Juani accepted that they might have gone a bit too far with “posh pussy”. “Watch out, we ain’t got a clue who this bunny is. She seems very highfalutin, but she must have done something really serious to get shut up in here,” she had warned them that first day. She had just seen the four inmates she shared a cell with at the Wad-Ras female prison crowd around the newcomer’s locker and bed and start rummaging among her things and grabbing what they fancied. “And she’ll know it were us,” she added while she herself snaffled some Calvin Klein knickers and bras that still carried the price tags from the shop. Sarai, whose feet were always cold now she was menopausal, even in the summer, had pocketed flannel socks and a silk scarf; Candela had gone for the eau de cologne and gossip magazines; Daniela and Catina, the most make-up conscious, had fought over an incredibly expensive Shiseido anti-wrinkle cream that hadn’t been opened. Daniela won out, a burly, brawny Colombian whose face was as wrinkled as a prune and who was a good foot taller than Catina. Catina, slight in build, a heroin addict originally from Bucharest, had to be satisfied with eyeliner and pink lipstick that didn’t go with her chipped, blotchy teeth.
The five inmates had only just made the acquaintance of Montserrat Codina i Cadalfach, but they’d immediately registered that the new jailbird was not starving to death. She’d made her entry into the cell dragging a Samsonite suitcase behind her and wearing an Adidas backpack that didn’t look as if it had fallen off the back of a lorry; her fancy Costa Brava tan, manicured nails, elaborate hairdo and designer tracksuit spoke for themselves. They were now sharing their room with a rich tart with two snobby Catalan surnames, and that was very peculiar indeed in Wad-Ras. Juani, who was naturally outgoing, had taken on the task of making introductions and giving her a welcome, but Montserrat smirked sourly in response, muttering only a faint “hello” to their “Hi, posh pussy!”, and that didn’t augur well.
“She don’t look like no whore,” commented Juani, who was familiar with the trade and known as Vanessa to her customers. “Hey, don’t you be fooled by looks. I bet she’s sucked a few cocks in her time,” retorted Sarai. As they always did when a new inmate arrived, the five women laid bets: Juani and Daniela bet she’d been done for drug trafficking, the most popular crime in the prison; Candela and Catina plumped for high-class prostitution and fraud; only Sarai, who’d been put in the slammer for stabbing a girl who had flirted with her guy, was convinced it was due to something violent. “This sort,” she said, referring to the social class she imagined Montserrat Codina came from, “only get put inside if they kill somebody.”
The moment she got back from the interview that all new internees are obliged to have on their first day in prison, Montserrat Codina noticed they’d interfered with her belongings and that a handful of items had vanished. “Posh pussy, it’s the dues you pay for being new,” said Daniela, marking out the territory. “My name is Montserrat, not ‘posh pussy’,” replied Montserrat Codina in a tone they all felt to be much too sour. “And I’d appreciate it if you could return my things.”
“What are you going to do, posh pussy, tell the cops? You can’t imagine what we do to snitches here,” rasped Sarai, walking towards her and flexing her muscles. The gypsy’s defiant stance brought a round of laughter and applause from the rest of the inmates, and revealed horrendously hairy armpits that gave off a stink that quickly filled the room.
Montserrat Codina didn’t shrink back. She stood her ground and stared hard into Sarai’s eyes, making it clear that she wasn’t intimidated by threats from any squat, smelly gypsy woman. When Sarai finally tired of trying to stare her out and went back to her bunk, Montserrat Codina turned around, took a book from her backpack and, with a winner’s smarmy smile, stretched out on the bed she’d been assigned. The five inmates interpreted her silence and attitude as a challenge and insulted her. “Well, if posh pussy ain’t a bleedin’ brainbox!” joked Candela, reinforcing her comment with a loud, pungent belch. Daniela, whose curiosity had been aroused, stood on tiptoes to read the book’s title (Montserrat was in the top bunk farthest from the window, above Juani), but as it was written in German she couldn’t understand what it said. As luck would have it, German didn’t figure among the languages spoken in that multicultural Babel: Spanish, which served as the lingua franca; English, which Daniela and Catina spoke reasonably well; Catalan, which was understood by Sarai, Candela and Juani; Romanian, Catina’s mother tongue; and finally Romany, which Candela and Sarai sometimes used to speak to each other.
