by Sarah Hilary
‘Other than “Dangerous Lunatic on the Loose” you mean?’
‘The art of the empty soul. Didn’t someone say all great paintings contain a little poison?’
‘Yeah, I’d call this a tsunami. You ever seen anything like it?’
The room, Ron meant. Vokey’s obsessive pinning of the Polaroids, every surface covered, the window blacked out. ‘Not like this,’ Noah said. What would Dan make of Vokey’s art? Profoundly disturbing, acutely wrong. These faces – who were they?
‘They’re right,’ Ron was saying. ‘The eyes do follow you.’ He was studying the walls with his head cocked. ‘I don’t know shit about art, but I know what I don’t like. Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Something like it,’ Noah conceded. It was impossible to look away from the urgency of the faces, as if each was calling out to be found, saved.
‘Who d’you reckon they are?’ Ron pulled the cuff of his suit over his hand, wiping at his forehead. ‘People he knew? Are we looking at more victims?’
Like the young mother Vokey had tortured, the men mutilated during the prison riot.
‘Are they all his victims?’ Ron wondered.
‘Not all of them.’ Noah pointed to the clutch of black and white photos, the woman with her hand to her head, the beautiful young man. ‘I’ve seen these before.’
‘New to me. And you’re older than you look if you’re remembering pre-colour mugshots.’
‘These faces are famous. Medical, not police mugshots. It’s the Szondi Test.’
‘The what now?’
‘Léopold Szondi, a Hungarian psychologist. Back in the 1930s he developed a non-verbal test to reveal a person’s worst fears and impulses. Test subjects were shown a series of faces – these faces – and measured on their levels of sympathy or revulsion. The theory is we fear in others what we’ve repressed in ourselves. They used the Szondi Test on soldiers returning from Vietnam. It’s been debunked for decades, but it was doing the rounds online not so long ago. It’s seen as a bit of fun now but they’d have locked you up once, for giving the wrong answers to his questions.’
‘What questions?’
‘The faces are the questions.’
‘What – like snog, marry, avoid?’ Ron stepped closer to the nearest wall. ‘I’m just getting a whole load of avoid.’
‘Szondi would say you’re in denial.’
‘Okay then.’ Ron reconsidered the faces. ‘The smiley bloke with the beard, say I chose him.’
‘Snogging or marrying?’
‘No, he’s giving me the creeps. What’s that mean?’
‘Repressed maniac with a beard fetish.’
‘Him?’
‘You.’
Ron snorted his appreciation. ‘Oh Dr Freud, with these rare old Polaroids you’re really spoiling us.’ He retreated one stepping plate at a time to the door.
A breeze caught the corners of the photocopied faces and fluttered them madly so that just for a second all the men and women in the room were blinking.
‘I wonder what his cell’s like.’ Noah shivered. ‘This looks compulsive. I can’t imagine he stopped when they locked him up.’
‘I guess the boss is finding out.’
‘DS Carling, DS Jake.’ One of the forensic investigators was in the doorway, his face edited by the white hood of his suit. ‘You’re needed downstairs.’
‘This is downstairs,’ Ron grumbled, ‘isn’t it?’
Noah was watching the man’s face. ‘There’s a cellar?’
The investigator gave a grim nod. ‘You’ll want to see what’s down there.’
3
After Aidan Duffy had been taken to his new cell, Marnie returned to the corridor where the riot had started. Michael Vokey and two other inmates, Tommy Walton and Neil Bayer, had started a fight over food. Or so the story went. Walton and Bayer were in hospital with serious head and facial injuries; both men had been brutally blinded in the attack. Vokey had gone on to start a fire with a T-shirt saturated in cooking fat. Smoke had killed two inmates and hospitalised a further two. While the alarm was being raised, Vokey had assaulted Ted Elms in the cell they shared, before making his escape through a series of doors which had been opened for the fire services. The ghost of the riot haunted the corridor in fresh whitewash specked with soot. Marnie’s escort was in his twenties, peachy-cheeked and nervous, eyes jumping from the floor to the walls. He’d given his name as Darren Quayle, one of Aidan’s schoolboy officers who, knowing themselves outnumbered, kept the peace by striking bargains with inmates for their good behaviour.
‘Were you on duty?’ Marnie asked him. ‘When the riot happened?’
