CHAPTER 71 Simone
Simone
Next to a No Smoking sign, an inmate in the yard is pretending to light up.
Simone watches her for several seconds, fascinated.
Imaginary cigarette held between thumb and index finger, the way you’d hold a roll-up you treasured, not a mass-produced cigarette.
She brings it – nothing – to her mouth, sucks her cheeks in, then blows out.
Simone’s arraignment and sentencing is in only two days, and therefore it is also in two days’ time that she will likely leave this jail for a prison, but all she is doing is nothing, just watching the non-smoker, also doing nothing, smoking nothing.
‘Been forced to quit,’ she tells Simone, ‘so I’m pretending.’ She pauses. ‘No nicotine patches allowed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Simone says, then offers up, ‘if it helps, I’m being forced to quit nice food.’
The woman lets out a little laugh. ‘Aren’t we all? Nice food and human rights. Natch.’
She comes over to Simone with a hand outstretched. Simone finds she doesn’t want to shake it but does so anyway, hoping none of the nearby guards will accuse her of anything. ‘Victoria,’ the woman says.
‘Simone.’
‘Nice name. Too nice for a murderer,’ she says, but her tone is light, without any loaded quality at all, and Simone supposes that maybe this passes for small talk.
Is it a film-and-TV myth that you never ask what someone is in for?
She doesn’t know, but somehow Victoria is fully aware of Simone’s crime.
‘Well, not everyone’s story is as obvious as it seems,’ Simone says.
She tilts her head back and looks into the high blue sky.
Just at the very edges, she can see trees, unfamiliar, cactus-like, and she finds herself thinking that it ought not to matter what country she is in, but that it does.
The yard is as dusty as the desert she and Lucy slept in, the clouds feather and down, the chain-link fences hot underneath her fingertips.
Sunscreen is allowed in jail here, and Simone bets it isn’t in England.
There’s a watchtower in the centre of the yard, its walls surrounded by barbed wire.
A guard sits at the top, looking out, and Simone shields her eyes against the fierce, hot sun, even into the autumn, and tries to get a glimpse of his face.
An aeroplane begins to pass, somewhere distant, taking free people from place to place.
Most of the inmates are playing basketball, something that at first seems like fun but seems more volatile the longer you look.
‘My trial is in six months. Been here six already,’ Victoria says. She flicks imaginary ash off the end of the cigarette. ‘Backlog due to Covid.’
Victoria looks directly at Simone. She has pale skin, ginger hair, near perfect features.
Her hair is recently cut, blunt ends, and Simone finds herself thinking how life must go on, even in jail, somehow.
Haircuts and sunscreen and dental procedures and who knows what else, the bits that purport to make up a life.
‘I’m being sentenced soon.’
Victoria locks her eyes to Simone’s in surprise. ‘Pleading guilty?’
‘Yeah.’
‘To murder? Aren’t you the one with the kidnapping?’ she asks, and Simone wonders how word travels so fast when this has never once been offered up by Simone as a defence since her arrest.
‘That’s me. Did a deal with the state,’ she says tightly.
‘The worst people to do a trade with.’ Victoria makes a gesture then, upwards to the barbed wire, to the unhappy women playing basketball as some kind of attempt at recreation, to the open skies that are available to everybody but them.
‘Well, sometimes you don’t have a choice.’
Victoria turns her mouth down at that in a kind of tacit agreement, nods, and throws her ‘cigarette’ on to the ground where she stubs it out.
‘And your guy – your daughter’s kidnapper …’
Simone raises her eyebrows.
‘One of the other inmates told me. We always google new people.’
‘On …?’
‘People on the outside do it for us,’ she tells her. ‘It’s more fun than basketball.’
‘Right.’
‘Your kidnapper is still at large, then? Just carrying on kidnapping?’
‘You believe me?’
‘Of course,’ Victoria tells her. She smiles grimly. ‘Why would you traffic drugs?’
‘Right.’
‘So he’s just – free? You don’t know who he is?’
‘Right. Some anonymous person, somewhere out there.’
‘Who never gets caught.’ She raises her eyes again to the barbed wire, the watchtower.
‘If somebody is getting away with something, I’d always look on the inside.
’ She brings an imaginary lighter out of her pocket and pulls down on an invisible metal barrel.
Simone can almost hear the rasp of it, see the flame dancing invisibly there in the white sun.
‘I always smoked them in twos,’ she explains.
‘Anyway, guess you’ve made your mind up.
’ She meets Simone’s eyes again. ‘But I wanted to say, I’d vote not guilty, if I were on your jury. ’
‘I’m not having a trial,’ Simone says.
But while it is all these words that reverberate in Simone’s brain for the next hour, it’s these in particular that are the loudest. I’d always look on the inside.
Who, on the inside, knew where they were going to be? Somebody they have overlooked?
Simone requests a phone call as soon as she can after this, and is granted one because it is telephone night.
Moody calls her back, and she’s allowed to take it in a crowded and horrible anteroom that grandly calls itself the Communications Hub.
It consists of white-painted breeze-block walls, a black-painted floor and the stale smell of cooked onions in the air.
Along the left are four hooded telephone booths, old-fashioned payphones that remind Simone of the worst night of her life the second she touches the handset. The screen reads CALLER UNKNOWN.
‘There are no other victims of kidnap who have come forward. And there is nobody in the area who used to traffic drugs and got convicted for it and ended up on a watch list,’ Moody tells her. ‘As we know.’
‘… Right,’ Simone says. ‘I was talking to somebody in here. She said, if the kidnapper has evaded getting caught, what if it’s somebody on the inside? I know we discounted the police, but …’
Moody is silent for a little while after she says this. So much so that Simone checks the line is still connected. ‘It could be somebody in control of the situation,’ he answers eventually. Then he says two words to her: ‘Border Patrol.’
Simone blinks. ‘A border official at the airport knew I was meeting Lucy,’ Simone says. ‘I told him. He was helping me to find my suitcase …’
‘He ask any questions?’
‘My flight number. I told him I was staying with Lucy …’
‘How long did your luggage take?’
‘A little while,’ Simone says softly. ‘Half an hour, maybe.’
‘Long enough to give someone advance notice to go and break a door while no one was there.’
The remote check-in. She’d told him that, too. Could it be?
Moody pauses again, and Simone hears paper crinkling. ‘Leave it with me,’ he tells her. Then adds: ‘Just – Yes. Leave it with me.’
Not even three hours later, a bored guard gets Simone.
‘Another call for you. Lawyer says it’s urgent, that we gotta comply, apparently,’ he tells her, and Simone trails him down corridors with doors that double-lock and bolt.
Nobody else is out of their cells. It’s the early evening, the jail quiet, and something about it feels almost like Dishes after hours.
Dim light, tidy surfaces, soft-close doors.
The Communications Hub is empty, dark, the only illumination from an office room next door that shines a yellow rectangle on to the polished black floor.
One phone has its receiver on the top, and Simone takes it, heart pounding, while a guard pretends not to listen.
‘Simone, how sure is Lucy that the kidnapper is male?’ Moody asks.