Lost (12 page)

Sarah doesn't realize until he grabs hold of her arm and bends it behind her back. Two magazines tumble from beneath her coat. She twists from side to side and screams.

Everything stops—the cashier chewing her pink bubble gum, a shelf stacker on a stepladder, the butcher slicing ham . . .

A frozen chicken korma is burning my fingers. I can't remember picking it out of the freezer. I push past the queue and hand it to the cashier. “Sarah, I told you to wait for me.” The security guard hesitates.

“I'm sorry about this. We didn't have a basket.” I reach into Sarah's pockets and take out the chocolate bars, placing them on the conveyor belt. Then I pick up the magazines from the floor and find a packet of biscuits tucked into the waistband of her jeans.

“She was trying to steal those,” protests the guard.

“She was holding them. Take your hands off her.”

“And who the fuck are you?”

My badge flips open. “I'm the guy who's going to charge you with assault if you don't let her go.”

Sarah reaches inside her coat and takes a box of tea bags from an inner pocket. Then she waits while the cashier scans each item and packs them into a plastic bag.

I take hold of the shopping bag and she fol ows me through the automatic doors. The manager intercepts us. “She's not welcome here. I don't want her coming back.”

“She pays, she comes,” I say, as I pass him and walk into the bright sunshine.

For a fleeting moment I think Sarah might run, but instead she turns and holds out her hand for her groceries.

“Not so fast.”

She shrugs off her overcoat revealing khaki jeans and a T-shirt.

“It's a bit of a giveaway.” I motion to the coat.

“Thanks for the advice.” Her voice is ful of fake toughness.

“You want a cold drink?”

She balks. She's waiting for a lecture on the evils of shoplifting.

I hold up the shopping bag. “You want this stuff, you have a cold drink.”

We go to a juice bar on the corner and take a table outside. Sarah orders a banana smoothie before eyeing up the muffins. I get hungry watching her eat.

“You saw me a few weeks ago.”

She nods.

“What did we talk about?”

She gives me an odd look.

“I had an accident. I've forgotten a few things. I was hoping you could help me remember them.”

Sarah glances at my leg. “You mean like amnesia?”

“Something like that.”

She takes another mouthful of muffin.

“Why did I come and see you?”

“You wanted to know if I ever cut Mickey's hair or counted the coins in her money box.”

“Did I say why?”

“No.”

“What else did we talk about?”

“I dunno. Stuff, I guess.”

Sarah glances down at her shoes, stubbing the toe against the legs of the chair. The sun is pitched high and sharp, like the last hurrah before winter.

“Do you ever think about Mickey?” I ask.

“Sometimes.”

“So do I. I guess you have lots of new friends now.”

“Yeah, some, but Mickey was different. She was like an . . . a . . . a . . . appendix.”

“You mean appendage.”

“Yeah—like a heart.”

“That's not real y an appendage.”

“OK, like an arm, real important.” She drains her smoothie.

“You ever see Mrs. Carlyle?”

Sarah runs her fingers around the rim of her glass, col ecting froth. “She stil lives in the same place. My mum says it'd give her the creeps living where someone got kil ed but I reckon Mrs. Carlyle stays for a reason.”

“Why's that?”

“She's waiting for Mickey. I'm not saying that Mickey is gonna come home, you know. I just figure Mrs. Carlyle wants to know where she is. That's why she goes to prison every month and visits him.”

“Visits who?”

“Mr. Wavel .”

“She visits him!”

“Every month. My mum says there's something sick about that. Gives her the creeps.”

Sarah reaches across the table and turns my wrist so she can read the time. “I'm in heaps of trouble. Can I have my stuff now?” I hand her the plastic shopping bag and a ten-quid note. “If I catch you shoplifting again, I'l make you mop supermarket floors for a month.” She rol s her eyes and is gone, pedal ing furiously on her bicycle, carrying her coat, the bag of groceries and my frozen chicken korma.

The idea of Rachel Carlyle visiting Howard Wavel in prison sends chil s through me. A grooming pedophile and a grieving parent—it's wrong, it's sick, but I know what she's doing.

Rachel wants to find Mickey. She wants to bring her home.

