‘We could cancel that. Adduce it at trial.’
‘She’s left, Moody! Our only chance was to catch her doing it. She’s not going to confess.’
‘I know.’ A beat. ‘I know.’
‘I can’t go to trial on that.’ She pauses, the excitement dying. ‘In the witness box, she’ll just lie. I can’t risk it on someonewho will have covered every base. She will have hundreds of colleagues who will vouch for her. It’s all been done on burner phones. She doesn’t even sell the drugs herself … She’s left the force.’
‘You could take the risk. Reject the plea, go to trial.’
‘I can’t, Moody. I can’t risk it for Lucy. A decade,’ she repeats back to him. ‘A decade.’
The kidnapper: a mother of a daughter. The symmetry, the irony, isn’t lost on Simone. Who better to ransom a mother than one herself, who knew what women are made of?
Visiting hours the next day, now the day before Simone’s arraignment and guilty plea, and they’re in the side rooms. Sometimes, visiting hours take place in the main Visitors’ Centre, sometimes here, cubbyholes with glass screens and telephones. There seems to be no reason why it’s sometimes one thing and sometimes another, like many things in jail. The same reason breakfast is served at five thirty in the morning.
There has not been a single effort to make the cubbyhole anything less than completely depressing. Nothing on the walls. Despite the lack of physical contact, Lucy is still body-scanned on the way in. She sits down on a plastic blue chair and looks at her mother.
Lucy is likely ageing underneath the surface. Simone might not even notice it, until so much time has passed that she has grey hair and wrinkles and so, today, she scrutinizes her for changes.
She is wearing a cornflower-blue top that Simone doesn’t recognize. She’s gained back the weight she lost. Nothing else.
Lucy rubs at her eyes. ‘How are you?’ she says into the phone. The screen distorts her, just slightly, reminding Simone that they are not quite seeing each other in person.
Perhaps it is Simone’s imagination, but she is almostalways marked very precisely by a guard, and wonders if this is because she has drugs offences on her records. One passes by now, walking heel to toe, a slow lap, listening in on their intimate communications in the way the law entitles him to do.
‘How’s the house?’ she asks Lucy.
‘It weirdly feels like home,’ Lucy says. ‘That little pink house. It’s OK. It was nice to hear from Moody.’ Simone had used her phone call after Moody left to explain to Lucy that it hadn’t been him who had betrayed them. A beat. ‘You’d hate what Dad is cooking.’
‘It can’t be as bad as here,’ Simone says drily, and Lucy lets out laughter that sounds for a second just like a child’s.
‘I’d agree there. But it’s really awful. We had scrambled eggs this morning in the shape of a square box.’
‘God, is he microwaving them?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Tell him to fry them in a pan, for God’s sake.’
‘I will.’
‘But is it – is it nice, no longer hiding?’
‘Itisnice,’ Lucy says carefully, but doesn’t add any more than that. ‘What news from here?’ she asks.
Simone steels herself, takes a breath. ‘Well, Moody thinks he has found your kidnapper. He thinks it’s a woman.’
‘What?’ Lucy says slowly, her voice audible only down the phone but her expression of guarded horror playing out right in front of Simone. But then her face changes. ‘It could be a woman,’ she says simply. ‘Yes. No voice. Yes. Strong, tall, but not necessarily male. You just imagine it is.’
‘Right.’
‘How old?’
‘Fifties.’
‘She’s a perfect kidnapper, in a way: someone who can hidein plain sight. A middle-aged woman. No one looks at old women.’
Lucy’s not wrong, but, nevertheless, throws Simone a tiny self-conscious grin. ‘Sorry.’
