mark – the burning girl private-school accent and a pony. Now, I'm a slightly better-paid legal secretary with less of an accent and no pony. And I'm still out of it. But.'
'But?
She grinned, picked up her drink. 'I've still got a few friends who are very much in it.' She drained her glass. 'We'll have a girls' night out a couple of times a year. You know the kind of thing family-run restaurant, shed-loads of booze on the house, I complain about work and they complain about how long their husbands and boyfriends are getting sent down for.'
'Sounds like a fun evening.'
'One or two of them may or may not know certain police officers pretty well and can call in a favour if they're asked nicely. Getting a copper's phone number is hardly rocket science.'
'I should be shocked,' Thorne said, 'but I'm too busy thinking about another round.'
She picked up Thorne's empty glass and pushed back her chair. 'Another one of those?'
For the next hour or so they talked about the difficulties of doing, or not doing, what was expected of you. It was soon obvious that this was something they both knew a great deal about.
Thorne told her that if he were the sort to do what was expected, or at the very least encouraged, he wouldn't be there drinking with her. Alison told Thorne about her reluctance to do bugger all and sit on her arse spending her old man's money. She told him about upsetting her mother by refusing the offer to set her up in a business.
'Sounds like you were trying to distance yourself,' Thorne said. 'From the money. From everything that made the money. Like you blamed it for what happened to Jessica.'
Her pale complexion flushed a little. 'If my dad hadn't been who he was, what he was, then it wouldn't have happened. That's not a delusion.'
They both took a drink to fill the short pause that followed. By now, she'd moved on to white wine. Thorne had moved on to his next Guinness.
'Why did you marry Billy Ryan?' he asked. She thought about it for a few seconds. Just rising above the buzz and burble of pub chat, the voices of the latest boy-band drifted through from the jukebox in the bar next door.
'It sounds like I'm joking,' she said, 'but it really did seem like a good idea at the time.'
'He must have been. what? Mid-thirties?'
'Older. And I was only eighteen.'
'So who the hell thought that was a 'good idea'?'
She smiled. 'Not my mum, for a start. She thought the age difference was too big. But Dad was all for it. I think there were a few people who thought it was a good thing, you know, some of the old boys who'd been around a bit. Even though Dad had been out of it a few years by then, and Billy was running the show, some people thought it was a good way of… building bridges, or something. The old guard and the new guard.'
'You make it sound like it was arranged.' She shook her head. 'I wish I had that as an excuse. I'd like to say I married him to make everybody else happy. And I knew that I was, to some extent. But the simple fact is that I loved him.' She paused, but looked as if she needed to say something else. She searched for the right words. 'He was impressive, back then.' Thorne thought about the Billy Ryan he'd so recently encountered. There would be some who might still describe him as impressive, but lovable was not a word that sprang to mind. 'What went wrong?' She took a good-sized slurp of wine. 'Nothing… for a while. But there were two sides to Billy.'
Thorne nodded. He didn't know many people without at least a couple.
'There was part of him', she said, 'that just wanted to have fun. He liked to have friends over or go out to parties. He used to take me into all the clubs. He wanted to dress up and show off and hang around with actors and pop stars. People writing books. He loved all that.'
'I bet the actors and pop stars loved it as well.'
'When it was just the two of us, though, he could be a whole lot different. If it was just him and me and a bottle of something, he became somebody else, and I was on the receiving end. Maybe he was still having fun, I don't know.'
Thorne saw her eyes darken and knew what she meant. He remembered the feet, dainty inside highly polished shoes, but also Ryan's shoulders, powerful beneath the expensive blazer.
Two sides. The dancer and the boxer.
'It's a pretty good reason to leave someone,' he said.
'He was the one who left.'
'Right.'
'He said he couldn't cope with the problems I had. All the stuff with Jess I was still trying to deal with.'
Thorne had to fight to stop his mouth dropping open. Problems? Stuff?
All of them, all of it, the result of what her husband had done. Alison saw the look on Thorne's face, took it as no more than mild surprise. 'I did have some bloody awful mood swings, I know I did. Billy wasn't exactly what you'd call supportive, though. He kept saying I was neurotic. that I needed help. He kept telling me that I hated myself, that I was impossible to live with, that I needed to get over what had happened when I was in that playground.'
When a man paid by Billy Ryan had come to her school to kill her. When flames had devoured her best friend in front of her eyes.
'No,' Thorne said. 'Not exactly supportive.' She swirled around the last of her wine in the bottom of the glass. 'He was right about me needing help, of course, but I needed a damn sight more after a couple of years with Billy. I got through a bit of that money my mum had been offering then. Pissed a lot of it away paying strangers to listen. Any number of the buggers at fifty quid an hour.'
Thorne stared at her.
Her eyes widened when they met his. 'I'm all right now, though,' she said.
'That's good.'
As she downed her drink, she contorted her face into a series of deliberately comical twitches and tics. It wasn't particularly funny, but Thorne laughed anyway.
She put down the glass and reached for her handbag. 'Let's go and get something to eat.'
Rooker stared at a spider on the ceiling, wishing things were noisier. It was always noisy in prison, always. Even asleep, five hundred men could make a shitload of noise. During the day, it could be unbearable. The pounding of feet in corridors and on stairs, the clank of metal -buckets and keys, the slash and smash of voices echoing from cell to cell, from landing to landing. Even a tiny noise a fork on a plate, a groan in the night was magnified somehow and charged. It was like the anger floating around the place had done something to the air itself, made it easier for sound to move through it and carry. Distorted, deafening. It was something you got used to. It was something Rooker had got used to.
Here, though, it was like the bloody grave.
Even the relative peace of the VP wings he'd been on was like a cacophony compared to this. There, the shuffling nonces made noises all of their own. Same thing went for the old fuckers they got lumbered with. They always stuck the very old fellas on the VP wings. The stroke victims and the doolally ones, and the ones who had problems getting around. They were no trouble, most of them, but, Christ, once the lights went out, the hawking and the coughing would start, and he'd want to put pillows over all their pasty, lopsided faces. He missed it now though. The silence was keeping him awake. He allowed himself a smile. There would be plenty of noise in a few weeks when he was out when it was all over and he was home, wherever that would be. There would be silence when he wanted it, and noises he hadn't heard in a very long time. Traffic, pubs, football crowds. When it was all over.
The sessions with Thorne and the rest were wearing him out. Thorne especially had a way of digging at him, of pushing and pushing, until the effort of remembering and repeating it over and over again was like shoveling shit uphill. He knew it had to be done, that it would be worth it, but he'd forgotten quite how much he hated them. Even when you were supposed to be helping them, when you were supposed to be on the same side, the police were a pack of mongrels. He felt a familiar flutter in his gut that was coming often now, whenever he thought about life on the outside. It was like a bubbling panic. He'd imagined being out for so long and now that it was within his reach he realised that it scared the living shit out of him. He'd known plenty of cons who'd done a lot less time than him and couldn't hack it on the outside. Most were fucked up on booze and drugs within a year. Others all but begged to be sent back to prison, and, eventually, they made sure they got what they wanted. It wasn't going to be easy, he
