Osama

NINE

Joe remembered the way Elaine’s screaming had joined Conor’s: she standing at the top of the stairs, he in the bathroom, begging his mother not to die.

He remembered trying to stand up, but not yet being back in full control of his body.

He remembered Elaine shouting at Conor to come with her, and how his son, as he passed him on the landing, threw himself at Joe, beating him with his tiny fists, a puny flurry of rage that Joe wouldn’t have resisted even if he’d been able to.

He remembered the minutes passing like hours as the strength seeped back into his body.

He knew he was alone in the house with Caitlin’s corpse, that Conor and Elaine had fled. He knew it would be just minutes before the police arrived. They wouldn’t see what they were supposed to have seen – a sight that told a story of Joe having murdered his wife before hanging himself. But they would see enough. And when he heard the sirens – faint at first, but quickly growing louder as the cars approached – he knew what he had to do: forget all thoughts of running to Caitlin’s side, or trying to see his son, or attempting to explain the truth of what had happened.

Forget about everything, except getting out of there. The police would have his name. They’d know who he was. They wouldn’t be sending some two-bit bobby and a community service officer. They’d be sending an ARU, fully prepared to drop him if necessary.

Somehow he found himself standing up, holding on to the banister like he was learning to walk again. He remembered edging towards the top of the stairs, the sirens blaring now, their blue strobes flooding in through the bathroom window, lighting up the hallway. The sound of the door being kicked in. The red dots of laser scopes flashing up the staircase. He could hear his own voice, a shadow of itself, shouting as loud as it could: ‘Unarmed! I have no weapon!’

And he remembered his legs giving way, and the brutal, soul-shaking thump as his body collapsed down the stairs and everything around him went black.

When he reawoke – it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes later – he was surrounded by SOCOs, trying to force him, feet first, into a paper body bag to preserve any incriminating DNA on his clothes and skin. Every muscle in his body shrieked with pain, but that hadn’t stopped him lashing out with heavy fists. It had taken at least six officers to pin him down, bind his hands behind his back and continue the process of wrapping him in the DNA suit, before forcing him outside where the night was lit up by flashing blue lights. He remembered shouting – screaming – ?his innocence, yelling about assassins and bin Laden; roaring at them to let him see Caitlin, to let him see his son…

But nobody even answered him.

Then he was in a local police station, held down by the same six officers in a small cell where he was formally cautioned, while a shocked-looking young forensics woman wearing a white coat and pale blue latex gloves took swab samples from inside his mouth, his fingernails, his foreskin. He didn’t stop shouting… his throat was raw, like he’d swallowed a razor… his mind was burning up… the room was spinning… he was screaming Caitlin’s name…

When he heard the forensics woman call for a semen detection kit, it made him roar louder than before… made him raise his knees and kick two of the officers holding him down in the face. Now he was banging his own head against the hard floor – if he did violence on himself, perhaps he could stop the agony…

Lights and faces danced before his eyes.

He heard the call for a sedative shot and he shouted even more – not words, but strangled animal noises.

For the second time that night he felt a needle slip through his skin…

And then darkness once more.

He had no way of knowing how long he was out. When he drifted slowly back into consciousness, he was in a vehicle. It was dark. He was lying on his front on a cold, hard, metallic floor and his hands were tied behind his back. He was wearing only jeans. Bare feet. Bare torso. It was noisy. The floor was vibrating with the movement of the vehicle. The drugs had fully worn off now, but every cell in his body was bulging with pain. His skull throbbed, but that was nothing compared with the agony that exploded in his head when he remembered what had happened. It didn’t matter if he opened his eyes or closed them. All he saw was Caitlin: stricken, brutalized, begging him to help her.

Dead by his hand.

Joe started to dry retch. It would have been better if they’d succeeded in faking his suicide. Then, at least, Conor would be safe. He knew now that somebody was trying to eliminate him. They’d do anything to achieve it. If they could do such a thing to Caitlin, they wouldn’t think twice about targeting his son. He retched again.

