She planned to head straight for the glass of orange juice she’d left on the side but when they emerged into the kitchen they were greeted by the sight of Jem, headphones on, crawling out from under his bed.
Hannah crashed back into Mr Dalgleish and he winced.
Jem got to his feet, turned round and startled, as surprised to see them as they were to see him. His eyes were crusty with sleep, his hair askew.
He removed his headphones.
‘You’ve been there the whole time?’ said Hannah, still not sure whether to trust the situation. She ducked up and down, trying to observe the bed from different angles. ‘But I couldn’t see you, the guards couldn’t see you.’
He raised his arms in the air and stretched from side to side. The movement was precise, easy; Hannah was again reminded of a dancer, warming up.
‘I hardly slept last night and then today.’ He gestured at the glaring sun. ‘It’s dark under the bed and these are noise-cancelling.’ He looked from Hannah to Mr Dalgleish, realisation dawning. ‘You thought I’d got out?’
Hannah hid her face in her hands. She felt like a kid who’d told her parents there were monsters in the wardrobe, only for them to turn on the light and show her there was nothing there.
Mr Dalgleish patted her on the arm.
‘Always best to err on the side of caution.’ He looked from Jem to the bed and chuckled. ‘It’s natural to be jumpy, especially in the first few weeks.’ He went to the keypad on the wall and reset the codes for both the front and back fence, standard procedure after a call-out, false alarm or not.
Hannah knew she should apologise for wasting his time, and she would, but the numbness was spreading down to her throat. She reached for the juice, now warm and gloopy, and necked it in one. Then she poured another and drank that too.
Within a few minutes she started to feel better, like a wilting plant that had perked back up to full height, strong and tall and green.
Jem watched her carefully from behind the bars, fascinated by the transformation. Before the juice she had been so unsteady. Weak. Vulnerable.
The next day and Hannah had to deliver fifty red velvet cupcakes to a press event for a new boutique in Covent Garden. All done, she headed to the river and along the Embankment to New Scotland Yard where she’d arranged to meet John’s old boss, Mickey, for a coffee and a catch-up.
Tiny but fierce, Detective Chief Inspector Michaela Coombes headed up one of the Met’s twelve Organised Crime Teams. An amateur bodybuilder, she had a tendency to address even the most hardened of criminals by pet names that ranged from lovey to noodle to sweetie pie. She and John had been close and after his murder she’d struggled to cope, her grief compounded by the fact that John was the second person in her team to die in three months; the first was an undercover officer who had committed suicide. Both detectives had been off duty at the time of their deaths but Mickey considered her team to be her responsibility whether they were on the clock or not.
Hannah always enjoyed hanging out with her but after yesterday’s drama she was looking forward to it more than usual. Despite her promises, Aisling had yet to come over (she’d had another influx of bookings she couldn’t turn down) and Hannah was craving the comfort of an old friend.
She approached the HQ’s art deco facade. To the right of the door sat a marble bust of Sir Robert Peel, the founder of the British police service, ‘The police are the public and the public are the police’ engraved on the plaque beneath. John had been based here for the last three years of his career. He always said the historical artefacts on display made him feel that he – a working-class East End boy – was an imposter, that he was play-acting at being a detective, and that at any moment he could be found out, exposed as a fraud.
Mickey came down to collect her from reception. Wearing a black trouser suit, she carried a stack of files under one arm. Her hair was pulled into a neat bun, her tan a deep mahogany. Her thigh muscles bulged and Hannah saw how they made the lower part of the trousers hang wrong, the fabric veering forward from the knees.
‘Petal.’ They embraced and Hannah felt herself relax for the first time in days. ‘You look exhausted.’ She signed her in. ‘Canteen?’
Hannah shrugged. She didn’t care where they went, she was just glad to be in her company.
They got into a lift and as they began their ascent Mickey seemed to sway a little on her feet. She hooked her arm through Hannah’s as if to balance herself and drew her close. The glass gave a view of each floor as they rose through the building and Hannah could see how half the desks were empty, the detectives that were there slouched and pale. It had been the same when John was alive. She figured it was the futility. The knowledge that, no matter how hard they worked to catch the bad guy, often as not, their efforts would be in vain.
Nineteen years earlier, a mix of complaints from opposite ends of the spectrum had set the change to the justice system in motion. On the one hand, the prisons had been at breaking point, the conditions appalling, riots commonplace. Despite jails cramming three and sometimes four inmates into the same tiny space, costs soared. On the other hand there had been a frustration at the supposed lack of justice facing some criminals, tabloid scoops about PlayStations, flat-screen TVs and mobile phones in cells, which made people angry. The authorities were being too soft, the newspapers said, prison was like a holiday camp.
The then government had launched a pilot scheme, the brainchild of a notorious policy wonk, designed to do away with mass incarceration. Its focus was restorative justice and the importance of the rehabilitation, not punishment, of those that broke the law. They argued that situating the prisoner within the home of the victim would ensure they truly faced up to the damage they had done, that they would learn from the experience and come out the other side a better person.
It quickly became apparent the scheme was ripe for abuse.
