Death Row - Mark Pearson [11]
Anybody could be intellectual if they read enough books. Oxford and Cambridge had about sixty colleges between them, for goodness’ sake. Brains were ten a penny. But what Melanie Jones had was looks, and she knew it. God-given beauty. And you couldn’t buy that, no matter how good your plastic surgeon was. Just ask Michael Jackson. She looked up at the sky, growing increasingly more pregnant with the possibility of rain, scowled, and thrust her hands deep in her pockets.
‘Here you go, Melanie. Milk, no sugar.’
Melanie took the cup of tea and nodded at Simon Harvey, the eager cameraman who had just handed her the drink. He was in his early thirties but still dressed like he was a film-school student, wearing black jeans, a black jacket and black Doc Martens on his feet. He was smiling at her with puppy-dog eyes. If he’d had a tail she reckoned it would have been wagging nineteen to the dozen. Men! All driven by urges they couldn’t control. Every single last one of them.
They were among a crowd of press and TV journalists and a large mob of the angry public who were waiting outside the prison that morning, despite the cold and the early hour. The anger simmering through the crowd like tidal energy. An anger that had been building for days, ever since the press had splashed across the front pages the news that one of the prison’s more famous inmates, Peter Garnier, had finally broken his vow of silence. The fury had been building for fifteen long years and for the last three days it had simmered to boiling point. Today was the day that he had agreed to take the police to his last burial ground. He was going to take them to the bodies.
Even his name sounded distasteful to Melanie Jones. Peter Garnier, she thought, with an involuntary shudder that had nothing to do with the cold, damp air. Peter Garnier. There was a man who certainly couldn’t control his urges.
A loud trilling sound startled Melanie Jones out of her thoughts. She pulled her mobile phone from her pocket and read the message on it.
She clicked it shut, put down her cup of tea on someone’s car bonnet and nodded excitedly at her cameraman,
‘Come on, Jimmy Olsen. We’re out of here.’
Simon Harvey had a good five inches on her but he had to lengthen his stride to catch up with her.
*
Graham Harper, seventy-six and feeling every year, set his cup back on its saucer. It rattled a little as his trembling hand fought to keep itself steady. The volume went up on his television as it always did when the ads came on. He picked up the remote control, pushed mute and then, his hands still shaking, as they did permanently now, he picked up a packet of cigarettes. His tired eyes blinked as he fumbled a cigarette out and into his mouth and searched in his dressing-gown pocket for his lighter.
He was sitting in the lounge of his two-bedroom end-of-terrace house. A cluttered room, dark with the curtains drawn, and a single lamp and the television providing the only illumination. His daughter had been on at him for ages to sell the place. Put himself in sheltered housing. But he’d worked hard all his adult life and now he was retired he’d be damned if he’d be put in another home again. They’d carry him out and up the street in a wooden box before he’d let that happen. He found his lighter and held it cupped between his knobbly hands, scarred and twisted with arthritis, and after a few rolls of the wheel managed to spark a flame and light the cigarette. He inhaled lightly