Minutes later he pushed himself painfully up to his knees. He figured he was in the back of a secure vehicle about the size of a Transit, maybe a little bigger. On one side there was a small slit in the chassis, the size of a letterbox, with three vertical bars. Getting groggily to his feet, he managed to peer through this peephole. He was on a motorway. Checking the rate at which they passed the cat’s eyes on the hard shoulder, he estimated the speed at 70 mph. The landscape beyond the motorway was enveloped in blackness. He moved to the rear of the van, turned to face the front and felt behind him for any bolts with his bound hands. There was a bar across both doors, like on a fire exit, but it wouldn’t budge. He was locked in from outside. Broken and shuddering, Joe slid once more to the floor in the back of what he guessed was a police van.

He couldn’t read his watch because his wrists were tied behind his back, and there was no way of guessing the time, but it was perhaps two hours after he awoke that the van stopped to refuel. Joe positioned himself by the peephole again. The owner of a Porsche Cayenne was staring in his direction as he refuelled. The guy was lit up – as was the whole service station forecourt – by a blue strobe. Joe realized he must have a police escort. Nobody was taking any chances.

After five minutes they set off again. Joe remained on his feet, looking out of the letterbox, trying to see landmarks he recognized. The angle of his vision made it impossible to read the road signs as they passed, and they had travelled for at least another three hours before he was able to get a bearing: they were crossing the River Thames over the QEII bridge. He counted the lights of four vessels on the river, three heading west, one east. After another half an hour, they turned off what was clearly the M25 and from the motion of the van he calculated that they were heading towards London. It was all the information he needed to work out where they were going.

Remand prison. High security. South-east London. It could only be HMP Barfield.

He’d been there once before, a decade ago. The squadron had been on standby in Hereford when word had come through from the Home Office that the Barfield screws were predicting a riot. They were clearly expecting something big to go off, because the police had requested Regiment support. Sixteen men had travelled down from Hereford to Greenwich and remained in a state of readiness for twenty-four hours. Nothing had happened. Maybe the inmates had got wind that they might have more than a few plods to deal with. Good thing too. Joe and the guys were only ever called into situations that needed the precise and ruthless application of violence. Send a squadron into a Cat A institution – home to some nasty fuckers who made Ronnie and Reggie look like eccentric uncles – and you could be sure of one thing: prison numbers would fall.

The lights above Barfield’s high wire perimeter glowed brightly in the early morning darkness as they approached the entrance. Joe heard a babble of male voices outside, then felt the van move forward again, through the entrance and into an empty reception yard. He tried to estimate the distance they travelled from the gates before stopping. Fifty metres, perhaps. A long way to run, especially with his arms bound behind his back and bare feet. Maybe if he had the element of surprise? Unlikely. He could see flashing lights illuminating the yard. There was a reception party.

He didn’t see the face of the man who opened the back of the vehicle. All he saw were the four armed police, with flak jackets, visored helmets and MP5s, two kneeling five metres back from the van, two standing ten metres behind that. Between the two standing officers was a uniformed screw, tall and thin, carrying a clipboard. ‘Get him in!’ he shouted, his voice echoing in the night. As Joe stood at the vehicle’s exit, squinting against the sudden influx of light from a powerful beam behind the screw, he clocked a look of disgust on the man’s face.

Two more men appeared from the wings. They also wore prison officers’ uniforms, but were burlier than the guy with the clipboard. They pulled Joe roughly from the van, each man taking one of his elbows. Instinctively, Joe wrestled away from them. He was rewarded with a solid truncheon blow in the stomach that knocked the wind from his lungs and bent him double as he was dragged across the yard – his bare heels scraping painfully against the rough tarmac – and into a single-storey brick building, the armed police following some five metres behind.

This first building was little more than a waiting room: five lines of brown plastic chairs and an old vending machine in one corner. There was a door on the far wall, and Joe’s two guards pushed him through it.

In a weird way, the room he found himself in reminded him of the armoury back at Hereford. It wasn’t big – maybe eight metres by five – and there was a long counter with an open doorway into another room behind. There was a desktop computer on the counter, next to which Joe saw what looked like a webcam, and a small flatbed scanner. On the wall behind the counter was a laminated poster entitled ‘Coping with Prison’. At the far end of the room there was a third doorway, this one closed by a heavy metal door studded with bolts and with two keyholes. Apart from Joe and his two guards, the only other person in the room stood behind the counter. He wore a ginger moustache and the bored expression of a clock-watching official. He said three words: ‘Belt, shoelaces, watch.’ Then he looked over the counter and saw Joe’s bare feet and lack of belt. ‘Watch,’ he corrected himself.

