudmouth friends in the pub bragged and swaggered, Joe kept quiet. He didn’t feel the need to big himself up. He didn’t feel the need to do anything but watch.

Apart from that one time.

He’d been home for two weeks. Joe, Eva and a few of their mates were drinking in the Hand and Flower, a local pub that turned a blind eye to the fact that they were all under-age. Ashley Bamber had left school to become an apprentice mechanic. He had been sinking pints of lager at twice the rate of any of the other guys, and was growing lairy with it. Joe, as usual, had sat in the corner, quietly watching. Then, just as last orders had been called, Ashley started coming on to Eva. There was nothing friendly and flirty about it: he’d groped her in front of everyone, and said something filthy. For what seemed like the first time that evening, Joe had spoken. ‘Time to go home, Ash.’

Ashley had looked at him over his shoulder. ‘Knob off, Action Man,’ he’d said. ‘Just because you’ve spent the last three months sucking the sergeant major’s dick . . .’

They’d left then, all of them, embarrassed and awkward. Outside the Hand and Flower, however, Eva had watched as Joe grabbed Ashley by the arm and led him down the side of the pub and into the deserted beer garden. Two minutes later he returned alone. ‘He ever gives you any trouble again, you tell me,’ he said.

She never found out what had happened in that beer garden. Joe wouldn’t tell her. But Ashley never gave her any bother again, and whenever Joe was back home, he stayed away.

It was thanks to Joe that Eva had joined the force. She’d half thought of joining the army like him, but her courage deserted her and she had decided to dedicate herself to a life of policing, thinking – maybe wrongly – that it was the softer option. She’d seen some things in her time. Rubbed shoulders with some nasty bastards who’d done some nasty things. She knew how they ticked. Knew the kind of men, and sometimes women, that they were.

And she knew Joe. Murder Caitlin? Eva no more believed him capable of that than herself. But then war did things to people, or so she’d heard. Maybe the Joe Mansfield she’d grown up with was not the same one who would now be in remand custody, awaiting trial.