Later, out in the yard, where they usually went for a while before going to eat, the five veteran inmates complained about how unlucky they’d been with the new prisoner who’d landed in their cell. What a pity she was such a stuck-up bitch … She’d weep soon enough at night, when it was lights out and she realized Wad-Ras wasn’t exactly a luxury spa. When she began to miss all the nice things – they figured – she’d been used to, and got tired of rubbing herself off at night, with no men to stick their cocks deep inside her or lick her fanny … She’d lose her airs and graces and see she was nothing special. Who did she think she was?
At lunchtime Montserrat Codina sat by herself and ignored anyone who came over and tried to start a conversation. She ate the salad and beans on the menu that day without batting an eyelid, though she didn’t touch the bread. After lunch, she went back to her cell, where she stayed while Sarai had a nap and the others watched the TV in the common room, walked round the yard or joined in some handicraft workshop.
“Fucking hell, what a bitch you’ve got there … She’s loaded, that’s for sure,” the other inmates told them.
The six women didn’t get back together in their cell until the evening. Aware that they’d set off on the wrong foot, Juani took the initiative and tried to smooth things over by telling Montserrat Codina why they had been put inside: she’d got three years for selling heroin and other shit in the Raval district; Daniela, for entering the country with ten kilos of coke hidden in uncomfortable, unlikely places; Sarai and Candela were reoffenders and in for robbery and intimidation (additionally, Candela had been done for GBH, because the grandma whose bag she’d tried to steal had fallen down and broken a hip); Catina, who was the quietest and often seemed not quite all there, had been sentenced to years inside for drug trafficking and working with a gang of Romanians who, among other things, procured underage prostitutes for roadside soliciting.
Montserrat Codina merely listened to Juani’s chatter and looked bored. When she finished and Candela asked Montserrat what she’d done to end up inside, she said that she’d done “something she shouldn’t” and sank her head back into the pages of her book, making it quite clear she wasn’t intending to tell them her life story or leave space for any camaraderie among thieves. Before lights out, Daniela and Sarai cracked a few more jokes at the expense of their arrogant new inmate, but as they didn’t trigger any response, they soon gave up and ignored her.
That night, unusually for a newcomer to Was-Rad, Montserrat Codina didn’t cry. And, as far as they knew, she didn’t shed a single tear on subsequent nights.
Juani was the most sociable of the five women who shared cell 23 before Montserrat Codina showed up. She had been born in the Raval thirty-six years ago, when it was still called the barrio chino, where she’d been brought up by an Andalusian grandma who taught her to sing the songs of Doña Concha Piquer while her mother, a whore by profession too and an occasional petty thief to boot, entered La Trinitat prison more often than she left it. Juani had been jailed for drug trafficking, but being a mule was only one of her regular activities to bring in enough income to make up for the paltry sum her pimp handed her for opening her legs. Unlike most of her friends in the Raval, Juani wasn’t hooked on any of the illegal substances that were hawked undercover in the neighbourhood of the Liceu, and was still pretty. She had a good rapport with the prison staff, which meant that, the following morning, she was given the job of extracting from one of the jailers the crime for which Montserrat Codina had been stuck in the slammer.
“None of us got it. She’s in for five years for stashing money away in Switzerland,” she later told her friends over lunch. “Switzerland, for Christ’s sake. But you bet she’s from a good family, and will soon get let out,” Juani then added.
“She may be rude, but you can see she’s got class,” observed Daniela, struggling to hide her envy.
“You mean she’s a stuck-up bitch. Have you seen the way she looks at us?”
“Perhaps if we returned her things and stopped calling her ‘posh pussy’ …”
“Yeah, and why don’t we bow and curtsy in front of her, like the queen …?”