Joe gave him a dark look and didn’t move. His hands were still tied behind his back. How the fuck was he supposed to do anything?

The thin screw with the clipboard entered. He took one look at the situation, then nodded at the man behind the counter, who produced a pair of wire cutters and handed them over. ‘We know who you are,’ the thin screw said to Joe in a reedy cockney accent. ‘Let’s not do anything stupid, eh?’

‘I want to see my son.’

‘Tough shit.’

With one squeeze of the cutters, Joe’s hands were free.

Distance to the exit, five metres. Two guards, thin screw, ginger moustache: he could put these four guys down with his bare hands, but he didn’t know what was waiting for him outside. He didn’t move.

‘Watch.’

Joe removed his watch, but kept his eyes on the jobsworth with the moustache. When he placed it on the counter, he saw the man’s face change. Joe looked down at his own hands. His right hand – his knife hand – was blood red, from the fingertips to an inch above the wrist. There was spatter all the way up his arm.

‘Empty your pockets,’ the man said, his lip curled with disgust.

Joe’s eyes flickered to the left. The two guards were standing three metres away, one with his arms folded, the other tapping his truncheon lightly against his right leg. To his right, the thin screw was scribbling something on the clipboard – Joe could hear the sound of his pencil on the paper.

‘Pockets!’ Joe could smell the tobacco on the breath of the man behind the counter. He noticed a signet ring on the little finger of his right hand, and dirt under the fingernails. ‘Come on, I haven’t got all fucking night!’

Joe pulled a five-pound note and a handful of change from the front pocket of his jeans. From the back pocket he removed a folded piece of paper. For a moment he didn’t know what it was, but then he remembered. Conor’s picture, the one his lad had given him in his bedroom back home.

‘You’re not having this,’ Joe muttered, making to put it back in his jeans.

The thug with the truncheon didn’t hesitate. The second blow was even more violent than the first, and Joe felt the paper being ripped from his hands even as he bent double with pain. It took five seconds to grab his breath. When he straightened up, he saw that the man with the moustache had unfolded the paper. With a malicious glint in his watery eyes, he tore it in two, then in two again.

Something snapped in Joe. He hurled himself at the counter, grabbing the officer by his greasy ginger hair and slamming his head down so that it smashed against the counter. The guy cried out. When he stood up again, blood was flowing from his nostrils and he had his hand pressed to his face. Vaguely aware that the thin screw with the clipboard had run from the room at the first sign of trouble, Joe turned to the two guards. They were edging away from him, the thug with the truncheon holding it forward threateningly like a sword. Joe was ready to jump them, but at that moment the armed police officers burst in. Total confusion. Four of them, MP5s dug into their shoulders, shouting at the tops of their voices: ‘Hit the ground, hit the fucking ground!’ Joe dropped to his knees, his hands raised, fully expecting the brutal kicks that his two guards now delivered to the side of his stomach with their heavy black boots. The thin screw reappeared behind the armed police, watched for thirty agonizing seconds, before saying ‘Stop!’

The two prison guards straightened up, leaving Joe in a pile on the floor.

The silence that followed was broken only by the pained swearing of the guy with the ginger moustache. As he tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose, he staggered backwards through the door behind the counter and out of sight. The thin screw gave a nod to one of the ARU. They lowered their weapons and withdrew to the entrance.

‘Stand up.’

Joe stood.

‘Look, pal,’ the screw said. ‘In twenty minutes’ time you’ll either be in a cell or in the hospital wing. The duty nurse is six foot three and called Albert. Lovely bloke. Family man. It’s a very funny thing, but last time he had a wife-beater in there, another inmate managed to stab the little shit with a dirty needle while Albert’s back was turned. Cunt got a nice case of Hep C off of it. Now I might be wrong, but I reckon someone who just killed his missus could find Albert’s got his back turned on him, too…’

‘I didn’t kill her,’ Joe muttered, his voice hoarse.