Darren shook his head. ‘They called us in though, called everyone in.’ He came to a standstill, hands twitching at his sides. ‘Didn’t tell us what sort of emergency, just gave out the riot gear and we kitted up and came in here.’
The corridor held onto the sour smell of bodies ripened by damage. Biohazard signs warned of the places you might slip and fall. A scroll of police tape sat in the spot where the worst of it had washed up. Not just blood. Teeth. Eyes.
‘Tommy Walton’s no friend of mine,’ Aidan had said. ‘But he didn’t deserve that.’
‘We’re taking the trays away.’ Darren blinked at the corridor. ‘Bringing the food in paper bags from now on. Meals in cells. They’ll be eating breakfast sat on the toilet. And we’re meant not to treat them like animals.’ He wasn’t looking at Marnie, staring down to where the biohazard signs stood sentry. ‘How’s that even going to work?’
No more bargains, or not for a long while. No promises of good behaviour, and little prospect of it. Fear would keep the peace for a while, but that couldn’t last. Before long the inmates would be pushing back, needing to know the new shape of this place, where its boundaries lay. It was possible the worst was yet to come.
Marnie said, ‘I’d like to see Michael Vokey’s cell.’
‘We showed it last time, before the clean-up.’ Darren’s hands moved, his fingers folding as if counting the number of empty cells going to waste in this corridor while the inmates were crowded three or four to a cell elsewhere in Cloverton. ‘Nothing’s changed.’
‘You’ve cleaned up. But you kept everything in situ. We asked that nothing was moved out.’
‘Except body parts.’ He turned his face, light catching the fuzz of down on his jaw. He was very young. ‘Eyes and teeth, and bits of brain. We cleared all that out, so you lot could do your job. No one’s helping us with ours, but yeah. This’s important because it’s dead bodies. They matter more than the live ones, I guess.’
Marnie couldn’t offer reassurances, and chose not to offer a platitude. She walked to where Ted Elms was assaulted shortly before Michael Vokey escaped. The cell had a bunk bed and a pair of cabinets bolted next to a metal sink and toilet. Two plants sat on one of the cabinets, green cacti coated in sticky brown soot. More soot stained the ceiling and shrouded the light fitting, the dark smell of fire damage crowding the narrow space. Her team had searched this cell seven days ago, taking everything likely to yield a clue to Vokey’s whereabouts. Letters and paperwork. Drugs of course, spice and pills. And Vokey’s sketchpads, the charcoals procured by Aidan Duffy through the channels which ran in and out of Cloverton like overworked shipping lanes.
‘Had you been in here,’ she asked Darren Quayle, ‘before the riot?’
He shook his head. ‘Ted was a neat freak, so we didn’t need to worry so much. On paper it looked like Vokey was the same. We thought it might work.’
As if this had been a flat share: Single white male living alone seeks similar. How close had the two men been? Vokey hadn’t spared Ted Elms his share of the riot’s damage; of the five in hospital, he had the worst prognosis. From the sense they’d been able to make of the night’s violence, Vokey had doubled back after his spree in the corridor, to attack Elms in this cell. That spoke of personal vengeance, or a special brand of sadism.
‘You know Mr Elms well?
’ Marnie asked Darren. ‘You called him Ted.’
‘We try to be friendly.’ He looked at the bunk bed. ‘It’s how they train us. Easier said than done with some of them, but Ted was okay. Just that one time when he swallowed batteries but everyone was doing it that week, like it was a group activity.’
‘Swallowing batteries.’
‘Triple A, the little ones. We have to take them to hospital so, you know, it’s disruptive. That’s why they do it. Low-level protesting. Nothing like what kicked off last week.’ He thumbed a fleck of soot from his cheek. ‘We cleaned up, but we’ll need the whole wing vetted before we can start using it again. In the meantime it’s four to a cell so who knows?’ He glanced in the direction of Aidan’s new cellblock. ‘This time next week they could be rioting over there.’
‘There wasn’t any trouble between Michael Vokey and Ted Elms before the riot?’
‘Nothing we had to deal with.’ He brushed his teeth with the pad of his thumb. ‘The smart ones figure out how to get along. We keep the peace as best we can, but it’s up to guys like Vokey how much trouble they want to get into.’