Over the next few days, Montserrat Codina’s relationship with her cellmates didn’t improve, though neither did it get any worse. She spent the time they were together listening to music on her headphones, reading, writing letters and sleeping. She deliberately ignored them, which particularly narked Sarai, who would periodically insult her or make fun of her, just to while the time away. None of them called her by her surname or first name; they all continued to use the nickname of “posh pussy” when they addressed her or talked behind her back. Which, as Daniela sensibly pointed out, wouldn’t have happened if she’d not taken the huff on her first day and strutted around Was-Rad stiffer than if she’d swallowed a broom, with that high-and-mighty expression you get from having a big wad of notes waiting for you in a foreign bank and the wherewithal to pay a good lawyer.
Sarai was found dead in the showers ten days after Montserrat Codina arrived in the prison. She’d been stabbed to death with a knife, or whatever had been used to perforate her belly. Violent attacks between inmates weren’t common in Wad-Ras, though everyone knew that Sarai and her family were in conflict with a gang of Ecuadorians from Sant Adrià de Besòs – there’d been three killings, even though the police only knew about one – and the crime was immediately put down to a revenge attack by the other gang. The Ecuadorian prisoners protested and were quick to deny they’d had anything to do with the gypsy’s death, but the rumour had spread and, for lack of other suspects or a better explanation, they were blamed. The police, however, made no arrests.
There was a grim atmosphere in Sarai’s cell. The only one who seemed unmoved by the gypsy’s death was Montserrat Codina, who had rushed to reclaim the socks and silk scarf Sarai had snaffled from her the day she entered the prison: she threw them into the bin after ripping them up, to the astonishment of her cellmates. OK, she’d grabbed them because they were hers, but why tear them to bits and throw them in the rubbish? However, as they themselves had been too busy appropriating Sarai’s belongings before the prison staff took them, that is, with the exception of Candela, who was the worst affected, they all looked blank and pretended they’d seen nothing.
Three weeks later Catina died. She was found drowned in her own vomit in a room used to store cleaning implements, in one of the corridors that looked over the yard. Initially, given Catina’s track record and the circumstances of her death, everybody thought the Romanian had died accidentally as a result of an overdose, until analyses, carried out as part of the autopsy, revealed the presence of adulterated heroin in her bloodstream, and that made the investigation much less straightforward. The detailed search carried out by staff in every nook and cranny of the prison brought to light a couple of boxes full of substances that constituted a sample of what the black market is capable of supplying to regular addicts, but they never found among the impounded drugs the doctored horse that had killed Catina and, due to a lack of other leads, the investigation ground to a halt.
Catina wasn’t the most popular of inmates in Wad-Ras – the range of substances she took triggered sudden changes of mood and she lost friends as quickly as she made them – but her death, so soon after Sarai’s, and the fact she’d been so young – twenty-eight – upset everyone in the prison for a number of days. The prison population of Wad-Ras came up with two theories: one was that Montserrat Codina was fishy business, and the other was that the cell once occupied by Sarai and Catina was suffering from the evil eye. Either of the alternatives pointed to Montserrat Codina as the person responsible for these disasters and Candela, who was very superstitious, spent the whole day crossing herself and trying to avoid her.
“I tell you, this bitch is bad news,” said Candela to anyone prepared to listen.
“She’s a nasty piece of work. I told you we should watch her,” added Juani. Much more pragmatic and incredulous when it came to the black arts and supernatural happenings, Daniela also thought the coincidence of two deaths in the same cell was suspicious and decided to use the smartphone that had been smuggled in for her, which she kept tucked in her knickers, to google Montserrat Codina.
“That Codina is a wealthy chick who wanted to show how smart she was by taking her money to Switzerland,” she later told Candela and Juani when they were sunbathing in the yard. “But that’s not all: it turns out that her brother drowned in the swimming pool at the family mansion when he was fifteen – the newspapers say it was night-time and the kid was drunk – and then her parents died soon afterwards in a fire in the house they owned in the mountains. As there were no other brothers or sisters, she inherited the lot. THE LOT! And she was only twenty-one!”
“So you reckon she did them in?” asked Juani, who ever since they’d buried Catina had been feeling an occasional tightness in her chest that prevented her from breathing. “You must be a real psychopath to do something like that …”
“You know what a cold-blooded bitch she is. Gals, we’d better watch out if we don’t want to end up like Sarai and Catina. It’s giving me the shivers.”
“Me too.”
“And me,” added Candela.
