Steve woke too early, like every night since they brought him here. It was the silence, he thought. The silence and the darkness. He’d never be comfortable in this place. He was a city boy, used to the traffic-drone that never died away, the wasteful small hours glare of the street lights and office blocks.
He rolled over, pulling the cheap duvet around his body, burrowing in search of further sleep. But the moment had passed. He was awake, mind already racing through the same thoughts, the same anxieties. Feeling a sudden claustrophobia, he threw back the covers and sat up in the pitch black. The room faced east, across the open valley, and the curtains were as cheap and flimsy as the duvet. But there was no sign of dawn, no promise of the rising sun.
He fumbled around the unfamiliar bedside table until he found a switch for the lamp. The sudden glare was blinding but, after a moment, reassuring. The bedroom was as bland and anonymous as ever. Off-white walls, forgettable chain store pictures, inoffensive flat-pack furniture. There’d been a half-hearted attempt to make it homely, but that only highlighted its bleakness, confirmed beyond doubt that no one would ever stay in this place by choice.
It was cold too, he thought, as he reached for his dressing gown. The central heating hadn’t yet come on, and he could taste the damp in the air. He crossed to the window and peered out. A clear night, the sky moonless but full of stars, less dark than he had imagined. In the faint light, he could make out the valley, the faint gleam of the Goyt in the distance. Miles from anywhere. The end of the line, past all civilisation.
He pulled the dressing gown more tightly around him, and stepped out on to the landing. This was his routine. Waking in the middle of the bloody night, making himself a black coffee, sitting and waiting for the sun to rise on another empty day.
The unease struck him halfway down the stairs. Nothing he could put his finger on, just a sudden sense of something wrong. He hesitated momentarily, then forced himself to continue down. Of course something was wrong. Everything was fucking wrong. He didn’t even know why he’d done it. It wasn’t the money – he knew there would be little enough of that, now they didn’t need him any more. It wasn’t the supposed guarantees. He’d few illusions about what those would be worth when the excrement hit the extractor. It wasn’t even that he was doing the right thing. He’d just managed to get himself wedged firmly up shit creek and then discovered that there never had been any paddle.
He pushed his way into the tiny kitchen and went wearily through the familiar ritual – filling the kettle, spooning coffee into the cup, adding two sugars. While the kettle boiled, he stared out of the kitchen window, across the postage stamp of an unkempt garden, towards the Peaks. The eastern sky was lighter now, a pale glow over the bleak moorland.
He stirred the coffee and paused for a moment longer, sipping the hot sweet liquid, gazing vacantly at the darkness. The sense of unease had remained, a thought lurking at the edge of his mind. Something more focused than the usual ever-present anxiety. Some idea that had struck him and receded before he could catch it.
He picked up the coffee and forced himself back into his routine. He would go into the living room, sit on the chilly plastic sofa, switch on the television and watch the silent moving figures, with no interest in turning up the volume. Waiting for yet another bloody morning.
He pushed open the sitting room door, and his mind finally grasped the thought that had been troubling him. The door. He’d closed the sitting room door before going to bed. Another part of his routine, some unquestioned wisdom retained from childhood. Close the downstairs doors in case of fire. Waste of bloody time in a place like this, he’d reasoned. Whole place would be up like a tinderbox before you could draw a breath. But he still closed the doors.
Halfway down the stairs he’d registered, without even knowing what he’d seen, that the living room door was ajar.
He thought of stepping back, but knew it was already too late. In that moment another, more tangible sensation struck him. The acrid scent of cigarette smoke, instantly recognisable in this ascetic, smoke-free official house.
He thrust the door wide and stepped inside. The small table lamp was burning in the corner of the room, The man was sprawled across the tacky sofa, toying lazily with a revolver.
‘Up early, Steve,’ he commented. He was a large man in a black tracksuit, wearing dark glasses, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His face was neatly shaven and boyish, but there was nothing soft about him. ‘Guilty conscience?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ Steve said. ‘You?’
‘Sleep of the just, mate,’ the man said. ‘Sleep of the fucking just.’
A moment before, Steve had been contemplating how to get out of this. Whether to try to get back into the kitchen or upstairs. Out of the front door, or through the patio windows.
But there was no point. The man knew his name. Knew who he was. Why he was here. Someone had grassed. Why else had he come? Someone would always grass. He ought to know that better than anyone.
There was no way out. No future. There never had been any future, not to speak of, once he’d taken that step. He’d known it then and there was no escaping it now.
Steve felt oddly calm, detached, observing all this from a distance. He saw the man playing aimlessly with his gun. He saw it all, and he felt untroubled. He had no illusions about what the man would do. Perhaps no more than he deserved.
So he stood there, motionless, waiting for it to start. And in that moment – before the flare and the noise, before the impact, before his blood began to seep into the worn fibres of the cheap grey carpet – Steve felt almost relieved.
He’d almost missed it.
Something caught the corner of his eye, some movement. A twitch. He moved himself to the right to try to gain a better vantage through the spyhole.
It was well after midnight. The dead hours of routine patrols when nothing much ever happens. Maybe just some scrote with insomnia – and, Christ knew, all of this bunch ought to have trouble sleeping – shouting the odds, wanting to share his misery with the rest of the fucking world.
But usually nothing much. A fifteen minute stroll along the dimly lit landing, glance into the cells, check that no one was up to no good. There was never any real trouble.
Sometimes Pete tried to kid people that this was a responsible job, stuck up here all night by himself on the landing. If anything happens, it’s up to me to sort it out. Yeah, he thought, up to me to press the bell and summon backup. He was an OSG. Operational Support Grade. Bottom of the pile, with – at least in theory – minimal prisoner contact. Didn’t always work out that way, of course. But nobody expected much of him. Especially not the Prison Officers.
Like that one earlier, who’d been coming up here just as he was ending his previous patrol. Pete had been running a bit late, had lingered a bit too long over his coffee and copy of The Sun. Nobody really cared at this time of the night, but he didn’t like to let things slide, so he’d been a bit out of breath, dragging his overweight body hurriedly round the landings then down the stairs.
He hadn’t recognised the officer who’d met him on the stairs. He thought he knew most of them, but they kept buggering the shifts about and this one was new to him. Christ knew what he was doing going up to the landings at this hour.
Pete had tried to offer a cheery greeting – they were both stuck on this arse end of a roster, after all – but the guy had just blanked him, hardly seeming to register that Pete was there. Well, fuck you as well, Pete had thought, puffing down the last few stairs. He’d heard the officer unlocking the landing doors above him.
Afterwards, he’d been worried that the officer might report him for being late. It was a stupid concern. The guy probably wouldn’t even have