‘Ted’s smart,’ Marnie deduced. ‘He knew how to stay on Vokey’s right side.’
Darren wiped his thumb on his trouser leg, not speaking. Possibly since the evidence was stacked so steeply against the hypothesis that Ted Elms had known how to stay on the right side of the man who’d put him into hospital.
‘The battery swallowing. How long ago was that?’
‘A month ago?’ He shrugged. ‘Thereabouts.’
‘So Vokey was sharing a cell with Ted when it happened.’
‘Like I said, lots of them were swallowing around that time. We were about to take in new transfers, it was right after the riots in Leeds. No one was happy about that.’
‘Low-level protesting. Did Vokey swallow batteries?’
‘Doubt it.’ He scuffed a foot at the floor, grimacing. ‘It’d be on his record.’
‘Do you think Ted was protesting about Vokey? Was he unhappy about that transfer?’
‘He didn’t kick off,’ Darren said, as if this was the only benchmark that mattered.
Marnie considered the bed frame before crouching to examine the wall adjacent to the lower bunk. Dotted amongst the smoke stains were pale spots where glue or toothpaste had been used to stick something to the wall. Photos, Aidan had said. She touched a hand to her bag as she studied the marks, Stephen Keele slipping into her head as easily as a knife into a sheath. The slope of his shoulders, the dark of his face. Leaning across the table in the visitors’ room, fixing her with his unblinking stare, daring her to swallow his lies when their deaths were already two stones in her throat. Six years, she’d thought that last time they sat together, I’ve been asking you why you killed them for six years. Listening to his newly broken silence, his stare burning her face like a frost until she half-expected to find its bruise on her skin the next day. His words had been bad enough, but now she had evidence. Here, in her bag. Photographs, like the ones gone from this wall.
‘Who slept in the bottom bunk? Ted, or Vokey?’
Darren Quayle picked at the skin on his thumb. ‘Vokey. As far as I know.’
‘He had pictures here.’ She indicated the marks.
‘Guess so.’ He looked, without interest. ‘So?’
‘There were no pictures in the belongings we recovered before you began cleaning up in here.’
‘Guess the fire got them.’
It was a lazy lie. The fire hadn’t spread into the cells. Smoke didn’t burn pictures from walls.
‘You didn’t see them?’ Marnie straightened. ‘Photos of women, and girls.’
Darren wet his teeth with his tongue, glancing away. ‘They’ve all got something like that.’
‘Has Ted?’
He kept his eyes on the opposite wall. ‘Ted’s not into girls, from what I heard.’
‘What’s he into?’
A shrug. ‘You’ll have to ask him.’
Marnie thought of the hospital bed where she and Noah had been waiting to question Ted Elms. The tubes, and fluids. The dressings, the smell. She looked at the plants on the cabinet. Cacti, just as Aidan had said. They’d survived the smoke better than most inmates.
She stepped back from the bunk. ‘Michael Vokey’s letters. His mail.’
‘Yeah?’ Darren was losing what little interest he’d had.
‘Where would I find that?’
‘We gave you everything,’ stressing the syllables, ‘from in here.’
‘That was a week ago. Where would I find the mail that’s come for him since then?’
He paused, long enough for Marnie to suspect he knew all about the fan mail, women sending pictures, wanting to reform Michael Vokey, or worse. He’d been jailed for torturing a young mother. It was hard to believe any woman would write fan mail to a man like that, but it happened.
‘The post room,’ Darren said reluctantly. ‘If there’s anything.’
‘You weren’t aware of anyone writing to him on a regular basis?’
‘No, but that’s not my job, is it?’ He squared his shoulders. An angry boil below his left ear stressed his youth. How had he ended up in a prison where violence and self-harm were a normal state of affairs? Which careers officer had advised him to try this line of work?
‘Did Michael Vokey write many letters of his own?’
‘No idea. Some do, some don’t.’ His jaw bunched. ‘I need to get to C spur. We done?’
‘Did Ted Elms write many letters?’
‘Same answer. No idea.’
Something had spooked him. The photos, which he was denying having seen? If drugs could make their way in here then so could photographs, even intimate ones. Or was it the fan mail that disturbed him? Had he seen the letters from the women who thought they could reform Vokey, or who liked him just the way he was? Had Vokey written back, encouraging confidences? Did he have a favourite fan, someone who’d shared her address in the hope of hearing from him, happy to have his attention? Craving it, even.
