The Silent Ones

by Knight, Ali

  Darren looked back at the locked door, panic beginning to conquer him. There was no going back now, he was in here for eight hours – a whole day for them to find out who he really was.

  They shuffled along with their buckets, pulling them with their mops or pushing with their feet. As they passed through the next security door a middle-aged woman with dark hair and her own clothes was writing notes behind a desk. Her name badge hung low over her breasts, knocking loudly against the counter. Helen McCabe. She didn’t look up, barely registering the cleaning team at all.

  At the next security door the team split up. ‘Where do I go?’ Darren asked the man called Yassir.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said and they began to walk down the corridor, light pouring in from the windows to his right.

  ‘Why don’t the prisoners clean the place themselves? It would give them something to do, no?’ he asked.

  ‘They are not capable. Too mad, too ill.’

  They reached another locked door, which opened automatically with a buzzing sound. ‘Now you clean and dust, everywhere inside the locked doors. Kamal come check later so you do it well,’ Yassir said.

  ‘I have a question,’ Darren said to Yassir, who looked up expectantly. ‘Why is Kamal such a, how should I put this …’

  ‘Ballbreaker?’ Yassir answered for him, smiling.

  ‘Tosser.’ Darren grinned.

  ‘Some people are just born angry,’ Yassir replied. He turned and waved to the camera in the ceiling and the door buzzed open. ‘Have a good day,’ Yassir said, and the door clanged shut behind him.

  Darren was alone now in a long corridor with no windows. It was very quiet. Darren had never been in a prison before. It was featureless and unpleasant; a thousand sad stories seemed to crowd around him.

  He dunked the mop in the rapidly cooling yellow water, placed it in the colander-shaped hole at the side of the bucket and squeezed. He dutifully began to mop the floor in a figure-of-eight motion, as Kamal had instructed. Dull. He moved along two feet, and repeated. And repeated.

  Three hours later he was so bored he felt he would die. The folly of his mad scheme to meet Olivia overwhelmed him. His back ached, and the place was hardly teeming with prisoners or people of any sort: two men in civilian clothes had walked past him about half an hour ago and ignored him; while he mopped in another corridor an unmarked door had been opened by a woman and he got a glimpse of a room with blue carpet and a chair before the door closed with a click behind her.

  He had a break for lunch and ate it in the changing room, reading bullying notices about what to put in the bins and where to put recycling, no doubt pinned up by Kamal. It was like he posted reminders of himself all around the facility, just in case anyone was fortunate enough to be able to forget him for a minute.

  By the afternoon he was thoroughly sick of the endless corridors that smelled of boiled cabbage and he was disorientated: windows were rare and he felt trapped, with no light and only the wall clocks to tell him the day was wearing on. A door at the end of the corridor buzzed open and a man in civilian clothes with a large name tag round his neck came out. Darren stopped mopping and stared. With him were three inmates, unmistakable in their white tops and loose-fitting white trousers. Two of the women were middle-aged; a third was younger, only a little older than Darren. He watched them, fascinated, as the group paused by a side door at the end of the corridor. The man held the door open for them and said, ‘Come in, ladies.’

  The door closed behind them and silence returned. Darren hurried with his mop down to the closed door and tried to listen to what was being said inside. He heard nothing at first, and then some faint laughter. He backed away. Olivia was no doubt also called a lady in here. People held doors open for her. She got to laugh. Something unpleasant began to stir deep within him.

  9

  The next morning Darren returned to Roehampton. He had sworn to himself at the end of his joyless and unfruitful shift yesterday that he was never going back, that Mum’s illness had brought on a temporary madness of which cleaning floors at Roehampton was the manifestation. But now here he was, unable to resist taking another mopping tour of the hospital.

  He changed into his uniform and lined up outside the cleaning cupboard with a new group of cleaners. Kamal wasn’t there and a woman called Roksandre doled out the cleaning rota. He was given Newman and Forsyth wards. No one asked how his first day had gone; no one asked his name. Yassir was the only face he recognised and they smiled at each other. As they waited for the security door to buzz open and swallow them up, Darren knew he wouldn’t be smiling much for the next eight hours.

