‘The worst people to do a trade with.’ Victoria makes a gesture then, upwards to the barbed wire, to the unhappy women playing basketball as some kind of attempt at recreation, to the open skies that are available to everybody but them.
‘Well, sometimes you don’t have a choice.’
Victoria turns her mouth down at that in a kind of tacit agreement, nods, and throws her ‘cigarette’ on to the ground where she stubs it out.
‘And your guy – your daughter’s kidnapper …’
Simone raises her eyebrows.
‘One of the other inmates told me. We always google new people.’
‘On …?’
‘People on the outside do it for us,’ she tells her. ‘It’s more fun than basketball.’
‘Right.’
‘Your kidnapper is still at large, then? Just carrying on kidnapping?’
‘You believe me?’
‘Of course,’ Victoria tells her. She smiles grimly. ‘Why wouldyoutraffic drugs?’
‘Right.’
‘So he’s just – free? You don’t know who he is?’
‘Right. Some anonymous person, somewhere out there.’
‘Who never gets caught.’ She raises her eyes again to the barbed wire, the watchtower. ‘If somebody is getting awaywith something, I’d always look on the inside.’ She brings an imaginary lighter out of her pocket and pulls down on an invisible metal barrel. Simone can almost hear the rasp of it, see the flame dancing invisibly there in the white sun. ‘I always smoked them in twos,’ she explains. ‘Anyway, guess you’ve made your mind up.’ She meets Simone’s eyes again. ‘But I wanted to say, I’d vote not guilty, if I were on your jury.’
‘I’m not having a trial,’ Simone says.
But while it is all these words that reverberate in Simone’s brain for the next hour, it’s these in particular that are the loudest.I’d always look on the inside.
Who, on the inside, knew where they were going to be? Somebody they have overlooked?
Simone requests a phone call as soon as she can after this, and is granted one because it is telephone night. Moody calls her back, and she’s allowed to take it in a crowded and horrible anteroom that grandly calls itself the Communications Hub. It consists of white-painted breeze-block walls, a black-painted floor and the stale smell of cooked onions in the air. Along the left are four hooded telephone booths, old-fashioned payphones that remind Simone of the worst night of her life the second she touches the handset. The screen readsCALLER UNKNOWN.
‘There are no other victims of kidnap who have come forward. And there is nobody in the area who used to traffic drugs and got convicted for it and ended up on a watch list,’ Moody tells her. ‘As we know.’
‘… Right,’ Simone says. ‘I was talking to somebody in here. She said, if the kidnapper has evaded getting caught, what if it’s somebody on the inside? I know we discounted the police, but …’
Moody is silent for a little while after she says this. So much so that Simone checks the line is still connected. ‘It could be somebody in control of the situation,’ he answers eventually. Then he says two words to her: ‘Border Patrol.’
Simone blinks. ‘A border official at the airport knew I was meeting Lucy,’ Simone says. ‘I told him. He was helping me to find my suitcase …’
‘He ask any questions?’
‘My flight number. I told him I was staying with Lucy …’
‘How long did your luggage take?’
‘A little while,’ Simone says softly. ‘Half an hour, maybe.’
‘Long enough to give someone advance notice to go and break a door while no one was there.’
The remote check-in. She’d told him that, too. Could it be?