One case in particular had caused a public outcry. A heavily pregnant shoplifter serving a six-month sentence was left alone for a weekend when her Hosts decided to bend the rules and go and visit family elsewhere. They’d left her with ample rations but food wasn’t the issue. The woman had gone into premature labour and delivered her baby alone on the cell floor. The infant had not survived.
The government had immediately announced the end of the programme and had been in the early stages of disbanding the whole thing when a snap general election saw them ousted from power. Everyone assumed the newly anointed government would be glad to see the progressive scheme consigned to the dust heap – they were, after all, the party of law and order – and that they would sign its final death warrant. But during campaigning it transpired that swathes of the electorate weren’t concerned about the shoplifter and her baby (after all, stuff like that had happened in actual prisons all the time) and that in fact they really quite liked the idea of being in charge of the severity of punishment a prisoner might receive, that they relished the idea they would be the one to decide whether or not to institute a games-console or a more spartan bread-and-water-like regime. Then there was the fact it was so very much cheaper. Before long, the scheme was rolled out en masse.
In the canteen they found a table by the window.
‘So,’ said Mickey once they were settled. ‘How are you?’
Her speech was the tiniest bit off kilter. The circles under her eyes visible even through the fake tan. Grief manifested in many ways and for Mickey it had shown itself in a chronic and debilitating bout of insomnia. She’d told Hannah that in recent months it had started to improve, but looking at her now, Hannah thought it seemed to have returned with a vengeance.
‘I feel like I’m trapped in a nightmare,’ said Hannah. She fiddled with her pendant, sliding her finger over the cognac-coloured teardrop. ‘It was bad enough having to see him every day during the trial. The feelings it brought up. But now I have to have those feelings on repeat. I can’t get away. I have to cook for him, make sure he isn’t too hot or too cold.’ She clucked a breath
, stifling a cry. ‘I have to do his bloody washing.’
She looked out of the window, across the slab of river to the London Eye and the aquarium, trying to compose herself. John had taken her to the aquarium for their second date. Afterwards, he’d told her he’d wanted to impress her by doing something magical she’d never forget and, at first it had been exactly that, even with the crowds. John’s bulk had shielded her from being bumped and shoved, his arms acting like a guard rail. They’d held hands by the flickering blue tanks and giggled into each other’s shoulders at the manta rays rising up to be tickled and fed; but then they’d got to the penguins. As soon as John saw them and realised how and where they were kept his smile had evaporated. ‘How is that allowed?’ he’d said, trying to direct his eyes anywhere but the enclosure. ‘They don’t even have daylight.’
‘Oh, angel. It’s shit. The worst,’ said Mickey. ‘But hopefully you won’t have to put up with him for much longer.’ She squeezed Hannah’s forearm and as she drew her hand back across the table it brushed against her stack of files. ‘Almost forgot.’ She reached inside the pile and pulled out a clear plastic folder full of paper. ‘Someone got assigned John’s old desk. They cleared out the drawers.’ She pushed the folder across the table. ‘I junked the five thousand salt and pepper packets and miniature soy sauce sachets he seemed to have stockpiled. The rest was just takeaway menus and old darts programmes. Still, I thought you might want them.’
There it was again, that slight delay to her speech, like she was concentrating hard on her pronunciation.
Like she was making sure not to slur.
Hannah tensed, wanting to reject the thought even as it formed.
Mickey hadn’t. She wouldn’t.
She tried to focus on the plastic folder, and tipped the contents onto the table. Mickey was right; it was mainly menus, darts stuff and what looked like property details for a series of flats in Dalston.
She separated out the rental brochures.
‘Weird.’ She gathered them up and went to hand them back to Mickey. ‘Did these have something to do with a case?’
Mickey refused to accept them.
‘I considered that but if they were they would have been logged.’
Hannah leaned back, studying Mickey afresh. Now she’d tuned into what was wrong she noticed other things. The DCI’s gaze was swimmy, like she was wearing the incorrect glasses prescription, and there was a garrulousness to the way she moved – a lack of precision when she lifted her mug or sat back in her seat – that wasn’t usual.
‘And you?’ said Hannah. Mickey had struggled with booze in the past. Her addiction had led to the breakdown of her marriage to a cheerful Canadian called Laramie. Sober for eight years, she’d channelled her obsessive tendencies into her bodybuilding. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine. Overworked and underpaid. Same old.’
‘It’s just . . .’ said Hannah, wary of coming straight out with it. Mickey was proud of her sobriety. For Hannah to doubt it, to doubt her, would be hurtful. ‘Are you still able to go to meetings, what with everything you have on at work?’
Mickey didn’t understand the nature of the question at first but then, as Hannah held her silence, she stiffened and made sure to sit up that bit taller.
‘There was a leaving do at lunch,’ she said flatly. ‘I had half a shandy. That’s it.’
Hannah waited a moment before replying, letting the lie sink in.
‘I know more than anyone how hard the last six months have been. If you’re struggling . . .’
Mickey checked the time and got to her feet. ‘I should get back.’ Her trousers had creased into folds at the top of her quads and when she tugged the twill loose it retained a thin concertina pattern. ‘Meetings.’
Hannah shoved everything back into the plastic folder and followed her to the lift.
