A Saturday in mid-July. It’s perfect outside, the sky so blue it looks like a bauble fit to shatter. It’s five to nine, and Jen is pulling up outside HMP Altcourse.
As soon as she realized the date and that Joseph would still be inside, she made her excuses to Kelly and Todd, who were taking the piss out of Saturday Kitchen – she said she had brunch with a client – and left. To her dismay, nobody was surprised. Jen has spent her entire life doing things for others: seeing demanding clients when she wanted to be watching Todd’s swimming lessons. Watching Todd’s swimming lessons when she wanted to be lying down with a book. The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.
Todd hasn’t met Clio yet, nor started associating with Connor. So, what, were they all red herrings, now that she’s gone back past them?
HMP Altcourse looks like an industrial estate, a strange kind of self-enclosed village. Jen’s only been here once, as part of her training. Beyond that, she’s never practised criminal law. Her father found the idea of repeat business from criminals so distasteful that they never did it. Jen finds making money from divorces vaguely distasteful, too, but there you go. Everyone has to make rent, and heartbreak is more ubiquitous than crime.
Jen walks into the foyer of the prison, thinking how fortuitous it is that Joseph is back in prison, and that visiting hours are limited and structured on weekdays but unlimited and informal at weekends – any unauthorized visitor can turn up and request to see any inmate on a Saturday. Today.
It’s like she knew.
It is raining outside, midsummer rain; the media have named it Storm Richard. Each time somebody enters the reception, the smell of wet grass puffs in. Visitors’ shoes leave patterns of water across the floor that a jaded cleaner mops up periodically, one hand on a hip, putting up more and more yellow triangular WET FLOOR signs.
The reception is modern, like a private hospital. A wide and sweeping desk dominates the space. A man clicks a mouse at it, takes softly spoken phone calls.
Behind the reception is a whiteboard with times written on it. Through a door marked CANTEEN (SECURE 2), Jen can hear an argument escalating. ‘You said I could order smoky bacon, not salt ’n’ vinegar,’ a man is saying.
‘I know – but Liam –’
‘It was fucking clear!’ the man shouts. Jen winces. The power of a packet of crisps.
For a second, just a second, she wants to confess all, right here in the foyer. Shout and scream. Commit a crime. Commit herself. Tell them she’s time-travelling and be sedated somewhere, meals made, crisp-ordering the height of her control.
‘Request here,’ the receptionist says suddenly. He stands and passes a form to Jen, which she fills in.
‘He’s happy to see you,’ the receptionist says after two phone calls and several more minutes. ‘Visitor centre that way.’ He points inwards, through a set of double doors, into the bowels of the building, and hands Jen a temporary pass with no string or safety pin.
She pushes the cold metal panels on the doors and enters a corridor staffed by two security guards. It smells of disinfectant and sweat. The vinyl floors have rubber edges. There are multiple locks on multiple doors.
She is met by a security guard with a name tag on, printed with the name LLOYD. Somebody, in biro, underneath it, has written Grossman! He asks to see her handbag, then checks it, a deft hand inside like a doctor performing some grotesque internal, then sends it through an airport-style scanner. He gestures for her to spread her arms wide and as she does so he pats her down, avoiding eye contact.
‘Phone in there,’ he says, and Jen puts it into the blue bank of lockers he indicates.
They go through another set of double doors that he opens with a fob. Underneath an over-the-door heater that momentarily warms the top of her head and shoulders, and then they’re in.
The visitor centre is a tired room, big and square with public-sector faded blue-and-red carpet, black plastic chairs, tiny tables. The back wall is solely floor-to-ceiling windows. Fat raindrops strike them and the roof above, rattling the skylights. The room is already full.
It’s less easy than Jen thought it would be to differentiate between prisoners and visitors. It looks like any other busy meeting room. A couple sits, split, across a table, their hands not quite meeting in the centre of it. Steadfastly not touching, but getting as close to the boundary of the rules as is possible. At another table, a child reaches towards her father, hand flexing like a distant blinking star, but the mother stops her, pulls her back into her body.
Jen thinks of her own father. She said goodbye to him in the morgue. She’d been too late. The image of her father lying there for six hours, dead, alone, stayed with her. In the morgue, eventually, the heat from her hand had warmed his, and she’d dipped her forehead to it, pretending, but it was no use.
Jen recognizes Joseph Jones easily. He’s sitting alone at a table in the exact centre of the room. The elfin ears, the dark hair. The goatee. His skin truly does have the prisoner’s pallor she’s read about. Not only a lack of suntan; something more. The kind of colour people go when they have the flu, when they haven’t slept, when they’re grieving.
She has been to this man’s house. She has seen him die. And now, here she is, about to find out quite who he is, after all.
‘Hi,’ she says as she sits down, her voice shaking. All his crimes. Robbery. Supplying. Assault. Her arms and legs begin to tingle.
The chair shifts underneath her. It’s the plastic kind that folds into a single line to stack against a wall.
‘Kelly’s wife,’ he says. He pulls the ribbed cuffs of his navy-blue sports jumper over his hands, playing for time. So he knows her, even though they’ve not yet met.
Jen sees that he has a gold tooth, right at the back. His eyes meet hers. ‘Jen,’ he finishes, his tongue lingering at his front teeth over the N.
She has gone completely cold, and completely calm. The frenzied anxiety of the mystery, of the anticipation, has boiled dry. The fuse has tripped, and she now feels nothing. The room stills around them, like a faded photograph. Quiet and blurred. Something is about to happen; she can feel it.
‘I …’ she says.
‘Jen, the love of Kelly’s life.’
She says nothing, trying to collect herself, but instead thinks about how brazen she’s been. Searching belongings, following people, hiding and eavesdropping. But look where it’s brought her. Here, a prison, mixed up with criminals, police cars driving by, a missing baby. Her skin burns with fear, like a thousand tigers’ eyes are watching her: she’s prey.
‘How do you know him?’ Jen says, swallowing.
‘We go way back.’ Joseph says nothing more. He crosses his legs underneath the table, legs stretched out, his feet underneath her chair. The gesture is deliberately proprietary. Jen wants to move back, but doesn’t.
Outside, the light fades, the clouds Russian blue, like somebody has flicked a dimmer switch. Joseph catches her looking. ‘Storm Richard,’ he says, passing his thumb behind him. ‘Going to be a big one.’
‘Is it?’ Jen says faintly.
‘Oh yeah. The murderers here love a storm.’ He gestures expansively around him. ‘Hypes them up.’
How strange that he wishes to differentiate himself from the prisoners, Jen finds herself thinking. She can’t help but notice it. ‘Tell me how you go way back?’ she presses.
Joseph leans across the table towards her. ‘You know, you’ll find out when I get out of here. I’m hoping to start it up again,’ he says, the same thing he said in the law-firm foyer. He makes another gesture, rubbing his thumb across his fingers, a signal for money or maybe just a twitch. Jen can’t catch it, perhaps imagined the delicate movement. It lasted less than a second. The rest of his body is completely, eerily still.
‘When did you meet?’
‘I think Kelly’s your man for this one,’ Joseph says. ‘Don’t you?’