Mark Pearson - Death Row

Maybe the woman’s granddaughter would have to wait for her bloody vampire novel or whatever it was that the daft old bat had been wittering on about. Some people liked to read horror stories, Jennifer reckoned, some people were already living in them. She opened her own bag, put the purse in and checked the contents: her own purse, five packets of condoms, a pepper spray she had bought off one of the other girls, some amyl-nitrate poppers. She closed the bag and stood up as the bus came into Camden.

Yeah. Time for field studies.

*

The governor of Bayfield prison, Ron Cornwell, a tall, thin man in his fifties, always felt nervous in Delaney’s presence and couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason. Some of the most dangerous criminals in the country were incarcerated in his prison and yet he felt more uncomfortable under the Irishman’s probing gaze than he did among them. It was to do with power, he guessed — he had complete control over the men in his care. He wasn’t sure whether anybody had control over this particular man and from what he had heard of him he couldn’t believe, even if only half the tales were true, why Delaney hadn’t been kicked off the force long before. He did get results, though, that much Cornwell knew. There were a lot of his inmates right now who would have dearly loved to get their hands on Jack Delaney.

They were in the segregated wing of Bayfield prison. An inner sanctum reserved for those prisoners most at risk from their fellow detainees. Maybe some of them would have been better off in the secure facilities at Broadmoor but what distinguished the criminally insane from the criminally and murderously perverse was a fine distinction that didn’t trouble Ron Cornwell’s conscience. And if the perverts were targeted and hurt or even murdered because of it — if there was no honour among thieves, then what should pass for honour among these lowest of the low? — then he didn’t have a problem with that, either. The segregated wing was a sanctum from the normal prison population but when rabid dogs turned on each other a handler was well advised to stay clear. After all, these were the prisoners that even the most morally reprehensible of the prison’s general population found repugnant. Child killers. Child molesters, rapists, torturers. And the worst of the lot, as far as some of the inmates were concerned, were ex-policemen.

People like Charles Walker. Delaney’s old boss and Kate’s uncle, who was awaiting trial on various counts of murder and the sexual exploitation of children.

People like Peter William Garnier.

Delaney cleared his throat and the governor realised he had been staring. He nodded to the two guards who stood beside him, one of whom took out a key and unlocked the door of the interview room.

‘We have him handcuffed as well as shackled by the legs.’

‘He’s a danger to young children, not to me,’ Delaney replied.

‘It’s standard procedure. Body fluids can be a dangerous weapon in a prison nowadays. It keeps him at a distance.’

Delaney nodded. ‘Let’s just get this over with.’

The governor looked at him again. The curiosity was written plain on his face. ‘And you have no idea why he asked to speak to you?’

‘None at all.’

‘And the woods this morning …?’

‘There was nothing there. It was a wild-goose chase.’

Ron Cornwell gestured to the guard, who opened the door for Delaney to enter the room. ‘The guards will be just outside.’

Delaney ignored him, walking straight into the room and closing the door behind him. At the end of a ten-foot wooden table and facing the door sat Peter Garnier. His magnified, watery eyes, which stared at Delaney as he entered, were as emotionless as those of a fish looking out of a bowl.

Delaney pulled out a chair and sat down, looking back at him. Assessing the man. He’d been forty-two years old when he’d been arrested eighteen years ago, and he looked older than his present sixty years. Frailer, his skin papery so that the pale blue of his blood vessels beneath filtered through. The pale blue of death, Delaney thought, and the sooner that happened the better — although the disease could take up to seven years, so maybe not. He revised his opinion. The man deserved a slow and painful death.

‘I saw you watching me this morning, detective.’

Garnier’s voice wasn’t what Delaney had expected. It was quiet but confident, more powerful than his thin legs and wasted frame would have suggested.

‘That a fact?’ Delaney said.

‘Watching me quite closely, Detective Inspector Delaney. I could feel your eyes upon me and when I looked over into them I saw the darkness of your desire. We have something very much in common, don’t we, Jack?’

Delaney felt his hands forming into a fist underneath the table but he kept his eyes level, his voice steady.

‘The only thing we have in common, you little piece of shite, is that we are both going to die and you’re going to do that a long time before I do.’

The corner of Garnier’s mouth quirked in something resembling a smile.

‘You seem very sure of that fact.’

‘Depend on it, Garnier, I’ll be pissing on your grave sooner or later. What do you want from me?’

Garnier twisted his head to look at the solid wall, as if there were a window there. ‘Things can happen when we least expect them,’ he said. Ignoring Delaney’s question as he looked back at him.

‘You know, Garnier, you open your mouth and I get the smell of raw sewage in my nostrils. What am I doing here?’

‘Do you believe in vengeance, inspector? Do you believe that revenge is a dish best served cold? No, I can see it in your eyes. You don’t wait, do you, Delaney? You’re an Irishman driven by passions you can neither control nor live with. You’re an addict, aren’t you, just like me?’

‘You’re a bug. A cockroach. I’m nothing like you. I’m a human being, Garnier.’

Garnier looked at him for a long moment without replying. ‘You believe in a final judgement, don’t you, Inspector Delaney?’

‘What I believe or don’t believe has got nothing to do with you. Either tell me what you want to tell me or I am leaving. Right now.’

‘What’s the time?’

Delaney glanced at his watch. ‘It’s ten o’clock and I’m out of here.’ He watched Garnier, waiting. Sometimes it was all about waiting. Delaney didn’t know why he was there but Garnier was after something. He could see it in the glittering of his eyes, in the moistness of his breath, in the hot flush that was suffusing his pale flesh like a rash.

Garnier quirked the corner of his mouth again. ‘The girl you rescued.’ He gestured as if searching his memory. ‘What’s her name now?’

He asked the question in an innocent enough way, but his eyes had focused and Delaney was sure that this was the question he had been brought here to answer.

‘Your fifteen minutes of fame, wasn’t it? The girl rescued from a monster by a handsome young policeman. The girl in the boot. Whatever became of her, I wonder?’

Garnier tilted his head slightly, like a bird, looking at Delaney. Watching his reactions.

Delaney held his gaze, the muscles in his neck tightening visibly. When he spoke his voice was heavy, laden with threat.

‘You attempt to put yourself in my life and you will regret it, Garnier.’

‘You put your own self in my life, inspector, the day you took that young girl.’ He coughed into his hand, his whole body suddenly racked with spasms. Then his body shuddered and grew calm again. ‘She was the last,’ he said and looked up again at Delaney, the corner of his mouth twitching once more like a grub exposed to sunlight. ‘And I know what you did with her.’

‘You know nothing about me.’