“Does God help you sleep at night or does he play well with the parole board?”
“The priest here has been good to me.”
“Let’s talk about Natasha.”
“What happened to her?”
“She fell through the ice on a frozen lake.”
“In London?”
There is a pause, before Ruiz asks the obvious question. “What makes you think she was in London?”
Aiden hesitates, preparing to lie.
“Had you heard from her?” I ask.
“No.”
“Why then?”
There is another long silence. Ruiz speaks first. “Let me give you some free advice, Aiden, since you’ve still got six months to go. Most of the cons in here are uneducated, violent, washed-up drug addicts and habitual criminals. They know how to work the system… to survive. But you, Aiden, you’re a fish. You’re too young and pretty for a place like this. I bet the wolves have been sniffing around, waiting to introduce you to a little prison romance.”
“No fucking way, man.”
Something drops with a loud bang on the far side of the room and Aiden spins around as though shot. After a beat of silence, conversations begin again. Aiden tries to shrug it off but he’s less sure of himself.
“Shower-time must be a nightmare,” says Ruiz. “What do you do? If you fight them they punish you. You get shanked in the breakfast queue or lighter fuel thrown on your bed while you’re sleeping. Are you getting much sleep, Aiden? I wouldn’t be. I’d keep my back to every wall.”
Aiden’s eyes are wide.
“Or maybe you’ve found yourself a benefactor, someone who looks after you. What do you give him in return? Are you bending over for someone, Aiden? Or maybe you’re muling drugs or lining up other fish?”
“You got it all wrong.”
“I wonder what your mates are going to think when they hear you’re somebody’s prison bitch.”
“No way, man! I’m nobody’s bitch.”
“That sort of rumor is hard to shake. Girls won’t treat you the same way. They’ll want you to take an Aids test just to look at them.”
Aiden’s eyes are filming over. “This is bullshit!”
“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know,” says Ruiz. “Maybe it doesn’t matter what your mates think. So what if they tell stories about you behind your back—about how some hare-lipped, flat-nosed con found you alone in the shower and uttered sweet nothings in your ear.”
“That didn’t fucking happen.”
“I believe you, truly I do.” Ruiz looks at me. “I don’t know how these rumors start.”
The silence lasts a dozen heartbeats.
“She sent me a letter,” says Aiden.
“Who?” I ask.
“Tash.”
“When?”
“A few months after she went missing.” He squints at something on the ceiling. “She said she and Piper were in London. They were living in a squat and she was working for some guy who ran a place in Soho.”
I look at Ruiz.
“Why did she write to you?”
“She said she was sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“What do you fucking think?”
“Do you still have the letter?”
“Oh, yeah, I put it in my scrapbook with my pressed flowers and needlework.”
Aiden thinks that’s funny. He wants an audience.
“Did you write back?”
“Why would I write to her? She put me in here. She put Callum Loach in a wheelchair. If it weren’t for that little prick-tease, none of this would have happened.”
I can see Ruiz’s shoulders flexing beneath his shirt. It isn’t so much Aiden’s whining that he dislikes, but his cocky self-importance and how he wants to blame his own immeasurable stupidity on a schoolgirl because the alternative requires too much self-analysis and accountability.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about the letter?” I ask
“Why should I? Nobody did me any favors.”
Taking a photograph from my jacket pocket, I place it on the table between his elbows. The image is from the post-mortem. Natasha’s thin body laid out on the stainless steel bench, swollen and exposed, her eyes blank. Aiden is staring at me, unwilling to look. Slowly he lowers his gaze. Hesitates. Recovers.
“She’s not so pretty now,” he says, turning his face away from the photograph.
“You still think she got what was coming to her?” asks Ruiz.
Aiden smiles ruefully, showing all the compassion of a shark loose in a colony of seals.
“Been going to church while I been in here. Learned a few things. It’s like the Bible says: ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ Man, woman, same difference. She got what she deserved.”