Post Mortem, Gary Bell [best fiction novels .txt] 📗

‘Oh, of course.’ She was wringing her gloves together as she led us to the nearby gate in the mesh – her on the grassy side, us in the road – and then she opened the gate and invited us through. There’d been a lock on the gate, but it was broken off. She noticed me noticing. ‘Kids were trying to grow weed out here earlier this year, I think. Can you believe it? They cut the lock off to get in.’

‘Not really the climate for it, I’d imagine.’

She shrugged.

‘So, how have you been?’ I asked.

‘I’m getting on all right. Keeping busy. Not much else I can do with myself, now I’m out of work.’

‘For now,’ I noted, stepping over a terracotta plant pot. ‘Keeping busy is the best way to handle this situation. You actually have an allotment here?’

‘I do!’ For a moment, she did something quite remarkable. She smiled, and beckoned us to follow between rectangles marked into the earth and a forest of bamboo stakes. ‘I know they’re for pensioners but, whatever, I like it. After spending every day moving between locks and bars, stuck behind concrete, you’ve got to get some space wherever you can find it in this bloody city …’ She paused, a shadow crossing her face, then shook it away. ‘Been renting it for two years now. We don’t have much of a back garden, so I thought it would give Roland and his sisters a nice place to come and get a little sunlight. You still help me out, don’t you, Ro? Whenever I can get you off the PlayStation.’

The boy didn’t answer; he was still standing close to the fence, watching us negotiate the crowded terrain towards his mother’s shed at the back of the land with something very like jealousy.

‘This patch here will be peppers,’ she said, showing us a strip of overturned dirt with an enthusiasm I would never have imagined possible back in chambers, ‘and this will be tomatoes, as long as I can figure out how to keep clear of the damn aphids this time. Over here by the shed I have these paving slabs, you see they’re actually different shades? Been wanting to get them down as a sort of border ever since I saw something similar on Pinterest, but I haven’t had time since …’ All at once, she sobered up, lost to the thought. Silence fell, and I was sorry to hear it.

‘It’s very nice,’ I said. ‘Peaceful.’

She gave a perfunctory nod. The brief gleam in her eyes had been snuffed out to leave something remarkably sad.

I cleared my throat. ‘Might we come inside the house for a brief chat? There are a couple of things I’d like to discuss before we get to court on Monday. Things we didn’t get around to yesterday.’

‘I don’t think that’s such a great idea,’ she said quietly. ‘Coming inside, I mean. The dog – he’s a bit of a handful.’

‘Yes, I saw.’

‘I just wanted a dog because I’ve been having a bit of trouble in the area.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘People disliking the fact that I work at the prison, I guess. To them it’s as bad as being police, and there are plenty of people with family on the wrong side of the law. Come sit down, though.’ She gestured to a stack of wooden planks that had been arranged as walls around her intended tomato patch. There was netting over the soil, but beneath that I could see soft, vulnerable green shoots peering through. ‘Roland, go inside and take your sisters with you.’

‘Uh-uh.’ He stood defiantly at the fence, some fifteen feet away, eyes moving between the three of us.

‘Roland!’

‘Why should I?’ he spat, rattling the fence behind him with a backwards kick and stretching as tall as the last of his stubborn childhood would allow. ‘I’m the man of the house!’

It was an odd statement, almost Dickensian, coming from this skinny boy who probably weighed eight stone wet and was still a year away from puberty. The tantrum might’ve been laugh-out-loud funny, if it hadn’t been such a poignant reflection of the state of the Meadows household. Charli didn’t even argue. She sighed and left him standing there. ‘What do you want to know?’

I felt awkward getting into it in front of her children, but she wasn’t giving me much of an option. ‘The Tuesday before your vehicle was searched, the night those thirteen men died in their cells. Were you at work?’

I watched closely for any change in her expression. Thinking towards this bombshell through the small hours, I’d expected a telltale widening of the eyes or a nervous twitch, if not a full-on wail of guilty horror, but there was no alteration whatsoever. Perhaps because her nerves were so permanently frayed. ‘I wasn’t on shift until the next morning. The ambulances were lined up outside when I got there.’

‘Must’ve been shocking,’ I said, ‘pulling into work and seeing that.’

‘Only a little. The ambulances are often called out several times a day.’

‘Because of the drugs,’ Zara added; it wasn’t soft, and it wasn’t a question.

A few seconds of dead air followed. I had this awful, sweeping feeling that I’d made a crucial mistake in bringing Zara here. That she might have planned this whole encounter just to get face-to-face with precisely the sort of smuggler responsible for her cousin’s death in the Scrubs all those years ago. Thankfully, neither one of them bit, and my concern was only fleeting.

‘Because of prison,’ Charli replied simply. ‘Convicts or not, though, deaths on the wings seem to hit officers and staff harder than they do the other inmates. I’ve always thought so, anyway. To some cons, we’re just the faceless screws trying to keep them inside, but the reality is that we’re there to keep them safe. Nobody wants to have a man end his life on their watch. Nobody. Losing so many in one night, that hurt the whole