Missing, Presumed (29 page)

She is all mouth; impossibly dry, thick as wool. An eye open to a white room. Has she died? It is so white, perhaps this is the afterlife, in which case, it should have a better view. A broad picture window gives out onto leafless trees and the flat roofs of municipal buildings, the sky the colour of porridge. She has a headache which threatens to split her skull.

‘Here, you’ll need a drink.’

Someone is lifting her neck and she closes her mouth around a straw, the liquid so shocking it sears her temples.

‘You’re a lucky woman,’ he says.

She focuses her dehydrated eyes – first on his white coat, then the stethoscope, then his black stubble. He smells of coal tar soap. His tie is lying on her body. He straightens, places her cup on the bedside unit, and she can see his olive skin and dark eyebrows. Albanian or Middle Eastern, perhaps. She would like to rearrange her hair, wipe the crust from the corners of her mouth.

‘That was quite a blow to your head,’ he is saying. ‘Knocked you out cold. Might have been a punch, or you might’ve been struck with something. We were concerned the injury might cause a bleed into your brain – that’s why we kept you in overnight. How’re you feeling?’

‘Rough,’ she croaks.

He smiles. ‘We’re going to monitor you a bit longer, run some tests. I’m going to get you some paracetamol. Expect you’ve got a fierce headache, right?’ He is
really
nice-looking, though now she considers it, possibly about fifteen years younger than she is. ‘By the way, you’ve got a visitor.’

The doctor and Harriet dance round each other in the doorway. Manon closes her eyes, her head heavy on the pillow. She feels Harriet’s nervous energy lower into the plastic chair beside her bed, her hand coming to rest on Manon’s.

‘What happened?’ Manon whispers.

‘From the CCTV, looks like a kid – an addict, probably – was being opportunistic, saw you alone, liked the look of your handbag. What the hell were you doing—’

‘Not Tony Wright, then?’

‘No, in fact our beloved Tony came to your aid – called 999, saw off whoever’d done it. Anyway, this kid, who we will catch, don’t you worry, has seriously assaulted one of my police officers and has now got himself a police BlackBerry.’

‘Which is passcode-locked, so don’t panic. I’ll give a statement to CID. Let them get on with it.’

‘Hmm,’ Harriet murmurs sceptically. ‘Anyway, he’ll be going to prison for a
really
long time, which’ll sort out his habit one way or the other. What the fuck were you doing there on your own?’

‘Edith Hind was on Tony Wright’s authorised visitor list in Whitemoor.’

‘What the
fuck
?’

Manon nods. ‘He reckons they were friends.’

They are silent for a moment, contemplating this information.

‘Edith was visiting him? Voluntarily?’ says Harriet.

‘Apparently,’ says Manon. ‘Wilco Bennett, one of the screws at Whitemoor, is sending me his whole file. That’ll give us more.’

‘What were those calls about, then, in the week before she disappeared? Did Wright tell you?’

Manon has raised her head from the pillow, ‘He says, “Och, this ’n’ that. How youse doin?”’ She has put on an appalling Scots accent, to which Harriet grimaces and says, ‘Where’s he from, Bangladesh?’

‘Anyway, I don’t buy it,’ says Manon, head back on the pillow. ‘I think something was being set up.’

‘Like what – a deal? A meeting?’

‘Dunno. I think we’ve been looking at Wright all wrong. We’ve been assuming he harmed her when I think—’

The door has opened and there is Davy, his expression reserved.

‘I’ll have to pull him in – Wright, I mean. Question him about this,’ says Harriet. ‘Anyway, I’ll leave you two to it.’

Davy has sat down on the plastic seat beside her bed. ‘Brought you these,’ he says, handing her garage forecourt flowers in clear cellophane.

‘Chrysanthemums,’ she says. She raises the bunch to her nose, sniffs. Frowns. The faint whiff of piss. She hates chrysanthemums and has evidently failed to rearrange her face because Davy says, ‘Back to your old self so soon.’

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’

‘S’all right. I bought them because I know you don’t like them.’

Her face crumples, dissolving in a sudden well of moisture. She didn’t think she had any wetness left in her dehydrated walnut of a head. ‘I’m so sorry, Davy. I’d never want to hurt you. You of all people, you’re the last person I’d ever … I’d ever …’ Childish judders, up and down. ‘You’re the best copper I know.’

‘I’m not though, am I? Always paddling too hard.’

‘Not lately,’ she says. ‘Lately you’ve seemed quite shirty.’

‘I’m weak,’ he says.

‘No you’re not, you’re not weak at all. Look at all the things you do for the kids at the centre, giving up your own time, when I say no to Fly at every opportunity. And the guilt you feel over Helena Reed when I can’t even look that in the face.’

Her eyes have filled again and she seeks his face. He looks back at her and smiles, as if her tears are apology enough.

‘Slept with Chloe last night,’ he says, sheepish.

‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘That’ll set you back. Comfort shag?’

