Chris Ryan - Osama

‘I know you didn’t. I just thought… I could help?’

Silence.

‘You want some ch—?’

‘No.’

A screw walked past. They sat in silence until he was out of earshot.

‘What happened?’ Eva said. ‘Who did this?’

He leaned forward. Eva did the same. For a moment she was back in Lady Margaret Road with him.

‘You expect me to believe that you just happened to get a sudden itch to see me after ten years? You think my brains have dribbled out my fucking ears?’

‘Joe…’

‘I don’t know who’s got to you, Eva. The Firm? Someone else? But whoever sent you, you can tell them this from me. I don’t care what happened in the compound. But I do care what happened to Ricky and Caitlin. You tell them that. You tell them, if they think they can set me up for this, they got another think coming. And when I’m out, I’m going to track them down and do something that is worth sending me down for…’

‘Joe, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What compound? You’re not making sense .’ She looked around the room. ‘Are they… taking care of you here? You know you’re only on remand? They shouldn’t be treating you like you’re convicted.’ She paused, while Joe made a hissing sound from behind his teeth. ‘Have you seen a lawyer?’ And then, more quietly: ‘A doctor?’

Joe stood up. Immediately two screws bore down on him. ‘Red chair,’ one of them called across from ten metres away, and everyone in the room turned to look at him. With a dark expression on his face, Joe sat down again. He didn’t look at Eva, but stared into the middle distance.

They sat like that, in silence, for five minutes. Eva found that she was holding back tears.

‘You’re different,’ she said finally.

No reply.

‘Do you remember the last time we met at the bandstand?’ she whispered.

It had been a cloudy Saturday afternoon, two days before what Joe had called ‘selection week’, whatever that was. Joe had told her that he was applying to join a different regiment. A ‘special’ regiment, he had said. Eva hadn’t known what he was talking about, though she had a good idea now. It would mean a lot of travel. Staying away for months at a time, or leaving the UK at short notice. She’d made him promise to keep in touch, but he hadn’t. Not really. Their paths had diverged. An uncomfortable thought crossed Eva’s mind. Maybe she didn’t know Joe as well as she thought. Maybe the things he’d seen, the things he’d done, had changed him.

She wondered how many people he had killed in the line of duty. And she wondered if once you’d killed one person, it was easier to kill the rest.

‘I’ll get us some coffee,’ she said weakly, and she stood up immediately because she knew Joe wouldn’t give her any response.

The queue was still long, which was a relief. It gave her time out. When she returned to the seating area ten minutes later, Joe hadn’t moved. He was staring into space. He didn’t take the coffee, nor did he speak as Eva drank hers.

‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she said when she had drained the dregs from her plastic cup. ‘I’m sorr—’

‘You ever been in the jungle, Eva?’ He still didn’t look at her, but he seemed to know that she had shaken her head. ‘Last time I was there, I spent five days lying on the jungle floor. Hard rations. Mosquitoes, snakes, fuck knows what else. Had to piss and shit where I was. Didn’t move more than half a metre in any direction.’

He turned to look at her, his eyes flat.

‘You tell them that.’

‘Tell who ?’

‘You tell them I can do my time better than any man alive. And when I’m done, when I’m out of here, I’m going to find out who they are and—’

‘ Joe… ’ Eva knew that the tears were flooding her eyes now. He sounded paranoid. And what was it she’d read in the newspaper? About soldiers coming back with their heads messed up. Maybe he really had lost it.

Maybe he really had killed her.

‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Really I don’t.’

But the conversation was over. Eva was left counting down the minutes until visiting was over. She made an awkward goodbye: ‘I still live in the same place… Dawson Street… if you need anything.’ Joe didn’t respond. The inmates and visitors divided into two groups. One standing by the door that led further into the bowels of the prison, the other by the exit that would take them back to the freedom of the outside world. And as the lags waved at their kids and wives and girlfriends across the open room, Joe stood by the door with his back to them.

Ten minutes later Eva was walking away from Barfield. The world was misty with tears. As she waited at a zebra crossing, she became aware of a man standing next to her. She recognized his suit, his stooped shoulders and his hooked nose, and she sensed that he was looking at her with interest. But Eva just kept her head down and crossed the road as soon as the little green man told her she could. It had been a traumatic afternoon, and she really wasn’t in the mood for talking with strangers.

‘Who’s your girlfriend, army boy?’

Finch was two steps behind Joe and talking in a quiet, taunting voice. ‘Wouldn’t mind getting her sweet lips round my chubby.’

Before Joe knew it, he had grabbed Finch by the neck and forced him up against the corridor wall. Instantly they were surrounded by a semicircle of inmates.

‘Go on then, army boy,’ he rasped. ‘Take your best shot, why don’t you? Might be your last chance.’

Joe squeezed his fist. He could feel Finch’s stubble against the palm of his hand, and the pulse of his jugular. There was a thickening of the neck as the blood constricted. Finch tried to kick him in the shins, but Joe barely felt it. He threw the bastard down. ‘I wouldn’t waste it on a piece of shit like you, Finch.’

Finch just grinned at him.

‘Be seeing you, army boy,’ he said. ‘Sooner than you’d think, eh?’

He dusted himself down and pushed through the semicircle of onlookers, who dissolved among the other inmates walking the corridor.

Douglas McGuire looked more like a con than a screw. Cropped hair, tattooed forearms. A stench of Golden Virginia roll-ups followed the prison officer everywhere. But there the similarity ended. McGuire had never met an inmate he trusted. These two – Hunter and Mansfield, the nonce and the soldier who’d done his missus – were no exception.

‘Strip.’

McGuire stood by the door while Sowden gave the instruction. It was 6 p.m. Dinner time. Out in the corridor there was the bustle of inmates making their way to the dining hall. Sowden was showing McGuire the ropes. Or as he had put it, ‘clue you up to how we do things around here’. It was only his first day in Barfield.

‘You gone deaf, Action Man? I said, strip.’

The soldier looked unwilling. But he did as he was told and started slowly unbuttoning his top.

‘No need to grin, Hunter,’ said Sowden. ‘You’re next.’ He looked back at McGuire. ‘So, what made you transfer from Whitemoor?’ he asked.

Like McGuire was going to tell anybody that . Like he was going to talk in front of a couple of inmates about the piece of scum he’d found smearing a shiv – made from a shard of mirror, the thick end wrapped in black electrical tape to form a handle – with his own shit, in the hope that his victim would get infected with AIDS. Like he was going to mention that one of his bitches who served up in the canteen had melted down a Mars Bar and spattered the burning caramel over his face.