‘Save it for the beak, pal. Now take the rest of your fucking clothes off before we give Albert something to ignore.’

Joe blinked stupidly up at him. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Clothes!’ barked the screw. ‘Off?! And don’t look at me like that. There’s plenty of faggots on the block, but we’ve all got WAGs to suck us off at home. Your arsehole’s safe on this side of the door…’

Joe stood up slowly. Without taking his gaze from the screw, and aware that everyone in the crowded room – the two guards, the thin screw, the four armed police by the door – were watching him, he stripped, then stood up straight.

‘All right, He-Man, turn round.’

Joe turned.

‘Squat.’

Joe didn’t move.

‘Squat!’

Joe squatted.

‘Cough.’

He did as he was told.

‘All right, you’re clean. Put your fucking trousers back on. Just so’s you know, we’ve got a nasty habit of asking you to do that whenever we feel like it. Remember that if you get tempted to keister anything…’

Joe pulled his jeans back on, then felt himself being yanked towards the counter. The guy with the bloody nose was still missing. Another screw, bald and thickset, had emerged from the room behind the counter. ‘Hand,’ he said, and pointed to the scanner. Joe stretched out his bloodstained hand. The guy grabbed him by the wrist and looked at his palm. He didn’t seem at all bothered by the gore, other than to say: ‘Too much blood. Won’t work. Give me the other one.’

The next thing Joe knew, his clean hand was palm downwards on the scanner bed, and a fluorescent white strip was moving from top to bottom under the glass. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

‘Biometric ID,’ the screw said proudly as he held up the webcam, looked at the screen and pressed the button. ‘Matches your palm print to your face. Course, clever bloke like you won’t be thinking of no funny business.’ He seemed to find this amusing, and grinned at the others.

The thin screw started talking. ‘My name’s Sowden,’ he said. ‘You call me guv and you do what I tell you. Trust me, sunshine, we’ve heard it all and seen it all. You want a quiet life, put your head down and do as you’re told.’

Joe had zoned out. Sowden continued talking – a list of rules and regulations, something about a lawyer and remand custody. His words barely registered.

The bald man handed Joe a bundle of beige clothes, then took a set of keys, walked round to the other side of the counter and opened up the heavy metal door. It was a good eight inches thick with two sets of internal locking bolts each at least three inches in diameter. Joe felt himself being nudged through the door.

He found himself in what felt like a cell – three metres by three, with an identical metal door on the opposite wall. The two prison guards and Sowden joined him, leaving the ARU in the reception area. The door clanged shut behind them. Joe heard the bolts closing. Thirty seconds passed before the second door opened. Another screw was there, his keys attached to his belt by a length of cord. Joe’s guards pushed him out into the corridor beyond, and the door was locked behind him.

This corridor had yellow-painted concrete walls and bright strip lighting. After fifteen metres it led to a second set of double security doors, then to another courtyard, half the size of a football pitch and surrounded by imposing brick buildings four storeys high. Even though it was still night, the sky was bathed in light – Joe had the sense that the whole exterior was lit by floodlights. Every window he could see had bars over it. He counted four prison guards circling the courtyard, each with a German shepherd on a lead. One of the dogs looked in his direction, its ears flattened. Its handler yanked its lead sharply and continued to circle the courtyard.

The building to which the guards led Joe was on the opposite side of the courtyard at his ten o’clock. This time they passed through a single security door, which Sowden carefully locked behind them. They were in a small annexe with a sign on the opposite wall: ‘Category A’.

‘You said remand,’ Joe muttered.

‘We’ve been advised you’re a flight risk. You’re under observation. Do yourself a favour and keep your head down.’ Joe opened his mouth to argue. He didn’t get the chance. ‘Give me any more trouble, fella, I’ll stick you with the fucking Irish. I reckon they’d make short work of a nice army lad like you. Trust me, mate, you’re better off with Hunter.’

Joe didn’t ask who Hunter was. He figured he’d find out soon enough.

The block Sowden and the two guards led him to consisted of three landings, each with a set of security bars at intervals of fifteen metres and lined with solid metal doors with shuttered peepholes every seven or eight metres on either side. Joe’s guards led him to the third door on the right of the ground-floor landing. One of them rapped on the door – three heavy thumps – then unlocked it.