He nods.

She rests her head back on the pillow and they sit in contemplative silence.

Eventually she whispers, half to herself, ‘I should have
fuckwit
tattooed on my forehead.’

‘Wouldn’t fit,’ says Davy.

‘Just
twat
then.’

‘That’d fit.’

He leans back in his chair. She closes her eyes. She loves a silence with Davy Walker. Some people give good silence, and he is one of them.

‘Being walloped really makes you feel low,’ she says.

‘You’re always low.’

‘I know, but more so. I feel …’ and she starts to cry again, looking at the trees beyond her broad hospital window. She realises they have given her this spacious room to herself because she’s a police officer.

‘I think you need a dog,’ Davy says.

‘What?’

‘I heard a dog makes unhappy people happy. They’re good, y’know, for people who can’t form proper relationships.’

‘You’re a real tonic, Davy.’

She lies there as the light fades through her picture window, waiting for the handsome doctor to discharge her, thinking about Edith, about Tony Wright, the sense that he
knew
she was alive. The hospital radio burbles out the news, still leading on the Tilbury Docks container death. Bryony will be up against it on the Abdul-Ghani Khalil evidence, she thinks as her mind begins its descent, merging with the news report; details of the routes driven by his trucks.

She sleeps.

The thrum of her printer is almost keeping time with the aching pulse inside her head. Manon is cross-legged on the floor in pyjamas and thick socks, a blanket around her shoulders. Her back is aching, her knees stiff. The room is crepuscular but for the light from an Anglepoise which she has dragged onto the floor; it is interrogating, with its brash light, the sheaves of paper which surround her.

Paper, upon paper, upon paper, and as the printer spews out more, they flutter down, creating more chaos.
Can’t get the AV list off of this,
Wilco Bennett’s email said,
so I’m just attaching his entire IIS file – all fifteen years of it. Enjoy!

The Inmate Information System contained everything about the life of a prisoner: personal details, offence, sentence, possibility of parole, relationships, movements (from that spur on that wing to another), case note information, risk assessments, courses taken, activities, paid and unpaid work, breaches of discipline, offender rehabilitation programmes.

Manon crawls across the white sea, leaving her blanket like a worm cast in sand, to where her phone has vibrated.

How’s the head? I’d bring you lasagne + Nurofen but my trafficking case has proper kicked off. Bri

She’s reminded to take more Nurofen, alternating them two-hourly with paracetamol, though the dull ache remains like a background noise. She pads to the kitchen where the chill curls itself about her neck and ankles. And as she tips her head back, swallowing, she wonders what she hopes she’ll find delving into Tony Wright’s life inside and – also printing out in reams – the 200-page Ministry of Justice report compiled by the CIC with Edith Hind’s assistance. ‘Staff–prisoner relations in Whitemoor prison’ – a vivid portrait of prison life.

The nice doctor discharged her from Addenbrooke’s last night and Harriet has forbidden her from coming into the office. ‘Don’t be a nutter. Stay home. Recuperate. I don’t want to see you in before Tuesday at the earliest,’ she said.

Back in her twilit lounge, the pages crinkle under her feet. She crosses one foot over the other and lowers to the floor, pulling the blanket around her shoulders and gathering new sheaves to read.

The first three years of a long sentence are the worst, she has learned. New inmates are put on the induction spur on C-wing and are most prone to existential crises; likely to self-harm. Here are men facing fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years in prison without hope of release. They are desperate for meaning, beset by loss. Tony Wright, then in his early forties, was no exception. He cut his arms with razor blades when he could get hold of them, and blades appear to feature widely in Whitemoor.

She shuffles the papers, then glances at her watch. Four p.m. She began reading at ten this morning, but she must have dozed at intervals right here on the floor, the blanket like a cocoon.

Page 20 of Wright’s file:
Emotional outbursts. No reduction in Cat A status.
For years he seemed to suffer the most stringent form of incarceration, every emotion deemed ‘risk’. Stints in segregation. One suicide attempt. In conversation with his personal officer following this attempt, Tony Wright said, ‘I’m spam. I’m meat in a tin.’

Don’t laugh, don’t look happy,
he wrote in a letter home that was confiscated and kept on file,
cos someone is looking at you on a monitor, deciding you’re not suffering enough, and that someone is deciding your sentence review.

Inmate moved to different cell every 28 days,
a note on Wright’s file states, including strip searches and ‘cell turns’, to prevent the formation of gang-style relationships. Or any relationships, Manon thinks.

Paracetamol. Cups of tea. At one point she takes a bath. Perhaps she dozes off once or twice. But she comes back to the floor, the puzzle tessellating in white across her carpet.

