Mark Pearson - Death Row

She let her bathrobe fall to the floor stepped into the cubicle and turned the shower on, adjusting the temperature. She stood underneath the powerful jets of water and felt the tension easing from her body as the water pummelled her flesh. A few months before and she would have had the water a lot hotter, punishing her flesh. Scourging the demons within. Burning the pain and the hurt and the guilt away. Now she just had it hot. Hot enough to wash the smoke and the grime and the smell of the city off her, but not hot enough to hurt. Not any more.

Kate gasped as a large powerful hand snaked around her waist and pulled her backwards against him. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard him enter.

‘Room for a little one,’ said Jack Delaney.

Kate laughed. A musical, deep-throated laugh that came from deep within her.

‘I thought you were getting up early?’

Delaney leaned in and whispered in her ear. ‘I am.’

Kate pressed back against him and smiled again as she reached around with her own hand. ‘That you certainly are.’

Outside Bayfield Prison. Morning. Six-thirty. The dawn only just about breaking. Dark but getting lighter by the minute. Not getting any warmer, though. Dampness hung in the air like a very fine mist. Not raining, at least, which was about the only good thing you could say about it, thought Melanie Jones as she adjusted the belt on her raincoat, folded her arms and flapped her hands against them, trying to coax some warmth into her shivering body. The raincoat had been bought from Aquascutum on Piccadilly for a small fortune and might well have kept the rain out but it certainly didn’t keep any heat in. It wasn’t the money she’d spent that she objected to, either: it was the fact that she needed to buy a raincoat at all. Bloody England — that was the problem. London in particular. Sodding London. Sodding rain-sodden London. She was still here! If she had her way she’d be out on the west coast of America where the news stations knew how to respect talent and you only saw a raincoat on late-night reruns of Colombo on a golden-oldies channel. America, the land of opportunity — that was where a woman like her rightly belonged. You wouldn’t catch Fox America putting old battleaxes front of camera in a month of sunny bloody Sundays, would you, she thought bitterly as she stamped her feet in a little dance to keep warm. At least she was with Sky and not having to put up with BBC intellectuals past their sell-by date, banging on about age discrimination. That kind of approach to the industry belonged in the 1930s when you had to wear a bow tie even to read the news on the radio!

Anybody could be intellectual if they read enough books. Oxford and Cambridge had about sixty colleges between them, for goodness’ sake. Brains were ten a penny. But what Melanie Jones had was looks, and she knew it. God-given beauty. And you couldn’t buy that, no matter how good your plastic surgeon was. Just ask Michael Jackson. She looked up at the sky, growing increasingly more pregnant with the possibility of rain, scowled, and thrust her hands deep in her pockets.

‘Here you go, Melanie. Milk, no sugar.’

Melanie took the cup of tea and nodded at Simon Harvey, the eager cameraman who had just handed her the drink. He was in his early thirties but still dressed like he was a film-school student, wearing black jeans, a black jacket and black Doc Martens on his feet. He was smiling at her with puppy-dog eyes. If he’d had a tail she reckoned it would have been wagging nineteen to the dozen. Men! All driven by urges they couldn’t control. Every single last one of them.

They were among a crowd of press and TV journalists and a large mob of the angry public who were waiting outside the prison that morning, despite the cold and the early hour. The anger simmering through the crowd like tidal energy. An anger that had been building for days, ever since the press had splashed across the front pages the news that one of the prison’s more famous inmates, Peter Garnier, had finally broken his vow of silence. The fury had been building for fifteen long years and for the last three days it had simmered to boiling point. Today was the day that he had agreed to take the police to his last burial ground. He was going to take them to the bodies.

Even his name sounded distasteful to Melanie Jones. Peter Garnier, she thought, with an involuntary shudder that had nothing to do with the cold, damp air. Peter Garnier. There was a man who certainly couldn’t control his urges.

A loud trilling sound startled Melanie Jones out of her thoughts. She pulled her mobile phone from her pocket and read the message on it.

She clicked it shut, put down her cup of tea on someone’s car bonnet and nodded excitedly at her cameraman,

‘Come on, Jimmy Olsen. We’re out of here.’

Simon Harvey had a good five inches on her but he had to lengthen his stride to catch up with her.

*

Graham Harper, seventy-six and feeling every year, set his cup back on its saucer. It rattled a little as his trembling hand fought to keep itself steady. The volume went up on his television as it always did when the ads came on. He picked up the remote control, pushed mute and then, his hands still shaking, as they did permanently now, he picked up a packet of cigarettes. His tired eyes blinked as he fumbled a cigarette out and into his mouth and searched in his dressing-gown pocket for his lighter.

He was sitting in the lounge of his two-bedroom end-of-terrace house. A cluttered room, dark with the curtains drawn, and a single lamp and the television providing the only illumination. His daughter had been on at him for ages to sell the place. Put himself in sheltered housing. But he’d worked hard all his adult life and now he was retired he’d be damned if he’d be put in another home again. They’d carry him out and up the street in a wooden box before he’d let that happen. He found his lighter and held it cupped between his knobbly hands, scarred and twisted with arthritis, and after a few rolls of the wheel managed to spark a flame and light the cigarette. He inhaled lightly and after a couple of hacking coughs cursed under his laboured breath as he heard a key turning in his front door and footsteps clattering on the tiled floor of his hallway.

‘Only me and Archie.’

Rosemary Woods was a tall strident red-haired woman in her forties. She came into the room, tugging an eight-year-old boy behind her. While her hair was a tamed auburn, hanging straight to her shoulders, her son Archie’s hair was wild and curly, such a dark brown that it was almost black. He had hazel, impish eyes, and was tugging on his mother’s hand, clearly not happy to be there. Rosemary shook his hand angrily and glared at him and Archie let go. Rosemary took off his padded coat.

‘Now you just behave for your grandfather.’

Beneath the coat Archie was wearing the brand-new Chelsea strip, bright blue with SAMSUNG written in bold white letters across it, over a pair of jeans and black and white trainers. ‘I want to go to Johnny’s house,’ he said. But he quietened as his mother turned to him with another exasperated look.

‘Well, for the hundredth time, you’re not! You’re staying here with Grandpa this morning like we arranged.’ Rosemary reached into her bag and brought out a coloured jumper with a large cartoon giraffe on the front. ‘If you get cold, put this on.’

She handed him the jumper and stepped smartly over to her father’s chair, whipping the cigarette out of his trembling hand and stubbing it out forcefully in an old pub ashtray he kept on the table by his side.

‘Rosemary …’ He started to object.

‘Don’t “Rosemary” me. You know what the doctors have said.’