‘Christ, haven’t you been fired yet?’ she says, lurching towards him.
‘They’ve got nothing on me. In fact, I’m just bedding in, getting the lie of the land, office hierarchy.’
‘You’re all about hierarchy, aren’t you, Stuart?’ she says. She feels as if she can say anything, to anyone’s face. ‘Like you’re obsessed.’
‘Who do you rate, then?’ he says, his glass raised towards their colleagues nearby. ‘Who’s a good copper?’
‘Me!’ she says, close enough to put her cheek on his chest. She’s tempted. Any port in a storm.
‘What about Harper?’ he says, and she sees that look, the same look he’d had when he had complained about the headmistress ‘lording it’ at the school where he worked.
‘Oh, Harriet’s good. Very good. Sexually frustrated, though.’ She burps into her fist. ‘Scuse me.’ She can’t feel the bottom half of her legs. Stuart swims in front of her. ‘Kim’s good. Solid, y’know. Unimaginative.’
‘Go on.’ This wily fox, his charm a lure into darkness.
The music is so loud, she’s had to shout in his ear, to smell him. Foreign male. Exciting and dangerous. She’s shouting now, just as before, but her words have a strange echo, as if they have been emitted through a loudhailer.
‘Davy’ll never be a good copper,’ she bellows into the sudden silence. ‘Too busy looking on the fucking bright side.’
Her eyes are half-closed, her mind woolly, and she has shouted the words before she registers that the music is off. Someone must’ve pulled the plug, she thinks, too late.
And she turns, slowly, to see a row of faces staring at her. Kim, Bryony, Nigel, and Colin. Davy at the centre, hurt ears pinned back. She can practically see the follicles standing up on his head.
She starts to burn. She is drunk but also painfully sober. Davy is staring at her and she doesn’t know if it’s simply what she has said or the fact that she has spilled it into Stuart’s malevolent ear. She is so drunk that all her movements are delayed and her eyelids half close again, though there is panic on the inside, as if she can’t persuade her body to catch up.
‘Davy, I—’ she begins, but the music is back on, louder than before, like she’s being punched about the head, and he has walked quickly out of the bar.
Before she knows what’s happening, Bryony has appeared, carrying her coat and bag.
‘Aren’t those mine?’ she asks, but Bryony has taken her by the elbow, saying, ‘Excuse us’ to Stuart.
‘Oi, I was just—’ Manon protests.
‘Yes, we all know what you were just doing,’ says Bryony.
Saturday
Manon
Everything in ruins.
She walks the cold lounge, lighting lamps against the tinkle and spit of rain at the window.
Her pyjamas stink – sweet, fetid alcohol, seeping out through her skin. She sits on the curved corduroy sofa and cries.
If there was only something left: a relationship gone wrong but her work intact; her work compromised but love still offering a future. Instead, it is a desolate landscape, the death of Helena Reed at its centre like a crucifixion, her head to one side. While she was with him, she could tell herself that dereliction of duty had been in aid of something; she hadn’t wanted to be married to the job. Now, even the job won’t have her.
She sits cross-legged on the sofa, pulls her laptop onto her knees, her phones beside her. She points the remote at the TV, so the news comes on. She needs something, anything. She needs an idea.
She Googles Tony Wright. The various reportings of his crimes pop up; a backgrounder after his conviction, in the Eastern Daily Press. Whitemoor prison is highlighted in blue, and she clicks idly on the link. The Internet is a journey, down tributaries random and meandering; a journey in which you could lose hours, days, a week, and she’s happy to become lost. She reads the Whitemoor Wikipedia page.
In June 2006, an inspection report from Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons criticised staff at Whitemoor Prison for ignoring prisoners, and not responding to their queries and requests for help promptly enough.
She skims the next part.
A further inspection report stated, in October 2008, that staff at Whitemoor Prison felt fear that Muslim inmates were attempting to radicalise others held at the jail. According to inspectors, officers tended to treat Muslim prisoners as extremists and potential security risks, even though only eight of them had been convicted of terrorist offences. Due to the concerns raised by this inspection, further visits by researchers from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, commissioned by the Ministry of Justice, were arranged between 2009 and 2010 to interview staff and inmates.