‘Ah.’
As she sits down, the jumpsuit strains at her hips, even though she’s lost weight already through not eating floppy pizzas and bread so oily it leaves stains on her fingers.
‘They didn’t charge Damien, then?’
‘No. Minor dishonest offences, anyway,’ she tells him. ‘I took it all for the main ones. Same with Lucy.’
‘Well.’
‘Well, what?’
‘It isn’t too late,’ he says.
‘Yes it is,’ Simone says, nodding firmly. ‘I’ve done a deal. If I went back on it, went to trial, they would go after her, too.’
Moody makes a face, his lips moving downwards in a kind of grimace, then just looks at her, saying nothing for a while. He begins to upend the pencil again, evidently thinking. ‘You’re sure about that decision?’ he asks her. ‘That’s why I’m here: to make sure.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘It’s a hell of a decision.’
‘But the right one.’
‘What if you both went to trial and I got you both off?’ he says lightly.
‘I’m not willing to gamble that,’ Simone says, and, truly, would anybody be?
‘Do you know what you’re gambling here, Simone? What they will sentence you to, in just a few days’ time, if you go ahead?’
‘No. And I don’t want to know,’ she says quickly. And, to her surprise, he just tells her, against her will, straight up.
‘They have charged you with murder; you just escaped capital murder,’ he tells her, his gaze direct. ‘With everything, you’d be looking at twenty to forty years.’
Simone is too shocked to say anything except a sarcastic-sounding ‘That is a lot of Tuesday pizzas.’
Moody gives her a grim laugh, but she isn’t listening, not really. Instead, she is thinkingtwenty to forty years. How dare he tell her? She didn’t want to know. And now she does, she can’t conceptualize it. It’s an unfathomable amount of time.
‘Twenty to forty,’ she repeats.
Twenty or forty multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five. The maths is stupid, dizzying, though easy for her from scaling up ingredients. Seven thousand to fourteen thousand days? And she’s done five days, all aching fucking five of them.
Perhaps as consolation, Moody pushes the tea again towards her. She takes a sip and, oh, that is wonderful. Proper tea, not the canteen stuff she has every morning, the colour of an ashtray and tasting about the same, made with UHT milk and careless brewing. This is rich and full-bodied, malty, balanced on the tongue. Hot but not scalding. Simone could write a tea guide like people do for wine, right at this moment. ‘That’s nice,’ she says feebly to Moody.
‘You like cooking?’ he asks. ‘You have a restaurant?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m partial to food myself.’
‘I could tell,’ she answers. ‘Nice spices, and nice knives, too, in your kitchen.’
‘I got them to use proper milk here … for the chef.’
‘Right.’ Simone pauses, then adds: ‘Lucy will be nearly forty to sixty years old.’
The unspoken passes between them: Simone herself might not make it out of here. She will be more like sixty to eighty.Eighty.
‘If you let me represent you, I could get it down,’ he tells her. ‘I could get you off.’