In reception she hugged her goodbye but the chief inspector kept her arms muscled to her sides. Still, Hannah stayed where she was, hoping her friend would come round, believing that if only she waited long enough, Mickey would return the embrace.
Three days into his sentence, Jem was allowed access to a phone.
That morning he barely touched his breakfast and after placing his plate and mug in the hatch he began moving around the cell, jerking up and down on his tiptoes the way sprinters do before a race. Fizzing with energy, he turned his baseball cap this way then that, then set about picking up and replacing each of the things on his shelf in turn, for no other reason it seemed than to have something to do with his hands.
Like all prisoners, he had a weekly sixty-minute call allowance, paid for through his commissary. Conversations were conducted on a specially modified mobile that had no internet capability and had been designed so as to be impossible to force apart and access the wiring inside.
Hannah had charged the phone in the living room overnight and, after clearing the breakfast things away, she ran to get it and placed it in the hatch. Black and chunky with square metal buttons, it looked like an ancient Nokia and weighed the same as a bag of sugar.
‘All yours,’ she said, pushing it inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘About the other day and the sleeping under the bed thing. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was going to try and wake up before you got back but I was more tired than I realised.’
Hannah shrugged. She was still embarrassed and would have preferred to forget it had happened.
‘My rooster cap,’ he said, holding it out for her to see.
‘What?’
‘Whenever I sleep under the bed, I’ll leave it on my pillow. That way you don’t need to worry, you’ll know where I am.’
He smiled shyly and pulled at his T-shirt, exposing the dip and rise of his collarbone. She saw how the top of his neck was smudged with stubble, the tiny black hairs like scratches of ink. He tilted his head slightly, catching her eye, and guided her gaze back up. She felt heat rising in her chest and, not wanting to blush in front of him, searched for a distraction. She nodded at the book, face-down on the bed.
‘What are you reading?’
He held her gaze a beat and then slowly turned to look.
‘Frank O’Hara.’ He said the poet’s name like he was an old friend. ‘My favourite.’
Hannah nodded. She’d studied one of his poems in school.
‘How come you worked in a pub?’ She’d only been around him for a few days but his intelligence was obvious and she was curious as to how someone like that could end up making their living glass-collecting. ‘I mean, was it a temporary thing?’
He smiled.
‘One of the guys I worked with had a PhD in astrophysics.’ He held his hands out to the side and grinned. ‘A pay cheque is a pay cheque.’
She cringed. Of course, he was right. It had been a thoughtless, snobbish thing to say. The job a person did was not necessarily a reflection of intelligence.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said, tapping the side of the hatch and rattling the phone inside, then launched herself up the stairs.
She had planned to go and wait in the living room but before she stepped out into the hall she paused, listening.
She wondered who he’d call first. A girlfriend? His mother? He’d yet to mention any family. Hannah wasn’t sure if that was because he had none – she’d not seen anyone in the gallery during the trial – or if, after what he’d done, he’d been disowned.
She heard the beep-beep-beep of him inputting a number and then she couldn’t help it; she leaned back, curious, and strained her ears for his opening line.
Silence.
A minute passed, then another. She held her breath, waiting for him to speak.
A beep.
He’d ended the call.
Had he not been able to get through or had he been directed to voicemail and not wanted to leave a message?
She waited for him to call someone else but instead she heard a dull thud, followed by a metallic shunk-shunk, the sound
of something being put in the hatch and pushed through to the other side.
The phone.
She checked her watch. There were still fifty-six minutes remaining but, for this week, at least, it seemed he was done.
Saturday morning and the plumber was on his back under the sink.
‘Any joy?’ said Hannah, hovering by his feet. She felt for the smooth spot on her finger where her engagement ring usually sat. Now someone was here helping look for it she felt calm, hopeful it would soon be back where it belonged.
‘How long has it been like this?’ he said, his voice flattened by the inside of the cupboard. His calves were huge and hairless, clusters of knotted vein protruding from his skin like sandworm casts on a beach.
‘Since the start of the year,’ she said, moving closer. ‘A month or so before my husband died.’
Hannah remembered how she’d made a Valentine’s dinner, beef Wellington and buttered greens, only for John to get stuck at work. She’d given up on him at midnight and thrown the whole lot down the waste disposal, only for it to craw and creak. A few seconds later it had cut out altogether. The mangled beef had been pushed back up to the opening and she’d had to fish it out with her hands, the pastry sticking to her skin like glue.
A squeak and the wet slop of something heavy landing in a bucket. A rotten, almost faecal stench filled the kitchen.
Hannah put her hand over her nose and mouth and retreated to a safe distance. When she looked she saw that Jem had done the same. He flapped at the air, trying to disperse the smell, and, despite everything, she laughed.
They stood next to each other, the bars between them.
‘Working in the pub,’ he said quietly so the plumber couldn’t hear, ‘you were right, it was supposed to be temporary. I wanted to go to university. Get a degree.’ His voice was thick with regret but there was something else pulling down the edges of his words too, like stones in pockets. Shame. ‘But I needed to earn money and then, once you start earning, you need to keep doing it, know what I mean?’
The Captive Page 4