Page 92 of The Dead Ex

Three? She barely looks old enough.

‘That cow has always hated me. God knows what she’stelling them about me now. My solicitor says I’ll get ten years. By the time I come out, they won’t know me,’ she sobs.

I try to comfort her. ‘They’ll be able tovisit,’ I suggest.

She snarls. ‘Think I want them coming to this place? ’Sides, I’m ashamed. I should never have done what I did.’

I suspect her crime has something to do with drugs. There are needle marks all the way up her bare, sinewy arms. She reminds me of someone else. Someone I met in the mother-and-baby unit a long time ago …

It was September 2008. I’d come a long way since that incidentin the sex offenders’ wing. Rather than being reprimanded, I’d made my mark. My ‘ballsy’ actions had helped me to win respect: ‘Vicki Smith,’ I overheard one officer say in the dining hall. ‘Tougher than she looks. You don’t want to mess with that one. Rising up through the ranks. One to watch.’

He was right. Several promotions followed and I was now a senior governor at a women’s prison. (Thereare several governor ranks leading to the very top post of Governor Number One.) When I rang to tell Dad, he was only interested in telling me about the girl next door who’d just had her third baby and had been four years below me at school.

‘Don’t leave it too late, lass. I’d like to be a grandad one day.’

To be honest, I had never felt much of a maternal stirring. But then, at the new prison,I discovered the MBU. The mother-and-baby unit.

Of course, we’d covered this in my training. Women prisoners were allowed to keep their babies until theywere eighteen months old. After that, they were either brought up by a member of the family or fostered or adopted according to the stark, easy-to-revise lines which had been part of the written exam.

But now the reality was in front of mewith bright blue and pink pastel murals of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs lining the corridor. At the far end was the ‘play area’, where twenty or so women sat about in ordinary jeans and baggy tops while the children played with an assortment of toys. Several had arms around each other. Women prisoners, I’d already noted, were more tactile with each other than they were Outside. But those two overthere, scrapping over a push-along toy train, looked like they could kill each other.

‘That’s my Jimmie’s,’ snapped one. Her thin arms bore a large tattoo of a bluebird on one and a heart on the other.

‘He’s just pinched it from our Alice,’ hissed another with a shaved head.

‘No he bloody didn’t.’

‘What’s going on here?’ This was the prison officer who’d been assigned to show me round.

Theshaved-headed woman pointed to the other. ‘She’s always hogging all the best stuff from the cupboard. Just cos she’s going to lose him before I have to give up my Alice, she wants him to have the best.’

‘BITCH!’

The tattooed arms flailed. Then the pair were sprawling on the ground. ‘She’s scratching me. Get her off.’

We took one each. I found myself with the tattooed woman.

‘In the cooler,both of you.’

‘Actually,’ I butted in, ‘I’d like to talk to this one privately.’

The prison officer gave me a stony look. Tough. I was the superior here. I addressed the young girl with the tattoo. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Sam.’

‘Well, Sam. Shall we chat in your pad along with your Jimmie?’

The room was only just big enough for a single bed down one side and a cot on the other. Baby stuff litteredthe floor. Packets of nappies. Rusks, some of them half-eaten. A pair of small denim dungarees. And toys. Lots of them.

‘Do all these belong to you?’

The young girl nodded, protectively hugging the small boy in her arms. He sneezed, producing a large lump of snot, which Sam tenderly wiped away with her sleeve.

‘I thought you were only allowed to have a certain number of personal items in yourroom?’

‘I’ve borrowed some of them.’

‘So you were lying just then.’