Dark Tides (11 page)

David tried pulling away but Edward held firm. David panicked. He lifted his free leg in the air and stamped on Edward’s arm. Edward clung on. David looked at me for help, then snapped his leg back and let go of a howl of disgust as he kicked Edward in the side of the head.

He broke free and toppled into me and dragged me away by the hand. I looked back at Edward as we fled. Blue lights flashed and flickered around us, bleaching his ruined face. I stared hard at his bloodied, glazed eyes, and I can’t deny that in that exact moment I wished him dead.

But I also glimpsed the one thing we’d forgotten in our hurry – the terrible mistake that would haunt all of our futures.

Six years later, I was a completely different person. Well, maybe not
completely
different. I still had the same name and the same identity. My physical appearance hadn’t altered dramatically and I hadn’t joined some elaborate witness protection scheme. But my life had changed and so had I. I was tougher, more determined, a lot more cynical. I’d seen hardship and suffering and despair. I dealt with it on a daily basis and there wasn’t a lot that could faze me any more. It wasn’t often that I was confronted by something that surprised or upset me. It was very rare for a situation to crop up that my training or my experience hadn’t prepared me for.

But today was unusual. Today, I was scared by what I was about to do. I was pretty sure it was a mistake. I was almost certain I’d regret it. And yet I was going to do it anyway.

Tougher.

More determined.

A lot more cynical.

Well, we’d see, I supposed. This was as good a test as any other. Maybe the timid old Claire, my weaker adolescent self, would come back to haunt me again. Maybe I’d find that she’d never really gone away.

Jurby prison had been constructed less than ten years ago on an old airfield in the north of the island. It was a suitably barren and desolate spot for a building with a barren and desolate purpose. At first glance, the prison looked like a modern office block. There was a lot of grey concrete and polished steel and glass. There was a revolving entrance door and some modest landscaping out front. But there was also a high concrete wall surrounding the entire complex, a lot of razor wire, an abundance of floodlights and security cameras, and the unmistakable sense that something was concealed here – something that most people would prefer never to think about or even to see.

The visitor registration centre was located outside the main prison building. It looked innocuous enough from the outside, but inside was a different story. The space was ringed with chairs, like the waiting room in a doctor’s surgery. Every chair was occupied. Groups of drawn-looking women talked in harassed tones, balancing drooling toddlers on their hips. Men in casual sportswear popped their knuckles or paced the hardwearing carpet, swinging their arms in fast arcs like boxers preparing to enter the ring. Gangs of raucous kids darted between legs, shrieking and yelping.

I approached one of the two female prison officers on duty, slid my ID across to her and told her the name of the prisoner I was visiting. She scanned my credentials and copied them into a ledger. At some point, I knew, all the names in the ledger would be checked and mine would raise a red flag. A phone call would be made. The right people would be notified and the appropriate questions would be asked. Maybe that would all happen later today. Maybe it would be some time in the next week. It was possible that nothing would be said to me directly, but it was also possible that I’d be summoned to explain myself.

While the first officer practised her penmanship, her colleague asked me to empty my pockets into a small plastic tray. I told her they were already empty but she checked anyway and then she turned me round and patted me down. She was fast and thorough. It was obviously a procedure she’d gone through many times in the past. It was a technique I was familiar with, too, though usually I was on the other side of it.

I was told to wait, just like all the people who’d come before me, and the few others who turned up afterwards. A little under ten minutes later, the two female prison officers escorted us out of the visitors’ centre towards the revolving glass doors at the front of the prison, where we stood in line and took it in turns to pass through the doors and an X-ray scanner. A sniffer dog took a pass at me, then moved on and got agitated about something one of the sportswear guys had concealed in his sock. The sportswear guy was ushered into a windowless side room while the rest of us were marched out into a prison yard and told to follow a painted yellow line that skirted a high steel fence just inside the high concrete wall.

Nobody talked. Nobody looked around. The bleak and oppressive atmosphere of the place was weighing heavily on us all, and it occurred to me that everybody here was incarcerated: not just the prisoners, but the officers and the support staff and even the visitors, too. And sure, we could leave. We could go home when visiting was over. But not until we were given permission. Not on our own terms.

The officer in front of us unlocked a heavy steel door with one of the keys tethered to her belt, and then she ushered us up a flight of stairs and through a sliding glass door. The visiting area could have been an inviting space. The architect had tried very hard to create that impression. But there were giveaways all the same. The windows were thin slots of opaque, heavy-duty glass that provided a visual echo of the bars in an old Victorian jail. The ceiling was scattered with tinted perspex domes that contained multiple surveillance cameras. The tables and chairs were bolted to the floor.