Daniela died five days later when her heart was punctured by a knitting needle from the handicrafts room. The fact that the three dead women had shared a cell meant the mossos stopped thinking Catina’s death was an accident and reviewed the role of the Ecuadorians in the death of Sarai. Juani and Candela became the chief suspects, after the investigators decided that an inmate like Montserrat Codina couldn’t possibly have any motive to do in a gypsy, a Colombian and a Romanian, who, when alive, had inhabited the underworld of Barcelona and its outskirts and not the tennis club in Pedralbes or the golf club in Sant Cugat.
“They’re really perjuried!” complained Candela, who had to spend a couple of days answering questions in the police station in the old part of the city.
“You mean prejudiced,” Juani corrected her, who’d also been interrogated.
“If you say so. But in the end, we’re the ones who come out perjuried.”
“You’re right.”
The murder of Daniela, the third inmate in cell 23 to die in violent circumstances, led the prison governor to separate Candela, Juani and Montserrat Codina and relocate them to other cells. Candela had to share a cell with five beds occupied by two Romanians, a seventy-year-old Mexican and a girl from Santa Coloma de Gramenet, while Juani was sent to the other end of the passage to a cell shared by two Russian sisters, a woman from Cornellà de Llobregat, a Brazilian and a gypsy from La Mina. Candela and Juani were reluctant to be split up, because, although Juani was a bit older than Candela, living together had made them friends and they’d got used to relying on each other.
Montserrat Codina was the one that came out best with the reorganization. She was sent to a smaller cell she only had to share with a young inmate who’d just been admitted after being sentenced to four years for trafficking marijuana. The girl, Lara Martí, was a literature student, and, like Montserrat Codina, from Sarrià, and the two soon hit it off.
When life had finally returned to the level of normality anyone can expect to enjoy within the walls of a women’s jail, Candela was found hanging from the bars over the window of the new cell she’d been assigned. It was three months after Daniela’s death. Some prison officers and most inmates began to entertain the belief that the former occupants of cell 23 were cursed, and everyone in Wad-Ras began to avoid Montserrat Codina and Juani, the sole survivors. Juani had no friends in the new cell and, when she was in the yard or dining room, she was always alone. Inmates were afraid that the evil eye from that accursed cell might end up affecting them, probably via Juani, and those who didn’t avoid her spent their time insulting her. Juani had never been short of friends, and didn’t know how to cope with that level of hostility; she now spent most of her time sleeping alone in the cell, counting the days left till she’d be back on the street.
Candela’s death was officially attributed to suicide, but Juani, who knew her well, could not believe the gypsy had taken her own life. Candela had no reason to kill herself, she had tried to tell the prisoner governor and officers, because within a few months she’d have had the opportunity of parole and the chance to go back to her husband and two children. Besides, she added, Candela was too much of a believer to commit such a terrible sin. After everything that had happened, Juani was in no doubt that Montserrat Codina was responsible for the deaths of her friends and she now lived in a state of terror, convinced she would be the next to end up on the autopsy table.
After Candela’s death, months passed without incident in Wad-Ras. The sticky summer had given way to a refreshing autumn, and, when the cold came, the inmates had almost forgotten the deaths of Sarai, Catina, Daniela and Candela. Juani’s relationship with the rest of the inmates had improved: they’d stopped insulting her, and some even chatted to her. Juani, however, was still in a numb state. She’d lost her appetite, and at night she slept very little, sure that sooner or later she too would be found dead and that her death would be put down to suicide or an accident. She was consumed by fear, and the tightness she’d felt in her chest months ago got worse and forced her to pay several visits to the hospital wing, where she was on the waiting list to undergo a series of tests.
On a very few days Juani tried to tell herself she might have been wrong about Montserrat Codina, that it was impossible a moneyed woman like her could be a vulgar serial killer capable of dispatching her friends. Juani thought she’d perhaps been too ready to prejudge the character of the new inmate, that it was her naivety that had led her to conclude she was responsible for all those murders. Until they exchanged glances in the yard or dining room and Juani caught her watching her with the eyes of an expert hunter. She reminded her of that cat she used to see on Carrer Sant Ramon. It would wait, dead still on the street corner, patiently waiting for the right moment to pounce on the pigeon that was its chosen prey.