And, somehow, this near stranger has said exactly the right thing, the only thing that could make her feel even slightly better. Before he leaves, he gets her a second tea, has to argue with the guard to do it, and they sit in silence while she drinks it.
CHAPTER 70
The Kidnapper
Everybody is back in Terlingua and so I, too, am back to the little house I suspected all along. I stake it out four times a day. It’s easier to do it now, though it remains a shut-up mystery.
Still, obsession yields results, so I set up a proper schedule so I will soon have every single hour covered. She has got to come outsometime.
Morning, afternoon, evening and then night. But there’s no movement, even though the lights go on and off. This time, I have the things with me. The tape, the ropes, they’re in a bag on my back. If I see her, she’s mine. Forget overpreparation, underpreparation is a risk, too.
I sit cross-legged in the dirt at two o’clock in the morning, hips aching, hands filthy from leaning back on them, just watching for any kind of flicker within.
There’s always nothing until there’s something. Sure enough, when I return at six o’clock in the morning, she is just leaving in a taxi that pulls off as I walk by. This spurs me to act. I risk a call to the county appraiser’s office, something I don’t want to do for obvious reasons. They answer, and I give false details of my own, but a nearby address. Say I’m a neighbour, the tenant is problematic and I suspect they’re up to no good. They don’t know who the tenant is, say it’s noton the records as let. They will find out who the landlord is and call me back.
Tomorrow, I will come back and stay the night. Two until six. People are creatures of routine and habit, after all. Let’s see.
CHAPTER 71
Simone
Next to a No Smoking sign, an inmate in the yard is pretending to light up. Simone watches her for several seconds, fascinated. Imaginary cigarette held between thumb and index finger, the way you’d hold a roll-up you treasured, not a mass-produced cigarette. She brings it – nothing – to her mouth, sucks her cheeks in, then blows out.
Simone’s arraignment and sentencing is in only two days, and therefore it is also in two days’ time that she will likely leave this jail for a prison, but all she is doing is nothing, just watching the non-smoker, also doing nothing, smoking nothing.
‘Been forced to quit,’ she tells Simone, ‘so I’m pretending.’ She pauses. ‘No nicotine patches allowed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Simone says, then offers up, ‘if it helps, I’m being forced to quit nice food.’
The woman lets out a little laugh. ‘Aren’t we all? Nice food and human rights. Natch.’
She comes over to Simone with a hand outstretched. Simone finds she doesn’t want to shake it but does so anyway, hoping none of the nearby guards will accuse her of anything. ‘Victoria,’ the woman says.
‘Simone.’
‘Nice name. Too nice for a murderer,’ she says, but her tone is light, without any loaded quality at all, and Simone supposesthat maybe this passes for small talk. Is it a film-and-TV myth that you never ask what someone is in for? She doesn’t know, but somehow Victoria is fully aware of Simone’s crime.
‘Well, not everyone’s story is as obvious as it seems,’ Simone says.
She tilts her head back and looks into the high blue sky. Just at the very edges, she can see trees, unfamiliar, cactus-like, and she finds herself thinking that it ought not to matter what country she is in, but that it does. The yard is as dusty as the desert she and Lucy slept in, the clouds feather and down, the chain-link fences hot underneath her fingertips. Sunscreen is allowed in jail here, and Simone bets it isn’t in England.
There’s a watchtower in the centre of the yard, its walls surrounded by barbed wire. A guard sits at the top, looking out, and Simone shields her eyes against the fierce, hot sun, even into the autumn, and tries to get a glimpse of his face. An aeroplane begins to pass, somewhere distant, taking free people from place to place.
Most of the inmates are playing basketball, something that at first seems like fun but seems more volatile the longer you look.
‘My trial is in six months. Been here six already,’ Victoria says. She flicks imaginary ash off the end of the cigarette. ‘Backlog due to Covid.’
Victoria looks directly at Simone. She has pale skin, ginger hair, near perfect features. Her hair is recently cut, blunt ends, and Simone finds herself thinking how life must go on, even in jail, somehow. Haircuts and sunscreen and dental procedures and who knows what else, the bits that purport to make up a life.
‘I’m being sentenced soon.’
Victoria locks her eyes to Simone’s in surprise. ‘Pleading guilty?’
‘Yeah.’
‘To murder? Aren’t you the one with the kidnapping?’ she asks, and Simone wonders how word travels so fast when this has never once been offered up by Simone as a defence since her arrest.
‘That’s me. Did a deal with the state,’ she says tightly.
