Chris Ryan - Osama

‘Do the other inmates see newspapers?’ Joe said.

‘Course. If they pay for them. What d’you want, Page 3?’

Joe didn’t answer. All he really wanted was to find out if the rest of the prison population had access to the article about him. It seemed they did.

‘There’s blow,’ said Hunter. He sounded desperate, as if he was trying to get on Joe’s good side. ‘If you know where to get it…’

But Joe didn’t want drugs, he didn’t want tobacco, and he didn’t want anything to do with the man he was sharing a room with. If Hennessey’s boys felt the need to do Hunter, they were welcome to him. All Joe wanted was to get out of this stinking, scum-infested shithole. Or, failing that, to protect himself.

He had access to two razor blades and nothing else.

It wasn’t much, but it would be enough.

It had been a good shift, Eva Buckley thought to herself. Tiring, but good.

She’d been on since midnight, working from her desk in Scotland Yard. Things had been quiet. She’d not been called anywhere or hassled by anyone. For a lowly, overworked DI such as herself, that was unusual. But it had meant she could spend the night dealing with the paperwork that had been piling up over the past couple of weeks. And anyway, she found herself less inclined to put herself on the front line these days. Maybe it was the first sign of growing old. Now she was winding down with a latte and a blueberry muffin in Starbucks at Victoria Station. At least that was the idea. But now the latte was cold, the muffin uneaten, and there was no doubt about it: her day had just taken a turn for the worse.

She read the article in The Times for the third time, grinding her molars absent-mindedly, as was her habit, and then her eyes returned to the picture of the fresh-faced young soldier – slightly blurred and spotted with age – that she recognized so well. ‘ Sergeant Joseph Mansfield of 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment is currently assisting the police with their enquiries, ’ the report said.

‘Joe?’ she whispered, shaking her head in disbelief.

Eva looked up, seeing but not registering the crowd of Japanese tourists that had just flooded into Starbucks. She was trying to work out when she had last seen him. Ten, eleven years ago? The afternoon of Millennium Eve. It should have been a happier occasion than it was. Her mum and dad, who still lived in Lady Margaret Road, Hounslow, where Eva and Joe had grown up, were having a get-together. All the old faces. Joe had shown up with his Irish girlfriend. She was beautiful and graceful. Everything Eva had hoped she wouldn’t be.

Eva looked back down at the paper. If anyone had asked her, she’d have pretended she couldn’t remember the girl’s name. But she could, of course. How many times had she wondered whether Joe had talked to Caitlin about her? Had he explained that, growing up, he and Eva had been like brother and sister? Had Caitlin ever felt a twinge of jealousy? Had he ever had to explain that he’d never even so much as kissed her on the lips, no matter how much she had wanted him to?

Or had it never come up?

Joe had stayed at the party an hour, then left. Eva had never heard from him again.

She’d thought about him, though. God knows, she’d thought about him. On his birthday – 22 April, she never forgot that. At Christmas. And when she was lonely, and wanted to talk to her childhood friend.

He’d been such a quiet boy, but none of their group took that as a sign of weakness. That was partly because of his dad. Reg Mansfield had a reputation. Now that Eva was in the Job, she knew his type well enough. A bit of door work, always happy to earn a few quid roughing up some poor sod who owed a couple of weeks’ rent or hadn’t paid their bar bill. Brought his work home with him too. Joe’s mum had the bruises on her face to prove it. Sometimes she’d make a go at camouflaging them with a bit of cheap foundation but most of the time she didn’t bother. It was no secret in Lady Margaret Road that Roberta Mansfield’s biggest concern was where her next bottle of vodka was coming from. You didn’t often see her sober, though best not to mention this in front of Joe.

Reg eventually got out of his depth when he found himself caught up in an armed robbery that went wrong. Eva had never got to the bottom of it, mainly because it was something Joe would never talk about. All she knew was that it had been a raid on a post office during which a police officer who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time had taken a hit. Two days on life support and a widow’s pension for his missus. Joe’s dad hadn’t fired the trigger, but that didn’t stop him from receiving a fifteen-stretch. The Scrubs – frankly the best place for him.

Joe couldn’t have been more different from his dad. Eva remembered a time, just a month before that last blag, when they had met at their usual hangout – the old bandstand in the recreation area at the end of Lady Margaret Road. It was wintertime, and Joe’s skin was flushed with anger. He was holding the knuckles of his right hand, and Eva saw that they were bleeding. At first he didn’t want to tell her what had happened, but after a few minutes of cajoling he gave in. His mum had been hitting the bottle. His dad had been hitting her. Joe had stepped in. It was a brave man that muscled up to Reg Mansfield, but Joe had done it and come out best. Eva remembered how she’d looked at him in a different light that night, how she’d realized that he was a teenager with a man’s strength and a man’s determination. Realized that even though he’d grown up in a den of thieves, he knew right from wrong.

She stared back at the article.

Joe knew right from wrong.

It was a surprise to everyone, Eva included, when he joined up at the age of sixteen. With his dad banged up and his mum now a slave to the bottle, nobody really believed he could make anything of his life. But Eva could tell, when he came back for his first home leave, that the life he had chosen was the right one for him. The quiet, steely manner had intensified. When their loudmouth friends in the pub bragged and swaggered, Joe kept quiet. He didn’t feel the need to big himself up. He didn’t feel the need to do anything but watch.

Apart from that one time.

He’d been home for two weeks. Joe, Eva and a few of their mates were drinking in the Hand and Flower, a local pub that turned a blind eye to the fact that they were all under-age. Ashley Bamber had left school to become an apprentice mechanic. He had been sinking pints of lager at twice the rate of any of the other guys, and was growing lairy with it. Joe, as usual, had sat in the corner, quietly watching. Then, just as last orders had been called, Ashley started coming on to Eva. There was nothing friendly and flirty about it: he’d groped her in front of everyone, and said something filthy. For what seemed like the first time that evening, Joe had spoken. ‘Time to go home, Ash.’

Ashley had looked at him over his shoulder. ‘Knob off, Action Man,’ he’d said. ‘Just because you’ve spent the last three months sucking the sergeant major’s dick…’

They’d left then, all of them, embarrassed and awkward. Outside the Hand and Flower, however, Eva had watched as Joe grabbed Ashley by the arm and led him down the side of the pub and into the deserted beer garden. Two minutes later he returned alone. ‘He ever gives you any trouble again, you tell me,’ he said.

She never found out what had happened in that beer garden. Joe wouldn’t tell her. But Ashley never gave her any bother again, and whenever Joe was back home, he stayed away.

It was thanks to Joe that Eva had joined the force. She’d half thought of joining the army like him, but her courage deserted her and she had decided to dedicate herself to a life of policing, thinking – maybe wrongly – that it was the softer option. She’d seen some things in her time. Rubbed shoulders with some nasty bastards who’d done some nasty things. She knew how they ticked. Knew the kind of men, and sometimes women, that they were.