Читать книгу The Angry Sea - James Deegan - Страница 13

1.

AT SEVEN-THIRTY, half an hour before unlocking, the prison came banging and rattling and echoing to life.

But Zeff Mahsoud and his cellmate had been up since well before sunrise, in order to perform their fajr.

Now they sat facing each other, Mahsoud on a tubular chair pushed hard against the cream-painted wall, the other man on his steel-framed bed.

‘I have a good feeling about today, brother,’ said the cellmate. ‘I think it will be good news.’

‘Inshallah, Hamid,’ said Mahsoud. ‘Time will tell.’

‘Be confident. Tonight you will be in your wife’s arms. Tomorrow…’ Hamid paused, and lowered his voice. HMP Belmarsh was not a place which rewarded the incautious. ‘Tomorrow, who knows?’

Mahsoud smiled. ‘Who knows indeed?’ he said.

Lazily, he got up and walked to the cell door, bending down to pick up the breakfast tray which had been handed over the previous night.

A plastic bowl of own-brand cornflakes, a carton of UHT milk, and a bread roll: he curled up his lip.

‘You’ll visit my friend?’ said Hamid. ‘Like I said?’

‘If I am released…’

‘You will be.’

‘If I am released, then yes, I will visit your friend.’

‘He will be most interested to meet you. I think he will have very interesting proposals for you.’

‘I hope so.’

‘I know so. He has big plans. Dramatic plans.’

Zeff Mahsoud smiled.

Cornflakes in hand, he walked over to the small window, and looked up at the clear blue skies over south-east London.

Seven or eight miles away, over Bromley, a passenger jet was climbing away through 6,000ft.

Mahsoud watched it go.

Three hundred souls and a hundred tonnes of aviation fuel, in a thin aluminium tube.

So thin.

So vulnerable.

‘I have plans of my own, brother,’ he said.

But I’m afraid I cannot share them with you, he thought.