‘I’d move closer but I stink.’
The room smells of cleaning fluids and stale smoke. Maggie can smell perfume, instant coffee, cheap white bread. She can’t smell the woman sitting a few seats away.
‘I don’t wash when I come here. Not for four days. Five if I can stand it. My Jason likes to smell me. The real me, he says, not perfumed me.’
There is no answer to this that Maggie can think of.
‘Who you here to see, anyway?’
‘Hamish Wolfe,’ Maggie says.
Is she imagining it, or has the buzz of conversation noticeably dropped? Are more heads turning her way?
‘You ’is girlfriend?’
‘Lawyer.’
Kelsey’s mother opens her mouth, but a grating sound catches their attention. The door into the main body of the prison has opened and an officer is in the doorway, beckoning them forward. It is time.
The prisoners are seated at tables in a large hall that smells of sweat and the stale oil of an antiquated heating system. Maggie is one of the last to enter. The others have rushed forward, have found the man they are visiting. Some children are in their fathers’ arms, whimpering at the unfamiliar contact, others hang back, warily. Most people are already seated, deep in conversation. More than one couple appear to be quarrelling.
Maggie stands, just inside the doorway, taking stock, trying to find the man she has come to visit.
Someone is watching her. This is not so very unusual in itself, a woman can’t look the way she does and not expect to be stared at, but this is different. This feels intense, even slightly predatory. She scans the room, the prickle of scrutiny stirring up the tiny hairs on her neck, knowing that somewhere in this mass of people, Wolfe has got her in his sights.
There he is. Directly beneath a window, its dust-clouded light softening the darkness of his hair. As their eyes meet, he remains as still as the walls that imprison him, and yet she has a sense of tremendous movement going on inside his head. He is processing her, absorbing information, preparing himself. She has to do the same, but it is as though a barrier has come down. All her usual powers of perception have deserted her. All she can see is the obvious.
She already knows that he’s tall, but he sits so upright, so straight in his chair as to give the impression of being even taller. She knows he is handsome, but she hadn’t expected the reaction just seeing him has provoked. He is brighter somehow, more colourful, the lines of his body sharper, than his surroundings.
Holding eye contact across the body-filled, stale-smelling room is like standing on the edge of a great lake, catching a glimpse of the far shore and being overcome with an urge to reach it. Swim, sail, float, whatever it takes. Or, like standing on a clifftop, looking down into the most perfect valley – lush and green, and wanting more than anything to get to it, but knowing the only way is to leap.
Maggie starts making her way towards him, weaving around tables, avoiding small children. She can see the detail of his eyes. The irises are green, maybe hazel. She sees his eyebrows lift, one corner of his mouth stretch out in a cautious smile. He is on his feet now, is smiling properly, his teeth white and perfect. His skin is so pale, has barely seen sunshine in two years. Physical contact is allowed, she remembers, at the start and end of these sessions. If he stretches out his hand, she’ll have to take it.
He doesn’t. He waits until she’s at the table and then his eyes dart across her face, her hair, her body. On the tabletop is an origami shape.
‘Hi.’
His voice is deeper than she expects, as though prison life has roughened and toughened it. He is wearing blue jeans and an oversized blue sweatshirt.
‘Hello, Hamish. How are you?’
How cool, how calm her voice is. It doesn’t sound as though her hands, were she to lift them from her sides, would be shaking.
‘Please.’ He’s indicating the chair. She sits. He does too, and now they seem only inches apart. The origami shape is made from silvery-white paper but she doesn’t want to look at it. His shoulders are wide beneath the sweatshirt. He is a powerfully built man.
‘Can I get you something?’ she says. ‘Tea? Coffee? Something to eat?’ Even here, in this dreadful place, social norms prove strong.
‘No, thank you.’ He isn’t cuffed, although she’d half expected that he would be. There is a graze on his right hand.
‘Did you have a good journey?’ he asks her.
She’d driven through snow in the pre-dawn darkness, the Solent had been rough, the ferry cold and uncomfortable. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she says, and thinks how polite they are being, the murderer and the – what, exactly?