‘He was drawing pictures,’ Aidan had said. ‘From the photographs.’
In which case, where were those pictures and photographs? Had he taken them with him when he ran? Or had he destroyed everything before the worst of the riot took hold, knowing the letters held clues to his whereabouts? Ted Elms had seen the photos and charcoal drawings; you couldn’t live this close to another human being without picking up the scent of a secret or two.
‘Where’s the post room?’ she asked Darren Quayle. ‘I need to see the mail that’s come for Michael Vokey, and for Ted Elms, since the riot.’
She looked again at the pale marks on the wall by the bottom bunk. Whatever had been stuck here, however strange or innocuous or terrible it was—
Ted Elms had seen it.
4
I’ve a room to myself at last, never mind the dog lead chaining me to the bed. The hospital’s like the shitting Ritz after Cloverton. I could’ve stood it even so, hunkered down and done my time. Until they gave me Mickey Vokey.
‘You’re one of the good guys, Ted. We trust you.’
To do what? I wanted to ask. Give him the bottom bunk even though it’s mine and I hate sleeping so near the ceiling? It gave me a migraine being that close to the lights, but I didn’t put up a fight because I could see how it was. They’d tried to cut a deal with Aidan, who wasn’t getting his fingers burnt. Well, you’ve seen him. Aidan Duffy. Not a mark on him, and he’s been inside long enough. Some people thrive in prison, that’s a fact. You’re not supposed to speak it, but it’s a fact. For some, prison’s the best thing that’s ever happened. The free meals and bed, the chance to be themselves. Men like Aidan don’t get rehabilitated, they don’t even get reduced. The worst of them flourish, thanks to unlimited opportunities to refine their skill set. The thieves get better at thieving, the liars get better at lying, and men like Aidan get better at being smart. Keeping quiet, staying strong. I’ve seen him practise his
smile when he thinks no one’s watching, running his fingers through his hair, making his eyes dance. He’s got Cloverton covered inside and out. I wonder whether the fire even touched him. When I try to imagine it, I see the flames swerve the other way.
Mickey isn’t anything like Aidan, but the same rules apply.
He wasn’t in prison. It was in him.
Prison’s the one place where your identity’s a hundred per cent protected. Chances are Aidan’s charm only works half the time out in the real world. As for Mickey, he couldn’t function out there. I know because I’m the same, needing the walls and noise. Needing the routine. Inside, if I line my stuff up and count it every day twice a day, I’m called a neat freak like it’s a good thing. I get, ‘You’re one of the good guys, Ted. We trust you.’ Out there I was called all sorts. Psycho, weirdo, paedo. Just because I had standards. They’re crying out for standards inside, the same as they’re crying out for anyone who can cut deals the way Aidan can. At least that’s how it was back before the drugs started coming in. Speaking of—
My lucky nurse is adjusting the meds, tapping in new numbers. Increased dosage, I hope. What they’re giving me’s only skimming the surface of the pain, like a pebble. Three, maybe four skips before it’s swallowed up. She’s my lucky nurse because of the gap in her front teeth. That and the dosage, not waiting for the pebble to drop before she punches in an extra kick. They say you get addicted to morphine but I’d reckon it’s the anticipation that’s addictive. Counting down to when it kicks in, four, three, two— Here it comes. Icy cold bliss. With me, it’s the anticipation.
Funny how quickly it all becomes normal. Spare a thought for the poor buggers who make a living out of smuggling shit into prisons, the girlfriends with their big smiles and bright clothes, flashing their teeth and tits around the visitors’ room, pushing Mars bars across the tables, chocolate under their fake fingernails from a morning spent stuffing a mobile phone in there or whatever else will fit, the things you never knew you couldn’t live without. Aidan takes care of all that now. Not the drugs, just the fancy stuff. The drugs get walked in by girls, even kids. The staff figure it’s easier to keep the peace with us lot off our faces, so they nod through all the sweets and cigarettes, porn and spice. You go to Aidan if you want silk boxer shorts or earplugs, or charcoals like Mickey for his drawings. Shit, those drawings. I’d never seen anything like it.
