Manon picks up her remote to silence the TV, as something forms, indistinct at present. Cambridge Institute of Criminology. Part of the university. Tony Wright was in Whitemoor when their inspections were taking place. Tony Wright might have been interviewed by the CIC.
She picks up her BlackBerry and finds Wilco Bennett’s number, her prison warden contact at Whitemoor.
‘Manon,’ he says warmly. ‘Long time.’
‘Everything all right, Wilco?’ she says, making a stab at the pleasantries. She has a soft spot for Wilco Bennett: pigeon fancier, holder of socially unacceptable views, which she forgives because he’s been incarcerated with sociopaths since 1989. They got to know each other during endless proceedings at Peterborough Crown Court – remand hearings, bail applications, and the attendant delays which often left them sitting on hard benches side by side beneath the courtroom.
‘Your Edith Hind girl,’ says Wilco. ‘Bit of a whopper, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm,’ she says. ‘Can I ask a favour, Wilco?’
‘Fire away,’ he says.
‘Tony Wright.’
‘Prince Charming, yes.’
‘Can you get me his authorised visitor list?’
‘’S’a while ago now, lovely. He’s been out eight months.’
‘I know. Are you in the office or is it your weekend off?’
‘No, I’m in. I’m not brilliant on the old computers; I think the AV list has to be downloaded onto the whatnot, using a doobrey.’ He chuckles at this. ‘I can never find the damned thing after that, you know? Downloaded where? Still, it’s quiet today; I’ll see if I can get someone to help me. Any particular span of time, so to speak?’
‘I’d like Wright’s entire AV list, if you can get it, but I want you to look at 2009 in particular. Call me back?’
‘Will do.’
She lies down on the sofa, her laptop at her feet, her hands between her knees. She is cold. She hasn’t eaten since sometime late yesterday afternoon, before the Cromwell’s debacle. She reaches back, drags a blanket off the back of the sofa to cover herself. She wonders if she should call Davy, but instead turns the sound up on the TV. She lies there, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the burble of the lunchtime news; always the soft stuff – items about the Royal Family or the cost of childcare, for people raising spoons of Heinz tomato soup to their quivering lips. People wrapped in blankets, just like her. She thinks about smoking a cigarette.
‘The body of an Afghan man and twenty other refugees have been found in a container at Tilbury Docks,’ she hears the newsreader say. ‘A man from Ipswich has been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to facilitate illegal immigration into the UK. Abdul-Ghani Khalil, thirty-seven, was arrested alongside three men from Luton in connection with the death.’
She reaches behind her head for a cigarette, which she lights without sitting upright, blowing smoke up into the gathering dusk.
She throws her cigarette butt out of the open third of her car window, then winds it up. Sits, feeling a swell of tears rise in her chest, then lower, plus something else – a kamikaze element. She shouldn’t be here alone.
In front of her, the estate road winds away into the shadowy hulk of buildings. A bin, over-full, billows with a white plastic bag stuffed in at the top. At the curve of the road is a group of youths, their hoods up, hunched, stamping foot to foot. She can’t see their faces but their bodies are febrile.
She’s been on the estate before after nightfall, crouching over the body of a debt collector who’d been sent out here on her own to gather piddling sums for an insurance firm. A mother of three, smartly dressed, pootling into danger in her little maroon Fiat, wearing a white mohair jumper with dainty gold necklace over its roll neck. She should never have been here alone, not at night, and certainly not asking for money. Twelve pounds a week she collected from the man who would eventually stab her to death.
Yet here is Manon, just like the debt collector, alone in the dark. No one to report her missing now, no police colleagues pulling out the stops. No backup.
She slams her car door and makes for Tony Wright’s flat.
‘To what do I owe this honour?’ he says, answering the door.
‘Can I come in?’ she asks, and he steps back.
She hears him lock the door behind her. ‘Cannae be too careful. All sorts round here.’
She steps into the lounge which is dim, except for a lava lamp glowing purple on a shelf, its moving globules like slow marine life. The room smells of incense and smoke.
‘Lyn here?’ she says, casting about. Her heart is thumping. She feels as if the ground is tipping. What is she doing here, locked inside with Tony Wright?
‘No, nobody here, ma wee scone, ’cept you an’ me,’ says Tony as he walks through to a small kitchen.
He returns carrying a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He motions to the square table against the wall and she sits at it, a whiskey glass placed before her. She thinks about the two glasses at George Street, one with blood on its shards.
She doesn’t say no as he pours; another line she’s crossing.