  He took out his mop and began to figure-of-eight the floor. After an hour and a half he was desperate to make the rest of the day more interesting. One thing Darren didn’t lack was an imagination. He was a daydreamer, an artist. He began to trace a large surfboard shape on the lino with his mop and filled it in with water. Then he drew large crashing waves, and some rocks to avoid when catching a break into shore. Then he filled in the spaces by the closed doors with the low clouds that always hung over the shore when he, Jez, Mike and CJ took the boards to Devon to surf.

  He used the mop as the oar on a paddle board for the next bit of corridor, leaning low and bending his knees as if adjusting to the movement and swell of the ocean. He looked behind him at his rapidly drying picture. Not bad. Maybe he could use this experience to create some real works of art when he got home.

  There were thirty-five cameras inside the buildings at Roehampton, and a further ten on the perimeter and the exit points. Sonny’s job was to monitor a third of these and make sure everything looked OK. Which it always did. He was alone at the moment, as Corey was in the small kitchen at the end of the corridor brewing the tea. They worked in pairs at Roehampton, in case someone was taken ill or needed a bathroom break.

  The images from the cameras were black and white and soundless, and relayed on to TV screens that reached from desk height to the ceiling of the windowless room. After a while the rhythms on the screens, the occasional door swinging open, a group of visitors or Dr McCabe walking around, blended into a pleasing backdrop that was as hypnotising to Sonny as driving on a motorway at night. Which was why the young cleaner on camera number fifteen jerking about with the mop was something to see.

  Corey came back, holding two tea mugs. Sonny used the zoom feature on the camera. ‘You seen that white guy before?’

  Corey sat down on his swivel chair and put his feet on the desk, something that Sonny hated. They watched Darren turn a full circle with the mop. ‘He trippin’,’ Corey said. ‘What’s he drawing on the floor?’

  ‘His resignation if Kamal catches him,’ Sonny answered, shaking his head and sipping his tea.

  Darren had reached the end of the corridor. There was no clock in this corridor and he had no idea if he was ahead of schedule or behind. An orderly coming the other way down the corridor opened the door with a key and he pushed his bucket through.

  Darren turned to see another long corridor, this time with doors leading off on the left, with no windows. He wondered how far from the kitchens he was, how soon he might see Chloe again. His bucket had a dodgy wheel that meant it didn’t push straight, like a supermarket trolley. He decided to count nineteenth-century French artists as he mopped to the end of the corridor. Maybe he could paint an imaginary Cézanne on the floor. No, that mountain Cézanne was always painting was the wrong shape for this passage. Which artist did long wide paintings?

  The door at the end of this corridor had a narrow panel with security glass in it. He looked through it and saw a tall man in civilian clothes coming closer, someone behind him. Darren stood back as the man opened the door.

  The woman directly behind the man was an inmate. Darren looked at her as she passed and felt a pain as if his heart had stopped. It was Olivia Duvall.

  Those were the last eyes Carly ever saw.

  Olivia stared at him with big brown eyes framed with long curled eyelashes,
crow’s feet radiating over her cheekbones. She had eyebrows that weren’t overplucked, but neither were they anything Frida Kahlo would admire. Her skin was tanned, with a soft down of hair across the cheeks. She didn’t break her stride as her eyes dropped to his name badge and lingered there for a moment before looking back at his face. He felt as if she had stripped him bare. Her long brown hair had no grey in it and bounced on her shoulders as she receded down the corridor, her small frame accentuated by the baggy white trousers and top that she wore.

  Inside that head was his sister, crying out to be found.

  The man stopped at the door at the far end of the corridor and opened it using another key from a bunch in his pocket. Olivia was thirty feet away now, standing still, just looking at Darren as a cat might wait under a bird’s nest for the chicks. A moment later they had passed through and he was alone again.

