‘Excuse me, would you?’ Conway drained his drink and stepped past the commercial director. He crossed to the bar, where the young woman serving the drinks abruptly ignored everyone else who was waiting and poured him a fresh glass of wine, delivering it with a quick tight smile. He moved through the thronged boardroom towards his cousin. Jezza was clearly excited, rabbiting away to the poor bloke he’d cornered over by the buffet table. Bradfield Victoria was his obsession. If there had been a church where Jezza could worship the club, he’d have been its archbishop.
When Mark Conway had told his cousin he’d been invited to join the board, he’d thought Jezza was going to faint. The colour had drained from his face and he’d staggered momentarily. ‘You can join me in the directors’ box,’ Conway went on to say. Tears sprang up in his cousin’s eyes.
‘Really?’ he’d gasped. ‘You mean it? The directors’ box?’
‘And the boardroom before and after the game. You’ll meet the players.’
‘I can’t believe this is happening. It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of.’ He pulled Conway into a hug, not noticing the other man flinch. ‘You could have chosen anybody,’ Jezza added. ‘Somebody you wanted to impress. Somebody from work you wanted to reward. But you chose me.’ He squeezed again, then let go.
‘I knew what it would mean to you.’ Which was perfectly true.
‘I can never repay you for this.’ Jezza roughly wiped his eyes. ‘God, Mark, I love you, man.’
This was the moment he’d planned for. It had taken a significant investment and a lot of smarming up to people he despised to get that coveted seat on the board. But he knew that once he’d handed Jezza Martinu the golden ticket, his cousin would do anything to keep it. The final element in his insurance policy in case his ambitious plans didn’t pan out. Conway smiled. It looked sincere because it was. ‘I’ll think of something,’ he said.
But he already had.
1
When a small group of FBI agents came up with the idea of offender profiling, the one thing they knew for sure was that they didn’t know enough about the minds of those who kept on killing. And so they went looking in the one place where they could be sure of finding experts – behind bars.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
It was the smell that hammered home his whereabouts as soon as he woke. There was no prospect of drifting out of sleep with that momentary sense of dislocation, that half-awake wondering, Where am I? Home? Hotel? Somebody’s guest room? These days, as soon as consciousness arrived, so did the miasma that reminded Dr Tony Hill that he was in jail.
Years of talking to patients in secure mental hospitals and prisons meant he was no stranger to the unpleasant cocktail. Stale sweat, stale smoke, stale bodies, stale cooking, stale farts. The sourness of clothes that had taken too long to dry. The faintly vanilla musk of too much testosterone. And under it all, the harsh tang of cheap cleaning chemicals. In the past, he’d always been glad to escape from the smell of incarceration and back into the outside world. These days, there was no escape.
He’d thought he’d get used to it. That after a while, he’d be inured to it. But six months into his four-year sentence he was still brutally aware of it every single day. Because he was a clinical psychologist, he couldn’t help wondering whether there was some deep-seated reason for what had begun to feel like hyper-awareness. Or maybe he simply had a particularly acute sense of smell.
Whatever the reason, he had grown to resent it. Not for him those half-asleep moments where he could imagine himself waking in his bunk on the narrowboat that had become his base, or in the guest suite in Carol Jordan’s renovated barn where he’d spent time enough to consider it a second home. Those dreamy fantasies were denied him. He never doubted where he was. All he had to do was breathe.
At least now he had a cell to himself. When he’d been on remand for weary months, he’d had a succession of cellmates whose personal habits had been a particularly arduous punishment in themselves. Dazza, with his tireless commitment to wanking. Ricky, with his phlegm-choked smoker’s cough and perpetual hawking into the steel toilet. Marco, with his night terrors, screams that woke half the landing and provoked even more screaming and swearing from their neighbours. Tony had tried to talk to Marco about the bad dreams. But the aggressive little Liverpudlian had leapt up and gone nose to nose with him, denying via most of the swear words Tony had ever encountered that he had ever had a bastarding nightmare.
Worst of all, Maniac Mick, awaiting trial for chopping off the hand of a rival drug dealer. When Mick discovered that Tony had worked with the police, his first response was to grab the front of his shirt and smack him up against the wall. Spittle had flown as he explained to Tony why they called him Maniac and what he was going to do to any fucking fucker who was in the pocket of the fucking feds. His fist – the one tattooed across the knuckles with C-U-N-T – was drawn back, ready for the strike that Tony knew would break something in his face. He closed his eyes.
Nothing happened. He opened one eye and saw a middle-aged black man with his hand between Mick and Tony. Its presence was like an improbable forcefield. ‘He’s not what you think, Mick.’ His voice was soft, almost intimate.
‘He’s filth,’ Mick spat. ‘What do you care if he gets what’s fucking coming to him?’ His mouth was a sneer but his eyes were less certain.
‘He’s got nothing to do with the likes of us. He doesn’t give the steam off his shit for robbers
