I cross my legs at the ankles and contemplate it. I was almost ready. I was sure I had her in my sights. And now this.
It’s time to make a new plan.But wait, I think, watching the flickering images play out on the phone,maybe it’s easier like this. There’s no one to get in the way of my plans; no one watching.MOTHER IN POLICE CUSTODY.
It’ll be easier to take her by myself.
DAUGHTER REMAINS FREE.
Part IV
THE PRISONER
CHAPTER 69
Simone
At four o’clock this morning, Simone wakes from a dream that it is Lucy in jail, instead, locked up away from Simone, inexplicably bound and gagged and mute.
Simone then does nothing for the following twelve hours – so jarring in the era of Netflix and Kindle and iPhones – until (absurdly) four o’clock in the afternoon, when dinner is served.
There is no lingering over mains late at night here. Tuesday is pizza day in jail, and the pizzas are loaded on to plastic plates in the canteen, their cheesy ends dipping like Salvador Dalí clocks.
If Simone were lying, she would say that the pizzas may be disgusting but the inmates are worse. But, actually, Simone finds nothing more offensive than soggy pizza dough and sprayed-on cheese, a fact she finds somewhat unedifying but is nevertheless true.
Pizza on plate, she squeezes past a couple of women standing together, talking behind their hands, and sits nearest to a guard. Probably wimp-like behaviour, but she doesn’t care.
She is alone at a bolted-down table. The floor is a bright yellow linoleum, the walls blue. A kind of overly compensated cheerful, the same found in children’s hospitals and contact centres back home.
Nearby, voices rise, over the last serving maybe. Simoneregisters it dimly, keeps her head down, doing what she feels is most sensible in this situation: she eats the pizza, looks uninterested, makes her body smaller. One woman pushes the other, and Simone doesn’t look at the guard or tell on anyone. Instead, she acts as if it is not happening at all.
One slice of pizza is all she can manage, the cheese, tomato and bread flopping in her mouth like a second tongue. This is her first Tuesday in here. She is on – what the UK would call – remand, awaiting a court hearing, and it is crazy, to Simone, to contemplate that this is the first Tuesday of an almost infinite number. Thousands of them, surely, thousands of pizza days stacking up ahead of her. One day, she wonders if she will stop counting, and just kind of sink into it with acceptance. But only five days ago she was on a boat with her family, and now she is here.
Simone likes the canteen because it has windows, although they’re way up high, at the edges of a vaulted ceiling. Even so, they have bars on them, running vertically. She also likes it because, in the windows, she can see herself – there are no mirrors in county jail.
She stares upwards at her reflection. Her jumpsuit is black and white stripes, an awful, clown-like outfit that, perversely, means she isnormal risk. Green means increased. Simone avoids those inmates the most. Beat-up trainers, one size too big, from a jail locker. Unbranded used-to-be-white socks. She keeps both on right until she goes to bed because her cell smells of urine and she can’t bear the thought of walking on old wee.
Texan skies are a burst of unreal blue beyond the windows, and it’s funny, she really does live here now, in Texas. This shitty canteen with its nailed-down furniture and plastic cutlery is her home.
After dinner, she lies on her bed in her cell that is always five degrees too hot, doing nothing, waiting for nothing. Novisiting hours until tomorrow. Lucy and Damien remain in America, for now, staying back in Terlingua, too far away for her liking, but what does it really matter? She wonders if they’re looking at the big blue sky, too.
And she can’t help but think something that bothered her less on the outside. That, while she is in here, imprisoned, he is still out there. The anonymous kidnapper, the wrongdoer. Walking free.
‘Somebody here to see you, Simone,’ a guard says to her while she lies on her bed, making eggs Benedict in her mind.
‘Who?’ she asks immediately. ‘It isn’t visiting hours?’
‘Lawyer,’ he says.
‘I refused legal advice.’ Her statement is downbeat and factual, comes from a place of fear. Only total compliance, in Simone’s mind, will keep Lucy free. Simone’s arraignment is in three days’ time, when she has told the police she will plead guilty to all charges as part of the ongoing bargain to give Lucy total immunity. They set it for then so that the judge can receive her plea and sentence her all in one. She took the blame for everything she could. Even the identities. It’s better for Lucy to have one parent free.
It’ll be life, she’s pretty sure.
She can’t get legal advice.
She sits up on the edge of her little bed now, mattress not hard but instead overly soft, so soft it sags into the springs of the bed frame which dig into her back in the night.
‘He’s in a meeting room,’ he says, and then he makes a gesture towards the heavy metal door with the hatch in it, for her to come.
‘Will anyone know about it?’
