Osama

by Chris Ryan

  ‘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 Like a knife being stabbed into his own guts, withdrawn and then thrust in again.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.

  He was on the floor, his head in his wet hands . . .

  ‘Looks like our new celebrity’s feeling sorry for himself.’

  Joe looked up sharply. There was a screw standing over him, no older than thirty but with a thick head of white hair and almost as broad-shouldered as he was. He looked at Joe’s dripping hand. ‘Shower block’s the place for that.’

  Joe breathed deeply to calm himself. There was no point making an enemy of yet another screw. He stood up. ‘Where is it?’

  The white
-haired screw shook his head. ‘Too late. Breakfast.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Word of advice. You might be on remand but this isn’t the fucking Ritz and you don’t get to choose what you do or when you do it. Now get to the dining hall before I stick you in the fucking Seg Wing.’

  Joe stood up. He wiped his wet hands on his prison clothes. The remaining blood smeared over them, but at least his right hand was relatively clean now. He said nothing, but followed the screw out of his cell.

  The dining hall was in the adjacent block. Joe could smell it from the exercise yard – the cabbagy odour of mass-produced food that reminded him of the cookhouse at barracks in Catterick in his Recruit Company days. The hall itself was filled with row upon row of trestle tables and benches – Joe noticed immediately that they were fixed to the floor – with a four-metre-wide gangway up the middle. The room was brightly lit by glaring strip lights hanging from the high ceiling, and it was crowded – he estimated that there were close on seven hundred men in there. At the far end was a serving area where a line of hotplates were manned by six inmates. Joe assumed the door behind the hotplates led to a kitchen, and he stored that information away. Kitchens, he knew, were good sources of hardware. Provisions and waste moved in and out of them. The remnants of a queue – maybe fifteen or twenty people – snaked down the gangway, and Joe counted fifteen screws standing with their backs to the wall at regular intervals around the edge of the hall.

  ‘All yours,’ said the white-haired screw, before leaving the dining hall.

  Joe felt eyes on him as he walked up the gangway, and it was only then that he twigged what the screw had called him back in the cell: ‘our new celebrity’. Had word of what had happened really leaked out so fast? Joe’s definite impression was that it had. As he walked towards the serving hatch, he found himself picking out sets of eyes staring at him as he went: a thickset, shaven-headed man with inked-up forearms; a skinny, weaselly-looking guy with round glasses and a weak chin; a young Asian lad, his face covered with wisps of bumfluff; Hunter, sitting on his own at a table well apart from the others, a dedicated screw standing over him as he chewed slowly and watched Joe with bright eyes. There was an immense, echoing hubbub in the dining hall. Maybe it was just Joe’s imagination, but the conversation seemed to lull at the tables he passed.

  He joined the end of the queue. It had gone down to ten people now. The final three had their backs to the serving area and were watching him approach. They were bulky men, all with jet-black hair and green eyes. They looked like they might be brothers. There was a pause of thirty seconds before one of them spoke. His hair was Brylcreemed back, and he had a pasty, unhealthy face. He stank of cigarettes.

  ‘You our new army boy?’ he asked. He had a thick Ulster accent. When Joe didn’t reply, he continued: ‘Always a pleasure to welcome a brave lad like you.’ He didn’t sound like Joe’s presence gave him any pleasure at all. His two companions gave Joe a menacing stare.

  Two years in the Province meant Joe could spot a crew of PIRA hoods from a mile off. Even back in the day, the majority of these lads were more interested in Republicanism as a front for their criminal activities – drugs, long firms, contraband booze and smokes, you name it – than anything else. Their criminality hadn’t disappeared with the Troubles, so it was hardly surprising to run into their type in a place like this. And though the politicians liked to pretend that the days of antagonism were at an end, Joe knew that was bullshit: the British Army were the bad guys in vast swathes of Northern Ireland, the SAS even more so. If these lads found out he was Regiment, they’d be almost duty bound to have a crack at him.

  ‘Not looking for any trouble, fellas,’ Joe said quietly.

  ‘You hear that, boys?’ the other guy sneered. ‘He’s not looking for any trouble.’

  His mates laughed, and the queue shuffled up a couple of places.

  ‘Well, you never know, army boy,’ the guy continued. ‘Maybe it’ll come looking for you.’ An unpleasant smile crossed his lips. ‘A filthy Brit and a beast in the same cell. It’s like Christmas came early.’ He turned his back on Joe. ‘Course, if you don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry having a pop at you each time you leave your cell, there’s ways and means, army boy.’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’

  ‘Ah, it’s just a matter of keeping in with the right people. People with clout, who can protect you.’