I remember something she said to me a long while ago. Her fingers were tumbling over and over in her lap as she described a little routine she had with Mickey. “Even to the post office,” they would say to each other, as they said goodbye and hugged.

“Sometimes people don't come back,” said Rachel. “That's why you should always make your goodbyes count.” She was trying to hold on to every detail of Mickey—the clothes she wore, the games she played, the songs she sang; the way she frowned when she talked about something serious or a hiccupping laugh that made milk spurt out of her nose at the dinner table. She wanted to remember the thousands of tiny details and trivia that give light and shade to every life—even one as short as Mickey's.

Ali meets me at the juice bar and I tel her what Sarah said.

“You're going to go and see Howard, aren't you, Sir?”

“Yes.”

“Could he have sent the ransom demand?”

“Not without help.”

I know what she's thinking, although she won't say anything. She agrees with Campbel . Every likely explanation has the word “hoax” attached, including the one where Howard uses a ransom demand to win his appeal.

On the drive to Wormwood Scrubs we cross under the Westway into Scrubs Lane. Teenage girls are playing hockey on the playing fields, while teenage boys sit and watch, captivated by the blue pleated skirts that swirl and dip against muddy knees and moss-smooth thighs.

Wormwood Scrubs Prison looks like a film set for a 1950s musical, where the filth and grime have been scrubbed off for the cameras. The twin towers are four stories high and in the center is a huge arched door impregnated with iron bolts.

I try to picture Rachel Carlyle arriving here to visit Howard. In my mind I see a black cab pul up in the forecourt and Rachel sliding out, never letting her knees separate. She walks careful y over the cobblestones, wary of turning her ankle. Glamour hasn't been bred into her, despite her family's money.

The visitors center is located to the right of the main gate in a set of temporary buildings. Wives and girlfriends have already started to gather, some with children who fidget and fight.

Once inside they are searched and asked for proof of identity. Their belongings are stored in lockers and gifts are vetted in advance. Anyone wearing clothes that too closely match the prison uniform is asked to change.

Ali gazes up at the Victorian façade and shivers.

“You ever been inside?”

“Once or twice,” she replies. “They should tear the place down.”

“It's cal ed a deterrent.”

“Works on me.”

Leaving her for a moment, I open the trunk and retrieve the diamonds. I can fit two packages in the inside pockets of my overcoat and two more in the outer pockets. I put the coat on the seat beside her.

“I want you to stay with the car and look after the diamonds.”

She nods. “You want to wear the vest?”

“I think I'm safe enough in prison.”

Crossing the road, I show my badge at the visitors center. Ten minutes later I climb two flights of stairs and emerge into a large room with a long continuous table divided down the middle by a partition. Visitors stay on one side and prisoners on the other. Knees can't touch or lips meet. Physical contact is restricted to holding hands or lifting young children over the divide.

Heavy boots echo in the corridors as the cons are brought in. Each visitor hands over a docket and has to wait until the prisoner is in place before being admitted.

I watch a young prisoner greet his wife or girlfriend. He kisses her hand and doesn't want to let it go. They both lean forward as though trying to breathe the same air. His hand reaches under the table.

Suddenly, the screws seize her chair and wrench it backward. Fal ing to the floor, she shields her swol en bel y. She's pregnant, for Christ's sake. He only wants to feel his baby, but there's no sign of empathy from the screws.

“DI Ruiz, you can't stay away.”

The Governor appears beside me. Barrel-chested and balding, he's in his late forties. Finishing a sandwich, he dabs at his lips with a paper napkin, missing egg yoke on his chin.

“So what brings you back?”

“It must be the ambience.”

He laughs roughly and glances through the Perspex screen at the reunions.

“How long since I was here last?”

“Don't you remember?”

“Old age, I'm getting forgetful.”

“About four weeks ago; you were interested in that woman who comes to see Howard Wavel .”

“Mrs. Carlyle.”

“Yeah. She's not here today. She comes every month and tries to bring the same gifts: kiddie catalogs. That sick fuck better not get an appeal!” I try to picture Howard sitting opposite Rachel. Did she reach across the partition and take his hand? I even feel a pang of jealousy and imagine his eyes traveling down the V-neck of her blouse. We live in a sick sick world.