  Darren had never seen Olivia in the flesh; he had not been at the trial. He had only seen the newspaper picture of her taken in the police station, after she had been hit by someone or something in the side of the head and it had developed a large swelling that distorted one of her eyes and accentuated the bags under them. She had looked how people would have wanted to see her – mad, deranged, and violent, her horrid work finally at an end. He had lived with that picture of her in his head for ten years. Only that image had been a lie. He had been lied to, and he didn’t like it. One of the many thoughts that were roiling round inside him was that Olivia Duvall was … normal-looking. Almost pretty.

  Sonny watched the young cleaner collapse against the wall. ‘Bwoy look like he gonna faint.’

  ‘Seeing that kiddie-killer will do that for you no bother,’ Corey said. Sonny shook his head in disapproval. Corey had a tabloid take on the world even though he never read a newspaper. ‘It’s not healthy, having normal people in here mixing with these nutters,’ he went on.

  Sonny sighed. ‘Someone’s got to do it though. Might as well be the young. Maybe they can recover quicker.’

  Darren had been parked with his nana during the court case; he was deemed too young to understand the details, to see the monster herself. One day Dad came home from the trial early – they found out later that he had begun shouting in court and had had to be dismissed. He came through the front door, a tension in him so great he walked like a man Darren didn’t recognise. Darren and Nan followed him into the living room where he began to grab his records off the shelves, his prized collection of thirty years, and pull them from their sleeves, snap them against his knees, hurl them at the walls and smash them on the floor.

  His mum and dad used to dance before Carly died; they never danced after. It was in this room that Dad and Carly would fight over music. Dad would put on a tune and would wiggle his hips and click his fingers, jiving like he was at Studio 54, while Carly would bounce, high and far, arms out and knees high-kicking, the hip hop rhythm pulsing through her whatever the track. She always existed, to Darren, in a physical way: spinning on a gymnastic high beam, rolling over cracked and uneven paving on her skateboard, crouched low on her surfboard, prancing about in this room, her long hair flying to the ceiling.

  As they cued up the records and shouted out suggestions for tracks the two of them would get madder, freer, the volume control would turn and turn, their dancing becoming more and more frenetic, until it was loud enough to make Mary from next door barrel down her path and up theirs, her housecoat flapping. Dad would hold up a hand in apology and, when she was gone, give his low chuckle and turn the volume back down, boogieing down the corridor to the kitchen for a vodka and tonic.

  But the sounds in the living room on that afternoon were not like the whoops of joy brought on by dancing with his daughter; they came from the pain of listening to what was being described in court. He and Nan could only watch until Dad was done destroying something he had loved doing, because without Carly it was too painful to ever repeat. When he had destroyed every single record, he collapsed on the floor on top of the pile of broken vinyl. It seemed to Darren now that he had never managed to get back on his feet.

  Darren imagined his mum, the devastating news about the cancer still being absorbed, sitting opposite Olivia just a few weeks ago, in a sad room somewhere in this building, begging her for Carly, trying to prompt a sliver of pity in the Witch’s heart. It hadn’t worked. Yet here the killer was, strolling down a sunlit corridor, a spring in her step, receiving one-on-one attention. The injustice of it pressed down on him in a way he had never felt before. It was as if a piece of dry tinder had finally been touched by the spark it had been waiting for and exploded into life, igniting the fiercest anger he had ever known.

  That night he woke with a start in his narrow bed, sweat pouring from him. He scrambled for the reading light, gasping as if drowning. Something horrible had stalked his dreams, but it vanished as soon as he flooded the room with light. The image that remained with him was Olivia’s head, its high forehead, symmetrical and lined, and her big brown eyes, as she walked in slow motion past him, those eyes never leaving his face. Behind those dark pupils were the five secrets of England: Molly, Heather, Isla, Rajinder and Carly. The five women and girls, desperate to get out.