  Joe sneered. ‘You?’ he asked.

  ‘Well now, that’s your choice, army boy. That’s your choice.’

  Two minutes later a member of the kitchen staff was spooning rubbery scrambled eggs into one of the compartments of a tin tray, baked beans into another. The table Joe sat at was three rows down from the serving area and populated solely by black prisoners: eight of them, four along either side. The guy closest to Joe had elaborate patterns shaved into the side of his head, but his face was a lot less pretty than his haircut. He wore a vest and the muscles in his arms were enormous and well defined. He had black tattoos on his dark skin. As Joe sat down, the man pushed his food tray away and turned to stare at him.

  Joe concentrated on his food, but he felt every part of his body enter a heightened state of alertness. He could sense the potential for violence in the air, and he gripped his plastic fork more firmly than he otherwise might have done. Not much of a weapon, but all he had: if he splintered it, he could wreck an eye at the very least . . .

  ‘Stand up!’

  Joe had barely forced down a couple of mouthfuls of his unwanted food when Sowden, the tall, thin screw from the previous night, walked up to him. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  All the black prisoners were watching the exchange in silence.

  ‘Because I told you to.’ And then, perhaps remembering Joe’s outburst the night before, he added: ‘Your lawyer’s here.’

  ‘I don’t have a lawyer.’

  ‘You do now.’

  Joe wasn’t sad to leave the dining hall. It felt like a war waiting to happen in there. Sowden led him into the courtyard for the second time that morning, towards another prison block and into a small room with nothing in it but a table and two chairs. A woman was sitting at the table. She was dressed in a two-piece business suit and had her brown hair arranged in a bun. Not a looker, and her face was pinched, unfriendly and covered in a thick layer of foundation. As the door was locked behind Joe, she nodded at the spare chair on the opposite side of the table, but she failed to catch his eye.

  Joe sat. The woman pushed a copy of The Times across the table. ‘You’d better read that,’ she said in a slightly hostile Scottish accent, sounding as though her mind was elsewhere. ‘Page five.’

  Joe wasn’t sure he wanted to, but he navigated past the front page and a picture of Princess Anne on page three. He pretty soon wished he hadn’t.

  He had no idea where they’d got the pictures from. There was one of Caitlin that he recognized as being the photo her dad kept on his mantelpiece in Epsom. It was about five years old, taken at Christmas. She had a smile on her face and was wearing a scarf Joe had bought for Conor to give her. The mere sight of it made him feel hollow.

  Next to the picture of Caitlin was one of him, taken the day he’d been awarded the MC for bravery in Iraq, having pulled a couple of wounded Yanks from the debris of a roadside bomb while under fire from insurgents. There was no image of Conor.

  He read the caption above the pictures: ‘Partner of Afghanistan hero found murdered’.

  He looked up at the lawyer. She was studying papers in a file on her lap, almost as if he wasn’t there.

  Looking back at the paper, he continued to read. ‘Northern Ireland-born mother of one Caitlin O’Donnell, 36, has been found brutally murdered in a remote cottage near Berwick-upon-Tweed. A police spokesman confirmed early this morning that her partner Sergeant Joseph Mansfield of 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment is currently assisting the police with their enquiries. Sergeant Mansfield was recently
returned to the UK from Afghanistan, where it is thought he was considered unfit for active service. The Ministry of Defence has declined to comment. Statistics released by the MOD suggest that troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are ten times more likely to suffer the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder than those who remain at home . . .’

  Joe threw the paper to one side.

  ‘PTSD?’ He remembered Ricky. He tried not to think about his own behaviour, but he knew how easy it would be for the fuckers to slap that label on him.

  ‘Clearly they can’t say outright that you did it, for legal reasons,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  The lawyer finally looked at him. ‘You’re on remand, Sergeant Mansfield. Do you understand what that means? You’ve been arrested on suspicion of murder, which means you’re not eligible for bail until you come to trial, which could take anything up to a year. My name’s Jacqueline Thomas. I’ve been assigned to your case and I’m—’

  ‘Where’s Conor?’

  ‘I understand he’s being looked after by his paternal grandfather. Sergeant Mansfield, I’m going to recommend from the get-go that you don’t attempt to—’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Joe said, keeping his voice quiet.

  There was a pause. Jacqueline Thomas’s eyes flickered towards the door, and Joe could tell she was wondering whether to call in the guard from outside. She obviously decided against it, and continued as though Joe hadn’t said anything. ‘A plea of diminished responsibility could reduce the charge to manslaughter . . .’

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  The lawyer laid her file on the table, removed her glasses and looked him in the eye. ‘Fine,’ she said in a neutral voice. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what happened last night?’