“I need to talk to him.”

“He's in segregation.”

“Why?”

The Governor picks at his fingernails. “Like I told you before, nobody expected him to live this long. He kil ed Aleksei Kuznet's little girl! That's a death sentence whichever way you look at it.”

“But you've managed to protect him.”

He laughs wryly. “You could say that. He was only here four days before someone ran a razor blade across his throat. He spent the next month in the hospital wing. Nobody's touched him since then so I figure Aleksei must want him alive. Howard doesn't care.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like I told you before, he keeps refusing to take his insulin. Twice in the last six months he's lapsed into a diabetic coma. If he can't be bothered why should Her Majesty, eh?

I'd let the bastard die.”

The Governor senses I don't agree with him. He sneers. “Contrary to popular opinion, Inspector, I'm not here to play nursemaid to prisoners. I don't hold their hands and say,

‘You poor things, you had a lousy childhood or a crap lawyer or a hanging judge.' A dog on a leash could do what I do.” (With a lot more compassion no doubt.)

“I stil need to see him.”

“He wasn't listed for visitors today.”

“But you can bring him up.”

The Governor grunts softly to a senior guard, who picks up a phone, setting the chain of command into motion. Somewhere deep in the intestines of this place someone wil fetch Howard. I can picture him lying on a narrow cot, smel ing the sourness of the air. The future is a scary business when you're a pedophile in prison. It's not next summer's holiday or a long weekend in the Lake District. The future stretches from when you wake up until you go to sleep again. Sixteen hours can seem like a lifetime.

Visiting time has almost ended. Howard pushes against the tide, walking as though his legs are shackled. He gazes around the room, looking for his visitor, perhaps expecting Rachel.

More than forty years on I can stil recognize him as the fat kid from school, who changed behind a towel and chain-smoked on an asthma puffer. He was almost a semi-tragic figure but not quite so tragic as Rory McIntyre, a sleepwalker who did a high dive off the third-floor balcony in the early hours of Foundation Day. They say that sleepwalkers wake up in midair but Rory didn't make a sound. Nor did he make a splash. He always was a good diver.

Howard takes a seat and doesn't seem surprised by the sound of my voice. Instead he stops, arches his neck and swivels his head like an old tortoise. I step in front of him. He blinks at me slowly.

“Hel o, Howard, I want to talk to you about Rachel Carlyle.”

He smiles little by little but doesn't answer. A scar runs from one side of his throat to the other, just beneath his chins.

“She comes to see you. Why?”

“You should ask her.”

“What do you talk about?”

He glances at the screws. “I don't have to tel you anything. My appeal application is next Thursday.”

“You're not getting out of here, Howard. Nobody wants to set you free.”

Again he smiles. Certain people don't seem to match their voices. Howard is like that. It is pitched too high, as though laced with helium, and his pale face seems disconnected from his body like a white bal oon moving gently in a breeze.

“We can't al be perfect, Mr. Ruiz. We make mistakes and we deal with the consequences. The difference between you and me is that I have my God. He wil judge me and get me out of here. Do you ever wonder who is judging you?”

He seems confident. Why? Maybe he knows about the ransom demand. Any suggestion Mickey might stil be alive would automatical y grant him a retrial.

“Why does Mrs. Carlyle come here?”

He raises his hands in mock surrender and lowers them again. “She wants to know what I did with Mickey. She's worried I might die before tel ing anyone.”

“You're messing up your insulin injections.”

“Do you know what it's like to go into a diabetic coma? First my breathing becomes labored. My mouth and tongue are parched. My blood pressure fal s and my pulse accelerates. I get blurred vision, then pain in my eyes. Final y, I slip into unconsciousness. If they don't reach me quickly enough, my kidneys wil fail completely and my brain wil be permanently damaged. Soon after that I wil die.”

He seems to revel in these details, as if looking forward to it.

“Did you tel her what happened to Mickey?”

“I told her the truth.”

“Tel me.”

“I told her that I'm not an innocent man but I am innocent of this crime. I have sinned but not committed
this
sin. I believe in the sanctity of human life. I believe al children are gifts from God, born pure and innocent. They only act with hate and violence because we teach them hate and violence. They are the only ones who can truly judge me.”