Two male officers were positioned at either end of the room, standing at ease in their white shirts with black epaulettes, their black trousers weighed down by the heavy leather belts strapped around their waists. The belts were loaded with keys and batons and cuffs and radios.

I didn’t think they’d need their weapons or their cuffs. It stood to reason that most visiting sessions would proceed very smoothly. Provided they behave, most inmates on the island are permitted one forty-five-minute visit a week, and there’s an unspoken rule that nobody will do anything to disrupt a session. People have kids in the room. People have loved ones to speak with.

Naturally, there’s the odd exception, usually triggered by the unique circumstances faced by criminals on the Isle of Man. There’s only one prison on the island, so aside from the handful of Manx prisoners who opt to serve life for murder in a UK institution, there’s only one place you can be locked up. And most criminals on the island tend to move in the same polluted circles. They tend to know one another. Plenty of them have grudges to bear. It’s always possible that an offender might be imprisoned with the same guy who burgled his grandparents’ bungalow or the monster who raped his sister. It’s always conceivable that an offender might see a fellow inmate warmly greet their family member from across the visitors’ room and become so enraged that they decide to seek vengeance. Not normal, but possible.

And sometimes, something even rarer occurs. Every prisoner has to request a visiting order for anyone who wants to come and see them. Even if someone on the outside writes a letter requesting a visit, it’s the prisoner who controls the process. It’s the prisoner who says yes or no. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the person granted the visiting order is someone the prisoner is eager to see. But not always. Occasionally the visitor is unwelcome. And occasionally the visitor has no idea how resentful or bitter or aggressive the prisoner might become when they come face to face with one another.

Like me, for instance, as I took a seat on a fixed chair at one of the numbered tables and waited in the sudden anxious hush for the prisoner who’d finally agreed to see me to be let into the room.

You’ve been waiting for today for a very long time. You’ve been building up to it. Anticipating it. Preparing yourself for it. You’ve had to adapt in all kinds of ways. Mentally. Emotionally. Physically. You’ve had to make a hundred different adjustments for a hundred different reasons, but you wouldn’t want it otherwise. You wouldn’t trade it for anything at all.

You’ve had to be very patient. You’ve had to be extremely disciplined. But the truth is you’ve enjoyed the process. You’ve relished it because it’s given you something to focus on. Given you a purpose.

And what you have planned is important. There’s no doubt in your mind about that. The task you’re going to complete today is absolutely the right thing to do. Not right in any objective sense. Not right in the eyes of the law or according to any form of religion. But right from your perspective, and really, when it comes down to it, your perspective is all that matters.

Thinking about your scheme has eaten up a lot of time, and time is your worst enemy. You hate the way it drags. Hate the way it spools out endlessly ahead of you. Hate when you have nothing to distract you from its torturous creep.

But now you have the best distraction of all. Because this is the part where you take all your planning, all your preparation, and you put it into action. This is when you finally allow yourself to become everything you’ve always known you could be. The best you. The real you.

Today, finally, it begins.

It was two minutes before anything happened. In normal circumstances, on an average day, two minutes is a relatively short period of time. There are plenty of occasions when I’ve wasted longer staring vacantly at a wall. I know there are days when I’ve lost entire hours without even noticing. But these weren’t normal circumstances. This wasn’t an average day. And the two-minute wait seemed to go on and on.

I listened to the constant drone of the blown-air heaters. Their speed never altered. Their frequency never changed. A baby whacked a rattle against a nearby tabletop while kids dropped coins into a vending machine at the far end of the room. A woman on my right kept smoothing her hand over a printed letter. I guessed the letter contained important news because she was treating it like a priceless artefact. The prison officers stood with their arms folded across their chests, heads moving from side to side.

I waited.

The second hand on the caged wall clock in front of me stuttered round the dial. I tried to regulate my breathing and slow my heartbeat to the same tempo. My pulse was up, my throat dry. I felt restless and flighty. I turned my head and gazed back at the way we’d come in. The sliding glass door was sealed. I was sure that the air had been fresher out in the stairwell.

I wanted to breathe that air.

Then a metal bolt shot back and I faced front again as a reinforced steel door swung open and a line of male convicts shuffled through. There was no official prison uniform. The inmates could wear whatever they liked. But most of them wore the same thing – trainers and tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts, not unlike many of the sportswear guys who were visiting. The trainers and tracksuit bottoms made sense because the prisoners didn’t have any reason to dress up. Comfort was their only priority. The T-shirts made sense, too. It was hot inside the prison. The temperature was constantly maintained. Heating in the winter, air conditioning in the summer. There were no windows to open or doors to leave ajar.

