Читать книгу The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows - Marnie Riches - Страница 8

‘Put a bag over my head, didn’t I?’ the woman said, biting nails that were already at the quick.

Couldn’t have been more than twenty, this one. Looked nearer to forty with a complexion the colour of porridge. Overweight and swollen-faced, George guessed anti-depressants were at work. Dull blue eyes, as though the medication had caused a film to form over her sclera, preventing her from seeing the world in its grim true colours. Another poor cow in a pen full of poor cows.

‘What do you mean, you put a bag over your head?’ she asked the woman. She was poised to write. Steeling her hand to stop shaking. Unnerving to be back inside the very same prison she had spent three unforgettable months in – now a long time ago. A one-star vacation at Her Majesty’s leisure. All meals provided. The beatings had come for free. She had not known then that she would swap these Victorian red-brick walls of a one-time Barnardo’s home for the ivory tower of St. John’s College, Cambridge. No, she had been a poor cow in a stall full of crap, same as the others.

Her interviewee leaned forward. Cocked her head to one side. Grimaced.

‘Are you fucking thick or what?’ A spray of spittle accompanied ‘thick’.

Issued forth with venom, George knew. Tap, tap on her temple with her chewed index finger.

‘Donna.’ The prison officer’s tone issued warning enough for Donna to back up.

‘I said, I put the bag on my head. They didn’t know I had it. Tied it tight.’ Donna folded her arms. Smiling now. Satisfied. ‘It was Sainsbury’s. It had fucking holes in the bottom, didn’t it?’

‘Did you intend to kill yourself?’ George asked, a rash unexpectedly starting to itch its way up her neck. She knew Donna wouldn’t catch sight of it so easily because darker skin hid a multitude. She disciplined herself not to scratch.

‘Yeah. Course I bleedin’ did.’

The prison officer, a heavy-set woman in her thirties, by the looks, laughed. ‘Come on, Donna. We all know you were doing a Michael Hutchence, weren’t you?’

‘What?’

Donna was almost certainly too young to have heard of him, George thought.

‘Feller from INXS. Offed himself by accident, doing an asphyxi-wank or something.’

Donna tugged at the collar of her standard-issue tracksuit – too tight over her low-hanging, braless breasts. ‘You taking the piss?’

‘Yes.’

Insane laughter from both of them then. A camaraderie that George was used to seeing, along with the gallows humour. When the mirth subsided, Donna confessed the real reason for her grand polyethylene gesture.

‘I had bedbugs, didn’t I? They were biting like bastards.’ She started to rub her forearms through the jersey material. ‘I asked for a new mattress but they wouldn’t bloody listen. So, I puts the bag on my head, cos if they think you’re going to top yourself in here, you stand a better chance of them actually listening to what you’re on about.’ She glowered at the prison officer, seated beside her. Switched the glare for a grin like a deft pickpocket. ‘I been in here two years, right? Got another six to go.’

George scratched at her scalp with the end of her pen. Got the cap entangled in one of her corkscrew curls. Unrelentingly itchy. Was it the nervous rash? Was this her body telling her brain that she was losing her shit? She couldn’t possibly be freaked out, though. Definitely not. Not after all this time. Not a pro, like her.

She shuffled her sheaf of paper straight, as if to demonstrate to herself that she had mastery over everything. In control of herself and her environment at all times. Now that she was qualified, she spent more time inside prisons than out. Except when she was in Amsterdam with Paul. Bastard. Oh, well. Not everything was within her control.

‘What did you do, Donna?’

‘I didn’t do it.’

‘No? Okay. But what were you convicted for?’

‘GBH. I got my son taken off me, didn’t I?’ Tears welled in Donna’s eyes, replacing the Valium film with something more organic. Sleeve pulled down over her fist, she wiped the burgeoning tears away. ‘They said, social services said, that I’d battered him. And I hadn’t. They said I was unfit, the fucking lying do-gooding bastards. Just because that old bitch next door grassed me for smoking weed and that. And the dead rabbits in the yard. Wasn’t my frigging fault. They shat everywhere. Then, I gets social services and the environmental health come knocking. And school gets involved, saying my Thom was truanting and had bruises and that.’

She pursed her lips. Hers was suddenly a mean face that looked as though its owner could inflict pain happily. George had grown up with the likes of Donna. Not so different from Tonya. A hard-faced calamity queen.

