Her eyes widened. She swallowed hard. He looked terrible.
His face was covered in scabs, as though he’d been in some kind of accident, and he had a couple of days’ dark stubble. He was leaner about the face than Eva remembered, but it was his eyes that shocked her the most. They were haunted. Unfriendly. Mistrustful. He didn’t smile as he looked at her. In fact, his face barely registered any expression. And he didn’t move.
Eva felt Joe might have just stood staring at her for the duration of the visit, but the screw instructed him to walk into the room.
He walked slowly, his face still set. A kid ran in front of him but he barely seemed to notice. When he reached the little group of four chairs at which Eva was standing, he stopped. Still he didn’t talk.
‘Inmates on the red!’ shouted a screw from across the room. Joe sat down. Eva sat opposite him.
‘Hi,’ she said. Her voice cracked, so she swallowed, smiled and tried again. ‘Hi.’
No reply.
‘It’s Eva,’ she said.
Joe looked around and beckoned to the female screw who was patrolling about five metres away. ‘I want to go back to my cell,’ he said.
‘Visiting time one hour. You go back then. No exceptions.’
The room was a hum of quiet conversation. About ten people were queuing up at the hatch.
‘I could get you a coffee,’ Eva suggested, ‘or some chocolate…’
‘Why are you here?’
Eva blinked in surprise. ‘Joe…’ she whispered.
‘Who sent you?’
‘Nobody sent me. Joe, it’s me…’
She saw his eyes narrow as he looked briefly around the room.
‘I saw…’ Her voice cracked again. ‘I saw it in the paper…’
‘I didn’t kill her.’ He said it quietly. Not much more than a whisper. For an instant his gruff, unfriendly voice sounded just like the kid she’d grown up with.
‘I know you didn’t. I just thought… I could help?’
Silence.
‘You want some ch—?’
‘No.’
A screw walked past. They sat in silence until he was out of earshot.
‘What happened?’ Eva said. ‘Who did this?’
He leaned forward. Eva did the same. For a moment she was back in Lady Margaret Road with him.
‘You expect me to believe that you just happened to get a sudden itch to see me after ten years? You think my brains have dribbled out my fucking ears?’
‘Joe…’
‘I don’t know who’s got to you, Eva. The Firm? Someone else? But whoever sent you, you can tell them this from me. I don’t care what happened in the compound. But I do care what happened to Ricky and Caitlin. You tell them that. You tell them, if they think they can set me up for this, they got another think coming. And when I’m out, I’m going to track them down and do something that is worth sending me down for…’
‘Joe, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What compound? You’re not making sense.’ She looked around the room. ‘Are they… taking care of you here? You know you’re only on remand? They shouldn’t be treating you like you’re convicted.’ She paused, while Joe made a hissing sound from behind his teeth. ‘Have you seen a lawyer?’ And then, more quietly: ‘A doctor?’
Joe stood up. Immediately two screws bore down on him. ‘Red chair,’ one of them called across from ten metres away, and everyone in the room turned to look at him. With a dark expression on his face, Joe sat down again. He didn’t look at Eva, but stared into the middle distance.
They sat like that, in silence, for five minutes. Eva found that she was holding back tears.
‘You’re different,’ she said finally.
No reply.
‘Do you remember the last time we met at the bandstand?’ she whispered.
It had been a cloudy Saturday afternoon, two days before what Joe had called ‘selection week’, whatever that was. Joe had told her that he was applying to join a different regiment. A ‘special’ regiment, he had said. Eva hadn’t known what he was talking about, though she had a good idea now. It would mean a lot of travel. Staying away for months at a time, or leaving the UK at short notice. She’d made him promise to keep in touch, but he hadn’t. Not really. Their paths had diverged. An uncomfortable thought crossed Eva’s mind. Maybe she didn’t know Joe as well as she thought. Maybe the things he’d seen, the things he’d done, had changed him.
She wondered how many people he had killed in the line of duty. And she wondered if once you’d killed one person, it was easier to kill the rest.
‘I’ll get us some coffee,’ she said weakly, and she stood up immediately because she knew Joe wouldn’t give her any response.
The queue was still long, which was a relief. It gave her time out. When she returned to the seating area ten minutes later, Joe hadn’t moved. He was staring into space. He didn’t take the coffee, nor did he speak as Eva drank hers.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she said when she had drained the dregs from her plastic cup. ‘I’m sorr—’
‘You ever been in the jungle, Eva?’ He still didn’t look at her, but he seemed to know that she had shaken her head. ‘Last time I was there, I spent five days lying on the jungle floor. Hard rations. Mosquitoes, snakes, fuck knows what else. Had to piss and shit where I was. Didn’t move more than half a metre in any direction.’
He turned to look at her, his eyes flat.
‘You tell them that.’
‘Tell who?’
‘You tell them I can do my time better than any man alive. And when I’m done, when I’m out of here, I’m going to find out who they are and—’
‘Joe…’ Eva knew that the tears were flooding her eyes now. He sounded paranoid. And what was it she’d read in the newspaper? About soldiers coming back with their heads messed up. Maybe he really had lost it.
Maybe he really had killed her.
‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Really I don’t.’
But the conversation was over. Eva was left counting down the minutes until visiting was over. She made an awkward goodbye: ‘I still live in the same place… Dawson Street… if you need anything.’ Joe didn’t respond. The inmates and visitors divided into two groups. One standing by the door that led further into the bowels of the prison, the other by the exit that would take them back to the freedom of the outside world. And as the lags waved at their kids and wives and girlfriends across the open room, Joe stood by the door with his back to them.
Ten minutes later Eva was walking away from Barfield. The world was misty with tears. As she waited at a zebra crossing, she became aware of a man standing next to her. She recognized his suit, his stooped shoulders and his hooked nose, and she sensed that he was looking at her with interest. But Eva just kept her head down and crossed the road as soon as the little green man told her she could. It had been a traumatic afternoon, and she really wasn’t in the mood for talking with strangers.
‘Who’s your girlfriend, army boy?’
Finch was two steps behind Joe and talking in a quiet, taunting voice. ‘Wouldn’t mind getting her sweet lips round my chubby.’
Before Joe knew it, he had grabbed Finch by the neck and forced him up against the corridor wall. Instantly they were surrounded by a semicircle of inmates.
‘Go on then, army boy,’ he rasped. ‘Take your best shot, why don’t you? Might be your last chance.’