‘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?’

Joe closed his eyes. The horror flashed back into his mind. The knife entering Caitlin’s body, the noose, Conor’s scream… When he opened his eyes five seconds later, he saw that his hand was shaking again. The lawyer made a show of noticing it too. One eyebrow shot up meaningfully. ‘Sergeant Mansfield?’ she pressed.

He stared at her. Unbidden, another image returned to him. Dom Fletcher, his OC, asking if any of them had breached SOPs. The way his gaze had lingered for a fraction of a second on Joe.

‘Who sent you?’

She blinked. ‘I told you, I’ve been assigned to your—’

Joe made an impatient tutting sound. Why the fuck should he trust this woman? Why should he trust anyone?

‘I want to go back to my cell,’ he said.

‘You can’t do that. You’re looking at life without parole, Sergeant Mansfield. As your designated legal counsel I’m obliged to advise you that we request a full psychiatric evaluation, and that we do it immediately…’

‘Shut up!’ Joe roared at her. ‘Just fucking shut up!’

He could feel himself losing it, feel his whole body shaking with anger.

He could see Ricky, looking at him across the minefield… ?Caitlin’s face as the knife entered…

He was on his feet, banging on the door with his fists, vaguely aware that the woman behind him was shouting for help.

The guards were there… barking at him… restraining him…

And ten minutes later Joe was back in his cell, trembling, his breath jerky, cold sweat soaking his body.

Hunter stared at him like he was a lunatic. He was sitting cross-legged on the top bunk. The TV was on. Some fucking Noel Edmonds game show. Behind him, Joe heard the sound of a key in the cell door. He kept his back to the door, breathing deeply, trying to regain control of himself.

‘Lock-up till twelve-thirty, fella,’ Hunter said nervously. Joe stepped forward and switched off the TV. No complaint. Hunter clearly knew what was good for him. Joe lay on the bottom bunk. Perhaps emboldened by the fact that Joe hadn’t threatened violence, he spoke again. ‘I can sell you some snout,’ he said. His voice had taken on a wheedling tone. ‘Pay me back when you get—’

‘What’s that?’

A huge din had erupted outside. Shouting. Clattering. Joe jumped up and strode towards the window. He opened it – it was grimy and smeared – and looked through the bars onto the exercise yard. Approximately twenty inmates had walked out into it. Without exception they had their hands in their pockets and their heads down. None of them spoke to anyone else, and everyone ignored the din. It came, so far as Joe could tell, from the windows that overlooked the exercise yard, of which there had to be almost fifty. He could see hands emerging from the windows, grabbing the bars and rattling them. Amid the chaos of shouting, he heard two words repeated: ‘beast’ and ‘nonce’.

‘I saw you talking to Finch.’ Hunter’s voice was slightly strained, as if he wanted to distract Joe from what was going on outside. Joe closed the window – the noise deadened slightly – and turned back to him.

‘Who’s Finch?’ he demanded.

‘He’s from Northern Ireland.’

Joe remembered the man in the breakfast queue.

‘Give you a word of advice for free?’ said Hunter.

‘What?’

‘Finch thinks he’s top dog. Least, he wants other people to think that. But he can’t touch Hennessey. Don’t matter where he is…’

‘Who the fuck’s Hennessey?’

‘He’s in the Seg Wing,’ Hunter said. ‘Solitary. Often is. Reckon he prefers it that way. Don’t stop him running the place.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You think the screws are in charge here?’ Hunter snorted dismissively. ‘That’s bullshit. Hennessey’s in charge. Ain’t afraid of nothing or nobody. Up to his eyes in drugs and killings when he was on the outside. Done three murders since he’s been banged up. Knows he ain’t never getting out.’

‘Who did he kill?’

‘Scoobies wouldn’t give him his own cell up in Hull when he got banged up. Bumped his cellmate off first night he was in. Smashed the bloke’s skull against the wall, that’s what I heard. Done it another two times before they give him his own room. Fucking stupid, some of these screws, if you ask me. Anyway, what Hennessey says goes. Even the scoobies do what he tells them, and there ain’t a single inmate won’t follow his orders. Except Finch and his crew, of course. But they’ll learn. He’s a clever bastard, Hennessey, on top of everything else. Sly. Knows how to make things work for himself.’

