She rests her head back on the pillow and they sit in contemplative silence.
Eventually she whispers, half to herself, ‘I should have fuckwit tattooed on my forehead.’
‘Wouldn’t fit,’ says Davy.
‘Just twat then.’
‘That’d fit.’
He leans back in his chair. She closes her eyes. She loves a silence with Davy Walker. Some people give good silence, and he is one of them.
‘Being walloped really makes you feel low,’ she says.
‘You’re always low.’
‘I know, but more so. I feel …’ and she starts to cry again, looking at the trees beyond her broad hospital window. She realises they have given her this spacious room to herself because she’s a police officer.
‘I think you need a dog,’ Davy says.
‘What?’
‘I heard a dog makes unhappy people happy. They’re good, y’know, for people who can’t form proper relationships.’
‘You’re a real tonic, Davy.’
She lies there as the light fades through her picture window, waiting for the handsome doctor to discharge her, thinking about Edith, about Tony Wright, the sense that he knew she was alive. The hospital radio burbles out the news, still leading on the Tilbury Docks container death. Bryony will be up against it on the Abdul-Ghani Khalil evidence, she thinks as her mind begins its descent, merging with the news report; details of the routes driven by his trucks.
She sleeps.
Monday
Manon
The thrum of her printer is almost keeping time with the aching pulse inside her head. Manon is cross-legged on the floor in pyjamas and thick socks, a blanket around her shoulders. Her back is aching, her knees stiff. The room is crepuscular but for the light from an Anglepoise which she has dragged onto the floor; it is interrogating, with its brash light, the sheaves of paper which surround her.
Paper, upon paper, upon paper, and as the printer spews out more, they flutter down, creating more chaos. Can’t get the AV list off of this, Wilco Bennett’s email said, so I’m just attaching his entire IIS file – all fifteen years of it. Enjoy!
The Inmate Information System contained everything about the life of a prisoner: personal details, offence, sentence, possibility of parole, relationships, movements (from that spur on that wing to another), case note information, risk assessments, courses taken, activities, paid and unpaid work, breaches of discipline, offender rehabilitation programmes.
Manon crawls across the white sea, leaving her blanket like a worm cast in sand, to where her phone has vibrated.
How’s the head? I’d bring you lasagne + Nurofen but my trafficking case has proper kicked off. Bri
She’s reminded to take more Nurofen, alternating them two-hourly with paracetamol, though the dull ache remains like a background noise. She pads to the kitchen where the chill curls itself about her neck and ankles. And as she tips her head back, swallowing, she wonders what she hopes she’ll find delving into Tony Wright’s life inside and – also printing out in reams – the 200-page Ministry of Justice report compiled by the CIC with Edith Hind’s assistance. ‘Staff–prisoner relations in Whitemoor prison’ – a vivid portrait of prison life.
The nice doctor discharged her from Addenbrooke’s last night and Harriet has forbidden her from coming into the office. ‘Don’t be a nutter. Stay home. Recuperate. I don’t want to see you in before Tuesday at the earliest,’ she said.
Back in her twilit lounge, the pages crinkle under her feet. She crosses one foot over the other and lowers to the floor, pulling the blanket around her shoulders and gathering new sheaves to read.
The first three years of a long sentence are the worst, she has learned. New inmates are put on the induction spur on C-wing and are most prone to existential crises; likely to self-harm. Here are men facing fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years in prison without hope of release. They are desperate for meaning, beset by loss. Tony Wright, then in his early forties, was no exception. He cut his arms with razor blades when he could get hold of them, and blades appear to feature widely in Whitemoor.
She shuffles the papers, then glances at her watch. Four p.m. She began reading at ten this morning, but she must have dozed at intervals right here on the floor, the blanket like a cocoon.
Page 20 of Wright’s file: Emotional outbursts. No reduction in Cat A status. For years he seemed to suffer the most stringent form of incarceration, every emotion deemed ‘risk’. Stints in segregation. One suicide attempt. In conversation with his personal officer following this attempt, Tony Wright said, ‘I’m spam. I’m meat in a tin.’