The prisoners all had one additional item of clothing – a luminous orange tabard that most of them were still fitting over their heads as they walked into the visiting area. The purpose of the tabards was to distinguish the prisoners from their visitors, helping the supervising officers to keep an eye on what was happening in front of them.

None of the men were shackled. All of them appeared subdued and disinterested. An act, I guessed. Learned behaviour. They couldn’t risk being seen to be excited to spend time with their loved ones. They were afraid of revealing any potential weakness that the others might exploit. But they all greeted their visitors. They all shook hands, or leaned in for a brief kiss, or ruffled a child’s hair.

All except for the man standing in front of me.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by how much he’d changed. I shouldn’t have been shocked by the ways in which he’d aged. But I was, and I didn’t hide it very well.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me how good I look?’

Six years. A fixed period of time. But time can weigh on people in different ways, depending on their circumstances. Factor in lifestyle, diet, environment. They all play a part. Life hadn’t been easy for me. The last six years had been hard, no question. But they’d been brutal for Mark.

He’d put on weight. He was carrying it around his gut and neck and in his bulging upper arms. His biceps weren’t scribed in prison tats. They weren’t swollen from a fanatical exercise regime he’d improvised in his cell. This was fat. It was sloth. It was what happened to a guy who was locked up in the prime of his youth and who responded by letting everything go.

His skin was pallid, his hair greasy and thinned. He hadn’t used to need glasses but now his eyes were somehow dulled and squinted behind the pair of metal-framed spectacles he had on. The specs were nothing fancy. The lenses were smeared with thumbprints. His grey T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms were worn and frayed. This wasn’t a guy who took pride in his appearance. This wasn’t a guy who took pride in anything any more.

He didn’t sit down.

I was finding it hard not to stare at the way the orange tabard was rucked up above his rounded belly so I spread my fingers and contemplated my blunted nails and the strips of raw flesh where I’d been picking at the skin alongside them. Nerves. Anxiety. Depression. They were a constant battle for me, especially at this time of year.

I kept waiting for Mark to sit and he kept standing. He watched me without speaking for so long that I became convinced he was about to turn and walk off. Part of me would have been relieved if he had. But I’d come this far for a reason and the reason wouldn’t go away even if Mark did.

I lifted my eyes very slowly. Finally, he grunted and slumped into the chair opposite me, spreading his legs and kicking out his feet. I leaned back and glanced down. His white trainers were smeared with dirt and featured a distinctive blue swoosh.
Nikes
.

I almost smiled.

It was the Adidas trainer the police had got him on. He hadn’t left fingerprints anywhere in the Caine mansion – the gloves he’d been wearing had made certain of that – but his prints were all over his left shoe. Layers and layers of them, from all the times he’d pulled his shoe on and off in the past. And the police had Mark’s fingerprints on record from his stints as a juvenile offender. He was identified and charged within a fortnight. Aggravated burglary with GBH.

‘I wasn’t sure if you’d agree to see me.’ My voice sounded timid and forced. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were even reading my letters.’

‘I was reading them.’

He blinked myopically behind his dirty lenses. I wondered how badly his sight had deteriorated and to what extent prison life was responsible for that. I was pretty sure that the windows in his cell and his wing would be made from the same opaque glass strips that were fitted around the visiting area. It would be impossible for him to see anything through them except the blur and shimmer of light on the other side.

But even if he had a proper window, what could Mark hope to see? A concrete exercise yard? A steel fence and loops of barbed wire? A high wall? And beyond it, nothing besides the weed-strewn asphalt of a disused airfield.

He was living in the middle of nowhere. A blank space on a map. A geographic afterthought.

‘I should have come sooner.’

Mark shrugged his big shoulders. He was slouched forwards, arms at his sides, fingers loosely curled, just like the first time I’d seen him, standing outside David’s Fiesta in his werewolf mask. I was pretty sure he’d welcome a mask right now. I got the impression he hated me seeing him like this.

‘There’s a lot I should have done. I feel terrible about it.’

‘Do you, Claire?’

My thumb was working on the skin beside one of my nails. My nail polish was chipped and needed freshening up. I lowered my hands beneath the table. I wasn’t wearing much make-up. I’d thought that I should look as plain as possible, but I guess on some level I was trying to communicate something more. I wanted him to know how tired I was of concealing the truth.

‘I made a choice.’ Mark half smiled and shook his head, as if it was only now that he could understand how foolish he’d been. ‘You were my friends.’

‘We didn’t deserve it.’

