Helen turned away from the window, unable to watch. She’d assumed the inmates would turn out for Leah’s departure and had expected some abuse. But not the torrent of bile that had poured down on Leah’s poor mother. Even now, she was still standing there, unsure where to go or what to do. It is always the families that suffer the most.
Helen returned to her bed, her head full of disquieting thoughts. She’d assumed that Annie’s gang had attacked Leah – the stitched-up mouth a warning to other grasses – but now she wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t just the sexualized nature of the attack – mutilating her genitals and stuffing every orifice – that gave her pause for thought. It was the care that had been taken. Annie’s thugs were brutal and effective, but clumsy with it. Moreover, the careful draping of the blanket over the body suggested some deeper motivation than mere revenge. Did the ‘tenderness’ of the killing and the hiding of the body from view betoken some kind of affection for Leah? Having killed her, did the killer want to draw a veil over their deeds? Or was the murderer trying to construct a sick tableau that contained a hidden meaning? The truth was that her death felt more like a ritual killing than simple prison justice.
Nobody was saying it, but Helen could sense others were thinking the same thing. Leah’s death was perverse and unusual and had left inmates feeling vulnerable and scared, Helen included. Rising from the bed, she lifted up her mattress and ferreted around for her small canvas bag. This was where Helen kept her valuables – if you could call them that. Stamps, phone cards, cigarettes, even buttons and pens – the strangest things become currency within prison. The closest thing she had to a ten-pence piece was a metal button, so she pulled this out and dropped to her knees.
Thankfully it fitted snugly into the head of the screws that secured the bed to the floor and Helen began to twist. Gently at first, for fear of snapping the button, but then with more force as the screw refused to yield. The screws had been painted over, presumably to make attempts to remove them more difficult, so abandoning the first screw, she moved on to the next. This time Helen couldn’t even get the button into the screw head – the paint was too thick and would take an age to wear down. So she moved on to the third and, when that resisted, the fourth.
She twisted, yanked and turned for all she was worth, but it refused to budge. Helen had been relying on Babs’s tip – it was her insurance policy against suffering the same fate as her neighbour – but now her attempt had failed, Helen felt unsettled. She did not scare easily, but her cell was swathed in darkness, she had no weapon with which to protect herself and there was a killer on the loose.
There would be no sleep tonight.