The Dead Ex(78)

Indeed, the staff take pleasure in belittling me at every opportunity. ‘Don’t fancy the food then?’ asked one last week when she saw me picking through ‘vegetarian pasta’, which tasted of cardboard with tomato ketchup on top. ‘Not like the governor’s posh dining room, then.’

‘Actually,’ I retorted, ‘I used to eat in the staff café, like everyone else.’

‘How very democratic of you.’

The other women on my wing regard me with a mixture of disdain and interest. ‘Heard you killed your ex-husband,’ says my new padmate.

‘Actually –’ I start to say.

But she continues before I can make a denial. ‘Reckon they’ll make an example of you because you used to be a prison guv?’

I’ve wondered that myself. And now my biggest fear has come to pass. I’ve been told to report at the MBU with my cleaning trolley. Please no. The thought of facing all those poor mothers on countdown to losing their babies is too upsetting. ‘Couldn’t I go somewhere else?’ I ask.

The prison officer fixes me with a glare. ‘What do you think this is? Multiple choice at the bleeding Ritz? You’ll go where I say.’

My heart thuds as I press the security button next to the MBU sign. One of the officers lets me in and then checks my trolley. A previous cleaner had smuggled in drugs that way. ‘You can start in the nursery,’ I am told.

I walk past the huge, hand-painted murals on the walls depicting farmyard animals and a smiley sun. There’s a sign to say that this is the work of inmates. In my old life, I sometimes attended the Koestler Awards, a national competition for prison art and writing.

A little voice now comes floating out of the room on the right. ‘Mummy!’ it sings. My stomach feels as if it is plummeting out through my body and into the ground.

Then there’s a furious screech. ‘Mine! Mine!’

I push my trolley in. Before me are two women arguing over a push-along toy, each fiercely clutching a child as if brandishing a shield. ‘My son had that first,’ snarls one.

‘Then it’s about time he bloody learned to share,’ hisses the other.

I want to intervene and suggest that they take turns, as I might have done when I was on the other side of the fence. Instead, I stand stock still. Transported back to the day that Zelda Darling came back into my life …

‘Congratulations on your engagement, by the way,’ Patrick said as we walked towards the mother-and-baby unit together that day in 2012.

I’d felt guilty about asking him back to work for me in the new prison, but told myself that those feelings were long dead. And it was good to have him around.

Nevertheless I experienced a small twinge when he mentioned the engagement. ‘I presume you’ve learned this from the staff.’

His voice softened. ‘I don’t gossip, Vicki. You should know that. I’m just glad you’re happy. We go back a long way.’

Something lurched in my chest. I had to put that behind me, I told myself fiercely. Concentrate on the job. So I began talking about the changes I had in mind for the MBU. As long as we stuck to work, it was as if nothing had changed between us.

Much as I loved David, he didn’t really understand my job – mind you, I didn’t understand his. But Patrick’s world centred around prison life and, just as importantly, he loved it. He ‘got’ the intensity and the excitement and the terror and the responsibilities – and danger – which came with the power. The other month, a woman had threatened to throw boiling water over another during kitchen duties. I’d been on the wing at the time and had managed to talk her out of it.

Not long after that, I’d caught a prison officer taunting a woman because she hadn’t had any post since she’d arrived. ‘Kids forgotten you, have they? Not surprised after what you did.’

It wasn’t the first time this member of staff had been seen to bully or reprimand prisoners over their crimes. I suspended him immediately. Thank goodness for the many prison officers here who did fantastic jobs; people like my old friends Jackie and Frances, who recently saved an inmate by cutting the cord around her neck with a ligature knife. And then there was Patrick.

Patrick understood, whereas my fiancé’s initial admiration of my job frequently turned to irritation when my shift work interfered with our social life. ‘Can’t you just cancel it?’ demanded David when I explained I couldn’t meet his daughter Nicole on a particular Tuesday because of an appointment with the board. He wasn’t pleased when I replied that no, I couldn’t.

When I was finally introduced to her, I was faced with a sulky little thing who was rudely ungrateful for the Mini which her father had given her for her eighteenth birthday. ‘I wanted silver,’ she’d pouted. ‘Not black.’

‘That’s not what you told me,’ he’d said, almost as if he was amused.

‘I changed my mind.’

At no point during the dinner did Nicole look at me.

‘Only jealous,’ David said simply as if this was perfectly normal. ‘It’s a father/daughter thing. She’s never liked any of my girlfriends.’

Nor, it seemed, did David’s PA, Tanya, who was distinctly frosty every time I rang. Maybe they wondered, as did the rest of the world, what he saw in me: a red-headed prison governor without the dress style displayed by David’s previous girlfriends. I still thought about the chic cream linen dress I’d found at the back of his wardrobe when I’d moved into the London apartment. Apparently it had been ‘left behind’.