I was conscious that the prison officer to my left was watching me closely. Maybe he recognised me. That was always a possibility on the island. Eighty thousand people, clinging to a rock thirty-two miles long by fourteen miles wide in the middle of the Irish Sea. People were bound to run into one another every now and again. But I was pretty sure I’d never seen him before. So maybe he was just intrigued by the way Mark and I were interacting. Maybe he knew it was rare for Mark to receive any visitors. Or maybe he recognised me for other reasons – ones that had to do with my chosen career. I thought again of all the surveillance cameras in the room. The footage that could be reviewed at any time in the future. No audio, though. The law didn’t allow it.

Small mercies.

‘We should have come forward. All of us.’

‘That would have been a really dumb thing to do.’

‘It would have been the
right
thing to do.’

He rolled out his bottom lip. ‘No sense in all of us wrecking our lives. Mine was half wrecked already.’

‘We were wrong, Mark.
I
was wrong. I needed to come here and tell you that.’

‘Great. And now you have.’

He twisted in his seat and placed one large palm on the table, ready to push himself to his feet. I reached out and grabbed his wrist, squeezing the doughy flesh and matted hairs. Mark looked down at my hand. He whistled and hitched an eyebrow towards the prison officer.

‘Best let go, Cooper. Wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble.’

‘Don’t leave. We need to talk.’

‘Yeah? Then let’s talk.’ He pulled his arm free and leaned back in his chair. ‘How are the others? Do they want to say sorry, too? Are they plagued by the same remorseless guilt that’s been gnawing away at you?’

‘I expect so.’

‘
Expect so.
You mean you don’t know?’

‘We haven’t talked about it.’

‘Huh.’ He stroked the stubble on his jaw. ‘So what do you talk about? You never mention them in your letters. It’s almost as if you lost touch for some reason.’

He squinted at me from behind his clunky glasses and I saw then how well he knew us – how he understood our failings. He was right. We didn’t talk any more. Had barely spoken, in fact, since that night six years before. It wasn’t something we’d discussed. It wasn’t a pact we’d decided upon. It had just happened. We’d walked away from one another. None of us could bear to discuss what we’d done, and yet none of us could pretend we hadn’t been part of it. The only solution was to keep our distance.

At first, I chose to tell myself that it was a sacrifice we’d all made. That we’d let our friendships drift as some form of compensation for the punishment Mark was enduring. But it wasn’t true. Our motives weren’t nearly so noble. Self-preservation had kicked in. We were all afraid of the way our lives could be ruined. And there was shame there, too. For me in particular.

Nobody had made Mark lash out in the way he had. Not one of us had set out that night intending to leave Edward Caine with bleeding to the brain and severe spinal injuries. If only we’d known that he’d rowed with Morgan and had abandoned him in a private hospital in London to fly back to the island early, we never would have entered the house. But we’d all been there. We’d all been a part of it. And it had all been because of me. Because of what I believed had happened to Mum, despite the absence of any proof, based on nothing more than the instincts and distorted memories of a hurt and scared little eight-year-old girl. Because of the line Mark and I had crossed together. He’d carried out his own form of justice and I’d stood by and let him do it. Had wanted it, then. Maybe didn’t even regret it now.

Except for what it had done to Mark. What it had done to all of us.

He kept staring and I began to detect something else in his eyes. Some kind of slow-burn satisfaction for the discomfort he was causing me.

‘Why come here today, Claire?’ He propped a thickened forearm on the table. An odour of stale sweat drifted towards me. ‘What did you hope to achieve? Did you want my blessing to carry on with your life? You already had that. I gave it to you six years ago.
You
specifically. The best gift I could ever hope to give you. Better than anything David could buy. Better than any makeover Rachel could provide. Better than any lame joke Scott could make or any trust exercise Callum could come up with. And how did you repay me?’

His eyes were dark vortexes behind his murky specs. He was breathing hard now, the air rasping in and out of his nostrils.

‘It’s strange how you never mention what you do for a living in your letters, Claire. What have you become, I wonder? You were always so into your books. Your studies. Did you become an academic? A writer? A poet?’

I looked down. Looked away. He bunched his fists and mashed his knuckles into the tabletop, pushing up from them until he was standing over me, the orange tabard hanging loose from his swollen neck. I could hear footsteps approaching. The prison officer, moving towards us.

‘Or is what I hear inside here really true? Because sometimes all the letters in the world don’t matter, Claire. None of the others have contacted me. Not even once. I think it’s safe to assume they never give me a thought these days. And you want to know the strangest part? It doesn’t feel like any of them have betrayed me as badly as you.’

The prison officer reached for Mark’s arm but he shook him off and paced away towards the reinforced door, hammering his fist on the metal.

The room hushed and everyone watched him. Me in particular. But he didn’t look back. He never turned around. He just waited for the door to open in front of him and then he hustled through and left me on my own once again.