‘My Thomas was not fucking abused.’ Poked herself in the chest, hard, so that George could hear the drumming on her sternum. ‘I was fucking abused. I could tell them how I was bounced round Rochdale. Me an’ about ten other girls off the estate in the back of a van. Thirteen-year-old rent-a-slags for all the dirty bastards in the area. Two pimping wankers raking in it like we was stock in a cash and carry. Working for some warped bastard called the Hawk or some shit like that. Our mams didn’t give a fuck. They was too busy getting pissed down the pub.’

George nodded. Showed no emotion. Dr McKenzie was a criminologist. Professional detachment was the only way to endure these heart-breaking stories. But it was the same story over and over, told by different women. Abuse, leading to abuse. Young girls playing chicken through the fast lanes of traffick. They never made it to the other side intact.

‘So why the GBH?’

Donna snorted noisily. ‘Day our Thom was put in care. Went out, didn’t I? Got mashed up. Beat some slag to a pulp with a snooker cue. She’d been looking at my fella, so …’ She looked up at George. No longer morose but suddenly hopeful, as if a timid sun was trying to push its way through the storm clouds. ‘I’m going to get him back. Our Thomas. When I get out of here. He’s coming home to his mam.’ A gingivitis grin. Radiant with rotten teeth. Thin hair scraped too high on her head into a tight ponytail made her look like a ruined child.

George had to get out of there. She’d had enough for one day. Checked her watch. Brought the session to an end.

As she made her way through the facility to the entrance, where she would reclaim her phone and her composure, she noticed the latest issue of Do What? – the inmates’ magazine she had remembered reading when she had been on remand here. Scattered copies on the table needed organising.

The baffled prison officer paused, giving George a moment to tidy the magazines into a neat fan. Beneath the headline that spoke of Shep, the drugs-dog almost choking to death on a hibernating hedgehog, there was a piece that triggered recognition deep within George’s mind. A debate on whether an icicle could actually be used as a shiv and whether it was right that the prison staff should leave these freakish twelve-inchers hanging off the old prison eaves.

‘Okay, Dr McKenzie?’ The prison officer asked.

George nodded. Tucked her portfolio of notes under her arm and made her way back down to security. Scanned on the way in. Scanned on the way out.

Having failed to find a USB stick at Aunty Sharon’s, she had once tried to bring in a CD-ROM she had burned especially in order to show the inmates a simple guide to the study she was doing into women’s prisons for the government. Security had confiscated even that, saying a teenage inmate had broken up a CD brought in for her by her sister and committed suicide by swallowing the shards. Everything was a weapon in here. She now made damned sure she never ran out of USB sticks.

Got to get the hell out. This place is bringing me down and down.

Beyond the gates, breath steaming on the sub-zero air, she switched her phone on to check for messages. Hoping that cantankerous old fool, Van den Bergen had been in touch. It was weeks since their argument. Six weeks to be precise. Her refusal to speak to him had been deliberate. Even Aunty Sharon had said she’d done the right thing by dropping the shutters on him.

But the screen yielded nothing. Silence. No abrupt words, saying he was sorry and that she had been right. That he would make amends.

On the train she sat at a dirty, crumb-sullied table, clutching her anorak tightly around her. Broken heating meant the journey would be purgatorial. Shivering at the sight of the snow-covered fields and jagged, naked hedgerows that scudded by. A white world, empty of life except for disappointing humanity and the odd cannibalistic robin. Irritation mounting inside her. Oppressive, like the Siberian freeze that had an entire continent in its grip.

Twenty minutes felt like an hour. Her phone still yielded nothing of note. Only nagging emails from civil servants, asking if she would be handing her study in on time. Pointed correspondence from a fellow criminologist who had it in for her. Professor Dickwad Dobkin at UCL. Complaining that he knew about her additional research into trafficking. Saying that he had started something almost identical, eons ago. Long before her. Of course.

‘Get fucked, Dobkin,’ George said, as she searched for her train ticket.

‘Sorry?’ The ticket inspector asked, swaying side to side in the Pendolino carriage, as it pelted through the crystalline hills of Staffordshire.

‘Nothing,’ George said. ‘Talking to myself. Too much work. Not enough play.’

The ticket inspector, a sweaty-looking man, despite the unrelenting cold, gave her a disinterested half-smile.

It was true. Her deadline loomed large. Today’s encounter with Donna had been one of her final interviews. She would have to start typing it up tonight. Perhaps even do a little work on her laptop now, on the train back to London.

Discipline yourself, George.

Except her phone pinged. Probably Aunty Sharon.

Fuck discipline.

Peered down at the screen.

Ah, finally.

But it was not the sort of message she was hoping for.

Come to Amsterdam a.s.a.p. Paul.