The CIC report describes a brutalising regime in Whitemoor towards the back end of Wright’s sentence. Staff were distant, distrustful; violence endemic. Where previously high security prisons used to function on a known code – a gentlemanly agreement between the old lags and the screws – the modern, multicultural population of Whitemoor was viewed with intense suspicion by its staff. Prison officers were frightened by the growing Muslim population; while outside, in the run-up to a general election, the press and public were growing less liberal by the day.
Prison should be for punishment, not rehabilitation. Offenders, particularly those convicted under the terrorism act, were having an easy ride.
In response to these hard-line views, the Home Secretary cancelled rafts of arts and education courses inside Whitemoor.

Manon looks up. The printer is growling, turning over against itself. A red light flashes. Paper jam.

She gets up, opens the printer’s various drawers and flaps, pulls out an inky drum, fingers blackened, then can’t jimmy it back in again. She cannot locate the jammed paper. She slaps the flaps shut again, jabs at the button angrily, turns it off, waits, then on again. She roars in frustration when she sees the red light resume its flashing and thinks she might hurl it against the wall. Then she cries. Alan could’ve fixed it. Alan probably has a laser jet, which never jams because he checked its reviews on
Which?
And he probably keeps spare cartridges in a drawer. No one can help her with the printer jam. She is alone. And all this time they have misunderstood Tony Wright.

Back sitting cross-legged on the floor, she picks up another page of Wright’s IIS report. Tony Wright moved to B-wing, to the spur for prisoners on the enhanced level of the incentives and earned privileges scheme. Things seem to be improving for him. In 2005 he gets a job in the library. A note says he keeps his head down – a ‘loner’.
Prisoner 518 focused on serving his sentence and leaving prison at the earliest opportunity.
Wright has learned how to make life better for himself, plus he is nearing the end of his sentence, but in the truly repressive conditions of Whitemoor, he is living in a febrile atmosphere. In another confiscated letter, he writes:
I keep my head down. I don’t talk to nobody. My personality’s out there somewhere, waiting for me to grasp it when I’m out.

On the same page is a note:
Prisoner reading
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy. Material confiscated: violent themes.

Manon wipes the tears from her cheeks.

Along came Edith Hind: listening to him, trying to understand him. Asking how his day was, how his life was, what his plans might be, and whether she could help him. She must’ve been the first person to treat him like a human being in fifteen years. Even the words, ‘Hello, Tony, how are you?’ must’ve been like a long drink to a man dying of thirst.

She looks at her watch. It is 2 a.m. She pulls the blanket more closely about her shoulders, crawls to the last pages spewed by her now-paralysed printer. Page 258 of Tony Wright’s IIS file. Inmate returned to C-wing, Cat A status.

Manon is frowning. What has happened to cause a set-back like this?

Prisoner 518 involved in breach of prison discipline during altercation with prisoner 678 in the gym. Sentence review frozen. In light of prisoner 518’s involvement in this violent episode, consideration of parole denied until further risk assessment has been carried out.

Who was prisoner 678? Manon pushes at the papers around her on the floor. They slide over each other like water. She leafs, faster and faster, through the white sea, looking for an explanation for this about-turn after a decade of model behaviour. Then she finds it. IIS file page 259: Prisoner 518 statement, transcribed verbatim from a recording of an interview with prison staff, investigating the gym incident, 21 January 2009.

I was workin’ out in the gym by myself, runnin’ on the treadmill, when Prisoner 678 came and began working the weights next tae me. Dumb bells an’ that. We were nice an’ quiet, the two of us, no’ talkin’. I seen him about but he wisnae ma pal or nothin’. Anyways, a group of prisoners walked into the gym, white guys wi’ tatts. Hated the Brotherhood, these guys. Thought the Muslims had too much power. They surrounded the lad next tae me. I’d like tae use his name, no’ his number, if ye dinnae mind, because he’s a human bein’, ye ken?

So this chap, Khalil – Abdul, I think his first name is – he’s carrying on nice an’ quiet, lifting his weights, but ye could cut the tension w’ a knife. He an’ I both knew those guys had come in here fer violence, a ‘lesson’ it’s called in here, ’cos there’s no cameras in the gym. All the cuttin’ and punchin’ in Whitemoor happens in the gym.

‘Brother Khalil,’ one of ’em said to him. Another of them pulled a blade. They held his arms behind his back and cut his throat. Then they walked out.

I was still runnin’ on the treadmill – can ye believe that? – an’ ma first thought was: There’ll be a lock-down now on the wing. Ah need te get ma stuff ’cos they’ll be turnin’ all the cells after this. That’s what this place turned me into. That’s how much o’ my humanity’s been sucked from me in here. An’ maybe there’s folk’d say I didnae have any humanity to start with, but I had some. Anyways, I remembered maself at that moment, an’ I raised the alarm, an’ I tried to stop him bleeding to death until the medic got tae us. He’s a person. An’ I’m a person, ye ken?

Prisoner’s sentence review unfrozen and all privileges restored,
says Wright’s file,
in the light of this statement and supporting statement from Prisoner 678 (A-G Khalil).

Manon looks up, dazed. Tony Wright saved Abdul-Ghani Khalil’s life.