Simone laughs softly, and she tells Lucy what Moody told her.
‘So Max chose us, then she did it, with help from the other guy?’
‘Seems so. That other guy works the airport; I spoke to him briefly. Enough – unfortunately – to tell him we were staying together, enough for him to know how much I love you.’
‘Oh,’ Lucy says, her mouth round with surprise. ‘You told him that?’
‘Said I had missed you so much. I tell everyone. It’s obvious, too, without me saying …’
Lucy gives her a sad half-smile through the glass. ‘And the rest is bum luck,’ she says, her voice melancholic. ‘That you dropped one of the bars of drugs.’
‘Exactly. I think so.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Michaela Wyatt.’
‘So that’s her,’ Lucy says slowly. ‘The person we tried so hard for so long to find.’ Another pause. ‘She was there all along, at the border, assisting you.’ She fiddles with nothing, just the table – there’s nothing in there, not her phone or a set of keys or anything. ‘We now know who she is, the spectre over all this. A woman.’
‘I know.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Cowboy hat. Seemed benign enough.’
‘All that time. You’d met her, too.’
‘I know.’
‘God,’ Lucy says, and they lapse into silence. One morevisiting hours tomorrow, before her sentencing, then after that … between twenty and forty. Between twenty and forty. The thought throbs in Simone’s ears like a bass beat. But she knows this is the right thing to do.
‘And now she’s retired, Moody tells me,’ Simone relays to Lucy, whose shoulders drop.
‘So she’s no longer doing it.’
‘Right.’
‘With no evidence she ever did.’
‘… Right.’
‘If you went to trial, she’d deny it on the stand, wouldn’t she? And what jury would believe it was a woman?’
‘Yes. And have her colleagues and Max say it’s preposterous. There’s zero evidence anyone at camp was ever kidnapped. God knows how many were – they’re always told not to tell. It could be hundreds. It could be just a few. No one will admit to shipping drugs.’
Lucy shrugs, and the gesture is so inadequate that both of them smile grimly. Simone has depressed even Lucy with her resolution, with her botched saving of the day.
‘How long do you think you will stay?’ Simone asks, finally saying it. ‘After.’
‘Forever,’ Lucy says. She meets Simone’s eyes and gives a kind of enigmatic smile. Simone can’t read it. It is both self-conscious but also knowing.
‘No – that’s not the idea!’ Simone says. ‘You’re going home.’
‘I can’t leave you here,’ Lucy says. Somehow, the plastic phone, the glass screen, it makes this more self-conscious, not less. Simone doesn’t feel one step removed; she feels on display.
‘I want you to be truly free. Go to RADA. Anything,’ Simone tells her, but Lucy just shrugs again.
A beep sounds: five minutes left. A kind of toddler timer set for inmates, to attempt to cut down on tantrums. Simone heaves a sigh. This is it until tomorrow, and she can’t even hug her. Back to her cell, to lie on the shitty bed, the too-soft mattress, her view of her stainless-steel toilet that looks like a loo from an aeroplane. Another day done of fourteen thousand.
