8
The wait goes on for several hours. Anna is seized up in her seat, her arm throbbing from being trapped in the same position by the handcuffs. She’s hungry, thirsty too, and desperate to pee. To distract herself, she counts down from 1,000: 999, inhale, count on the exhale, 998 . . .
She’s nearly at 666 when the door crashes open. She’s not going to take it as a sign, even though the prison officer is wearing an expression that’s particularly demonic. He’s at the front, followed again by Little and Large, with another man in a suit bringing up the rear. It must be the duty solicitor. Anna sits up, straightening her hair with her left hand, attempting to create some impression of order.
The police officers sit down opposite her once more, while the solicitor sits to her left. The prison officer props up the door again.
‘Right, let’s start again,’ Large says. He launches straight back into the caution. Murder, that word again. Anna can feel herself freeze.
The solicitor puts his hand up. ‘I’m going to have to stop you there,’ he says. ‘I want to have a consultation with my client on her own beforehand.’
Heavy sighs from round the table, but they all troop out, leaving Anna and the solicitor alone.
‘I’m Tom Wright,’ he says. ‘Solicitor from Douglas Kemp and Co. They’ve called me in to represent you.’
Anna nods. ‘I’m Anna Flyn,’ she says.
He nods back at her. ‘I know.’ He pulls a pen out of his jacket pocket and puts it down on the table next to his notebook. ‘Can you tell me what this is all about?’ He’s brusque in his manner, off-hand.
‘I don’t exactly know what happened,’ she says, ‘but when I woke up she was dead. She’d cut her throat with a razor, slit her wrists too.’
‘Who was dead?’
‘My pad mate – cell mate. Her name is Kelly Green, that’s what they’ve just said. I didn’t know her, though.’
‘Are you sure about that? They told me she was living on the streets in Oxford in the last few months, staying in hostels. You haven’t come across her?’
Anna stares at him blankly. ‘I’ve been in here for the last three years. How would I have met her?’
He leafs through his notes, reads down through a page in front of him. ‘Oh yes, sorry. Of course.’
Anna tries not to sigh. She shouldn’t have bothered with a solicitor – he’s clearly not interested. She takes a deep breath, continues.
‘I’ve never met her before. It was late at night when she was brought in. I was asleep before she came in – I went back to sleep straight afterwards. When I woke up, she was dead, her throat slit. I was checking to see if there was anything I could do to help, when the officers came in and found me . . .’ Anna’s voice trails off.
Tom is noting down her reply. She glances over at his handwriting, which is slanting, neat. Too measured for the horrors it’s recording.
‘What do you think happened to her?’ he says.
‘I think she killed herself.’
‘Right,’ he says, his tone non-committal.
Anna raises her head and looks at him, clocking now that he’s younger than any solicitor who’s represented her before: mid-thirties, clean-shaven, his suit tailored to his lean form. He looks more like one of the associates at the city firm where she used to work, not like a criminal hack. His white shirt is so pristine, it’s hard not to assume he’s having to restrain himself from wrinkling his nose at the smell in here.
Anna looks down at her hands again. She doesn’t want to cry but tears are threatening, the reality of it starting to hit her. Not for herself, but for the dead woman, all the other women wailing and yelling in the corridors outside, a constellation of pain.
‘I think you should give a “no comment” interview. Let’s see what the police have to say. Even the most open-and-shut case can reveal something unexpected,’ Tom says. He mutters the last bit under his breath, but she hears him.
‘Open and shut?’ she says. ‘You think it’s as clear as that? Did you even hear what I said? She’d slit her own throat.’
He doesn’t reply, doesn’t look at her, just adjusts his pen and his notebook carefully.
She slams her left hand down on the table, angry now, exhausted, all the strains of the last hours finally coming to a head. ‘She killed herself. I’m sure of it. People do that in prison – all the fucking time. Why would I kill her?’ Her voice raises to a shout.
Tom turns towards her and for the first time makes eye contact with her, finally seeing her as a person. ‘You make a good point.’
‘Yes,’ she says, trying not to sob. It’s not sadness, just frustration at the sheer bloody mess of it. ‘I don’t know who she was, why she was in there. Why she wanted to kill herself. But I was meant to be released today, and whatever’s happened, it was nothing to do with me.’