Another pause. Hunter started examining his fingernails.

‘Does he get visitors?’ The more information Joe could get on this Hennessey, the better.

‘Why you so interested?’

Joe gave him a dangerous look.

‘All right, all right,’ Hunter said quickly. ‘There’s a woman, least that’s what I heard. Comes in once a month. Scoobies let them hook up, dunno where.’

‘Know her name?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone else get the same treatment?’

Hunter shook his head. ‘Special privileges. Word is, the only thing that’s stopping Hennessey’s lot rioting is his say-so. Take away his privileges…’ He made a sign with his hands like a bomb going off. ‘Like I say, clever bastard. Knows how to fix things. Course,’ he added quietly, ‘it’s because of Hennessey that I’m not in the Seg Wing with the others.’

‘What others?’

‘The others that are… in here for the same as me.’

‘The sex cases?’

Another sniff. ‘If that’s what you want to call us. Got the scoobies in his pocket, ain’t he? Knows he’ll never get us all out into the general prison population, so he’s doing us one by one. Last fella they done in the showers. Cut him to ribbons, his dick and all. Broke both his arms. Didn’t kill him, though. Dunno why. Young lad. Nice fella.’ He sniffed again. ‘I’m next. They already had a go, didn’t they?’

‘The train tracks on your neck?’

‘You been eyeing me up?’

Joe immediately stepped forward and grabbed the disgusting little nonce by his hair. Hunter squealed like a frightened girl. ‘What did they use?’ Joe hissed.

‘A shiv.’

‘What the fuck’s a shiv?’

‘A weapon,’ the nonce babbled. ‘Home-made. The block’s full of them…’

Joe let go of his hair in disgust. ‘How did they make it?’ he demanded.

‘The one that done me? I think it was a toothbrush they used. Two razor blades superglued to the end.’ Hunter scrambled up into a kneeling position, then made a swiping gesture with his right hand. His eye burned brightly as he did it, but when his imaginary slice was complete, he shuddered and put his fingers to his neck, as though reliving the pain. ‘But they done me with a power cord off the telly once, too. Blades tied to it.’ He made a whipping gesture to explain how that worked. A frown crossed his face. ‘Reckon they’re playing with me. You know, like cats and mice.’

‘You got a shiv of your own?’

Hunter shook his head timidly. ‘The scoobies don’t want me to defend myself,’ he said. ‘They search me more than the others.’ But Joe had immediately noticed the way his eyes darted towards the wall behind him. He looked over his shoulder, to see Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus grinning back. Joe marched over to the posters and was about to rip them from the wall, when Hunter spoke quietly.

‘Don’t do that, fella…’

Joe’s hand stopped inches from the top of Justin Bieber’s gay haircut. Hunter looked anxiously over at the locked door, then carefully peeled back the Blu-tack fixing the bottom corner of Miley Cyrus to the wall so that Joe could see the back of the poster. There were two strips of masking tape, each about two inches long, stuck to the shiny paper. Underneath each strip, Joe could see the outline of a razor blade. ‘I won’t go to the showers,’ he admitted. ‘I wash in here. Reckon this is where they’ll try to do me, when the time comes.’

Hunter lowered the poster and stuck the Blu-tack to the wall again. He waddled back to his ladder and climbed up into the top bunk. His lips spread, fat and toad-like, as he watched Joe return to his own bunk.

‘Do the other inmates see newspapers?’ Joe said.

‘Course. If they pay for them. What d’you want, Page 3?’

Joe didn’t answer. All he really wanted was to find out if the rest of the prison population had access to the article about him. It seemed they did.

‘There’s blow,’ said Hunter. He sounded desperate, as if he was trying to get on Joe’s good side. ‘If you know where to get it…’

But Joe didn’t want drugs, he didn’t want tobacco, and he didn’t want anything to do with the man he was sharing a room with. If Hennessey’s boys felt the need to do Hunter, they were welcome to him. All Joe wanted was to get out of this stinking, scum-infested shithole. Or, failing that, to protect himself.

He had access to two razor blades and nothing else.

It wasn’t much, but it would be enough.