Death Row - Mark Pearson [25]
Jennifer sat down next to her and the woman looked across at her for a moment, blinking as if to pull her eyes into focus. Then she smiled at her.
‘You going to be late at school?’
Jennifer shrugged dismissively. ‘It’s a field-studies day.’
‘Oh, I see.’ The woman nodded and looked at her again.
‘Vampires is it, dear?’ she asked.
Now Jennifer blinked herself. ‘You what?’
‘What with the hair and the make-up. What do you call yourselves? Geemos. I know you’re all into it now. I have a granddaughter your age Kirsty.’
Jennifer didn’t have a clue what the daft old bat was going on about. ‘Whatever.’
‘Stephanie Meyer, isn’t it? She’s all the rage. I have to get one of hers for Kirsty for Christmas. Maybe you can tell me what the latest one is?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘In my day it was Errol Flynn.’
Jennifer sighed, exasperated, and turned to her. ‘What?’
‘That had all the girls swooning. Mind you, he just wore green tights and the like. Maybe he should have dressed in black and gone out at night.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded him biting my neck. That’s for sure.’
Jennifer’s lips curled. ‘Yeah, too much information.’
‘I wasn’t always old, you know,’ said the woman, smiling, lost a little in her nostalgic reveries. ‘Like they say, tempus fugit.’
Jennifer would have responded, pretty sure that she had just been dissed by the old woman, but she stood up before Jennifer could say anything.
‘Anyway, this is my stop.’
As Jennifer shifted her legs sideways to let the woman pass, the bus swerved to the side and came to a sudden stop, throwing the old woman against her and causing her to drop her bag. Jennifer muttered under her breath and bent down to pick it up, sweeping the contents back into it. She stood up, handed it to the old woman and let her pass.
‘Thanks, dear, and good luck with the undead.’
Jennifer watched her go and waited for the doors to close and the bus to pull out into the traffic again. Then she opened her left hand and looked at the small purse that she had neglected to return to the old woman’s bag.
Maybe the woman’s granddaughter would have to wait for her bloody vampire novel or whatever it was that the daft old bat had been wittering on about. Some people liked to read horror stories, Jennifer reckoned, some people were already living in them. She opened her own bag, put the purse in and checked the contents: her own purse, five packets of condoms, a pepper spray she had bought off one of the other girls, some amyl-nitrate poppers. She closed the bag and stood up as the bus came into Camden.
Yeah. Time for field studies.
*
The governor of Bayfield prison, Ron Cornwell, a tall, thin man in his fifties, always felt nervous in Delaney’s presence and couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason. Some of the most dangerous criminals in the country were incarcerated in his prison and yet he felt more uncomfortable under the Irishman’s probing gaze than he did among them. It was to do with power, he guessed – he had complete control over the men in his care. He wasn’t sure whether anybody had control over this particular man and from what he had heard of him he couldn’t believe, even if only half the tales were true, why Delaney hadn’t been kicked off the force long before. He did get results, though, that much Cornwell knew. There were a lot of his inmates right now who would have dearly loved to get their hands on Jack Delaney.
They were in the segregated wing of Bayfield prison. An inner sanctum reserved for those prisoners most at risk from their fellow detainees. Maybe some of them would have been better off in the secure facilities at Broadmoor but what distinguished the criminally insane from the criminally and murderously perverse was a fine distinction that didn’t trouble Ron Cornwell’s conscience. And if the perverts were targeted and hurt or even murdered because of it – if there was no honour among thieves, then what should pass for honour among these lowest of the low? – then he didn’t have a problem with that, either. The segregated wing was a sanctum from the normal prison