  He got out of bed, his phone showing 3.30 a.m. He had worked just two shifts at Roehampton and he had already seen the Witch, could have reached out and touched her. He felt the euphoria of possibilities crackle in him. He scratched and twisted, then dropped to the floor and did twenty press-ups, the blood flowing through his forearms and biceps. He did chin-ups until he was exhausted and his muscles burned. He couldn’t wait for morning. He was going back to the hospital to face the demons that were chasing away his sleep. He would go back through the gates and into her world. Carly would have wanted it. More than that, he thought, his sister demanded it.

  10

  ‘I heard you saw Duvall yesterday.’ Kamal was smiling slyly as they pulled buckets and mops out of a cupboard.

  Darren was taken aback. ‘How?’

  ‘Remember, everything you do is on those.’ He pointed up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling. ‘Got friends in security, they saw the whole thing. They said you nearly fell over you were so surprised.’

  Darren tried to smile, feeling exposed. ‘Yeah, I guess it was freaky.’ He shuddered. ‘How many women did she kill?’

  ‘Five. Fi-ive.’ Kamal waved his hand. ‘You know the rumour why she’s here, got transferred from that place up north?’

  Darren leaned closer as Kamal unlocked a door. ‘Had a thing with a guard at the other hospital. They had to keep it hush-hush, would have caused a scandal.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Sexual thing! She is one twisted bitch, I tell you. He was doing her in her cell! Got inside the guy’s head, sent him mad! He apparently still sends her love notes. Now he’s out of a job and probably lost his wife too. Imagine saying that to your other half! I’m in love with another woman, and it’s Duvall.’ Kamal shuddered.

  ‘She never told him where she put the bodies?’

  Kamal looked confused. ‘No man, they were fucking, right at it. She’s an evil, mad bitch on heat.’ He said it with a touch too much admiration, before turning back to the huddle of cleaners.

  ‘Right. Darek, you do Newman, Yassir the offices upstairs. You, Darren, can do the corridors down to the dayroom.’ Kamal barked out further instructions to two female cleaners and they all pushed their buckets and trolleys to the door and waited for it to buzz open. ‘Wave to security once in a while. It keeps them awake. It’s not like they’ve got much to do all day, unlike the cleaning team.’ Kamal turned and moved away and the door buzzed shut behind them.

  Darren pushed his bucket towards another security door and held up his ID badge. A woman at a nursing station checked it and opened the door.

  He figure-eighted the floor, getting angrier by the minute. The Witch was having sex and enjoying herself while Carly lay rotting somewhere cold. And here he was, cleaning bloody corridors. He could b
e painting the house, doing something useful for Mum and Dad; for his living family.

  Several hours later he was trying to quell his anger by imagining what the corridor would look like painted different colours, with the ceiling gunmetal grey and the walls yellow, or with Carly’s graffiti tag as a motif down the wall. He was tracing the letters of her tag on the floor in a furious mop stroke when the door at the far end of the corridor was opened by a male orderly in a nurse’s uniform, keys on his hip. ‘Excuse me, what’s your name?’

  ‘Darren.’

  ‘There’s been a spillage, can you come through, please.’

  The nurse held the door open for Darren, who pushed his bucket through the door. It closed behind him with a loud click. He was in a kind of recreation room with about ten people in it, a large space with full-length plate glass windows that gave on to an expanse of grass with a single willow tree in the middle, the low red buildings at the sides and opposite giving it the appearance of a large courtyard. Low-slung chairs with well-used leather cushions were dotted around, and four women were at a table where their card game had been interrupted by what was happening beyond them. An old woman was bent sideways over her wheelchair, staring at a puddle of vomit.

  ‘Linda’s been feeling unwell all day, haven’t you, Linda?’ A female nurse announced, to Linda but intended for Darren. She unhitched the wheelchair’s brakes and pulled Linda backwards away from the mess.

  ‘If you could deal with that please,’ the male nurse said to Darren, indicating the vomit spread across the lino.

  Darren pushed the bucket across the room, fighting the disgust churning in his stomach.