The Moth Catcher

Chapter One

Lizzie Redhead listened. In the prison it was never quiet. Not even now in the middle of the night. The other women in her room stirred, snuffling like animals in their sleep. No cells here. Dormitories that reminded her of school. No privacy. No darkness, either. A gleam from the corridor outside shone through the crack under the door, and though this was a low-security establishment there were spotlights at the walls and the gate, and the curtains were thin. Footsteps in the corridor outside. A screw checking that lass on suicide-watch. Two in the morning.

Lizzie worked in the prison farm, so she had access to fresh air and enough exercise to keep her fit, but that didn’t mean she slept well. She’d never needed much sleep. She’d always believed she didn’t belong to her parents; had decided when she was quite small that she was a foundling child, secretly adopted. What did they have in common after all? She had too much energy and a very low boredom threshold. Annie and Sam were soft and gentle, big on squidgy hugs and soppy kisses. Lizzie saw herself as hard and metallic. As an adult she’d chosen men like her. Flinty. Flint on flint made fire. Jason Crow had set her alight.

In a week she’d be released, and she was making plans. She’d become healthy in prison. She’d realized there were better ways to get her kicks than booze and drugs. Jason had taught her that too, though she hadn’t believed him at the time. She knew, from all he’d told her, that she was lucky to have ended up in an open institution.

In prison her entertainment was simple. She visited the library and joined the writers’ group. She had stories to tell and she needed to find the right words. In the library she’d found a book published by the National Geographic and kept renewing the loan until she believed the book was hers. She lay on her bed and looked at pictures of places she wanted to see for herself, felt dizzy at the idea of travelling, had in her nostrils the smell of the rain forest, the salt of distant seas. Huge places, big enough to contain her ambition. Her parents had spent all their life within ten miles of the valley where her father had been born. Lizzie needed tough places to battle with, rocks sharp enough to cut her flesh.

She’d been a cutter when she was a teenager, slicing into her arm with a razor, high on the smell of metal and blood. She still occasionally harboured dreams of steel, sharp blades, blood oozing in perfectly round drops from clean cuts. Her mother had never noticed. Lizzie had always been good at hiding her secrets. Now she was hiding Jason Crow’s secrets too. She was haunted by them, but she waited for the time that they might be useful to her.