Wrong Place Wrong Time(56)

‘Phone in there,’ he says, and Jen puts it into the blue bank of lockers he indicates.

They go through another set of double doors that he opens with a fob. Underneath an over-the-door heater that momentarily warms the top of her head and shoulders, and then they’re in.

The visitor centre is a tired room, big and square with public-sector faded blue-and-red carpet, black plastic chairs, tiny tables. The back wall is solely floor-to-ceiling windows. Fat raindrops strike them and the roof above, rattling the skylights. The room is already full.

It’s less easy than Jen thought it would be to differentiate between prisoners and visitors. It looks like any other busy meeting room. A couple sits, split, across a table, their hands not quite meeting in the centre of it. Steadfastly not touching, but getting as close to the boundary of the rules as is possible. At another table, a child reaches towards her father, hand flexing like a distant blinking star, but the mother stops her, pulls her back into her body.

Jen thinks of her own father. She said goodbye to him in the morgue. She’d been too late. The image of her father lying there for six hours, dead, alone, stayed with her. In the morgue, eventually, the heat from her hand had warmed his, and she’d dipped her forehead to it, pretending, but it was no use.

Jen recognizes Joseph Jones easily. He’s sitting alone at a table in the exact centre of the room. The elfin ears, the dark hair. The goatee. His skin truly does have the prisoner’s pallor she’s read about. Not only a lack of suntan; something more. The kind of colour people go when they have the flu, when they haven’t slept, when they’re grieving.

She has been to this man’s house. She has seen him die. And now, here she is, about to find out quite who he is, after all.

‘Hi,’ she says as she sits down, her voice shaking. All his crimes. Robbery. Supplying. Assault. Her arms and legs begin to tingle.

The chair shifts underneath her. It’s the plastic kind that folds into a single line to stack against a wall.

‘Kelly’s wife,’ he says. He pulls the ribbed cuffs of his navy-blue sports jumper over his hands, playing for time. So he knows her, even though they’ve not yet met.

Jen sees that he has a gold tooth, right at the back. His eyes meet hers. ‘Jen,’ he finishes, his tongue lingering at his front teeth over the N.

She has gone completely cold, and completely calm. The frenzied anxiety of the mystery, of the anticipation, has boiled dry. The fuse has tripped, and she now feels nothing. The room stills around them, like a faded photograph. Quiet and blurred. Something is about to happen; she can feel it.

‘I …’ she says.

‘Jen, the love of Kelly’s life.’

She says nothing, trying to collect herself, but instead thinks about how brazen she’s been. Searching belongings, following people, hiding and eavesdropping. But look where it’s brought her. Here, a prison, mixed up with criminals, police cars driving by, a missing baby. Her skin burns with fear, like a thousand tigers’ eyes are watching her: she’s prey.

‘How do you know him?’ Jen says, swallowing.

‘We go way back.’ Joseph says nothing more. He crosses his legs underneath the table, legs stretched out, his feet underneath her chair. The gesture is deliberately proprietary. Jen wants to move back, but doesn’t.

Outside, the light fades, the clouds Russian blue, like somebody has flicked a dimmer switch. Joseph catches her looking. ‘Storm Richard,’ he says, passing his thumb behind him. ‘Going to be a big one.’

‘Is it?’ Jen says faintly.

‘Oh yeah. The murderers here love a storm.’ He gestures expansively around him. ‘Hypes them up.’

How strange that he wishes to differentiate himself from the prisoners, Jen finds herself thinking. She can’t help but notice it. ‘Tell me how you go way back?’ she presses.

Joseph leans across the table towards her. ‘You know, you’ll find out when I get out of here. I’m hoping to start it up again,’ he says, the same thing he said in the law-firm foyer. He makes another gesture, rubbing his thumb across his fingers, a signal for money or maybe just a twitch. Jen can’t catch it, perhaps imagined the delicate movement. It lasted less than a second. The rest of his body is completely, eerily still.

‘When did you meet?’

‘I think Kelly’s your man for this one,’ Joseph says. ‘Don’t you?’

Joseph rubs one of his hand tattoos, his head not moving at all, just looking at her. The wind picks up outside. A plastic bag drifts by like a balloon.

‘Jen,’ Joseph says, repeating her name. Like somebody toying with her. ‘Jen.’

‘What?’

‘I have one question, before I leave.’

‘Okay?’

‘And that is – Jen … how could you not know?’ Joseph cocks his head to the side like a bird. He’s mad, Jen finds herself thinking. He’s totally mad, this man who knows who she is. ‘Even I thought you knew.’

Forked lightning illuminates the sky outside, a split-second flash. Blink and you’d miss it.

‘Know what?’

Jen stares and stares at Joseph as the visitors’ centre seems to narrow around them. As thunder flexes in the sky above, he leans closer to her, gesturing for her to do the same, left hand upturned on the desk like a beetle on its back, fingers making pulling motions towards his body. She leans in reluctantly.