and screams and fear.
It’s getting light now. A delivery van comes and drops off newspapers on the street and then the newsagent opens up. Gabriel goes to buy some snack bars. I can hardly swallow them but I force them down. Then there’s more waiting.
Celia appears round one of the towers. It’s 7:29 and I have to go.
Gabriel says, “I’ll join you soon.”
I jog across the expanse of open ground to the Tower, through the broken door, up the smelly staircase, past the sick on the seventh-floor landing and already I feel good. The tension in my stomach has gone. I’m dying to get on with it.
I go invisible and carry on up the stairs to the top floor and the door to the prison. I’ve got one of Mercury’s hairpins that magically picks locks and, leaning close to the door, I say quietly, “Throttle back,” as I put the tip of the hairpin on the lock and push.
Nothing happens.
My throat is dry and maybe my voice was unclear. Or maybe the password is wrong, but I can’t go through lots of options.
I can hear footsteps on the stairs. The guards aren’t due to change over for twenty-five minutes so it’s probably another resident. But still I need to get through the door. I say “Throttle back” again, a little louder and clearer, but it seems like a shout in the quietness of the building. I put the pin on the lock, push the door, and it opens.
Now I’m standing in the dark. I got a quick glimpse of the next door two or three paces in front of me. But there’s no handle on it and I don’t know which way it opens, so I can’t tell which side of the room I should be on to slide in with the guard. I’m not sure if there’s a light in here but I daren’t look for one and put it on. I’ve just got to hope that when the guard arrives I have time to get into a good position. It’ll be another twenty minutes or so.
But a minute later the outer door opens. It must have been a guard on the stairs. I have a second to go invisible and the guard pulls a cord that hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a bare bulb, and the outer door swings shut. He knocks on the inner door five times. Two loud and slow and three fast, which I guess is another signal.
After nearly a minute, the peephole in the inner door slides across for the briefest of seconds and then back into place. The lock rattles and then the door opens and the guard on the inside says, “Early for once.” He lets the door swing open for my guard to enter. There isn’t much room for me, but I slide to the side and hold myself tight against the wall.
I’m in.
The returning guard swears and looks down. A sweet wrapper is stuck to his boot. As he bends forward to pull it off, I shrink further back against the wall. His jacket touches mine. That’s all, nothing more. But somehow I know he knows there’s something wrong. And he turns round as if to check behind him, staring straight through me, with the sweet wrapper between his fingers. He turns away again and says, “Is Jake here?”
“You’re the first. You’re half an hour early. Dale’s still finishing his rounds.”
“I thought I heard Jake . . .” Then he wanders up the corridor, the sweet wrapper held out in front of him. And I have a bad feeling he’s working it out.
I follow the sweet-wrapper guy through to a small room with a set of kitchen units along one side and a table with a bench seat along the other. He puts the wrapper in the bin then wipes his hand on his trousers. He takes his jacket off and hangs it on a hook on the wall. The other hooks are full. Another guard comes in and says, “You’re early.”
“Yeah.”
“She throw you out or something?”
The sweet-wrapper guy shakes his head, as if he has other things on his mind. He fills the kettle and makes a tea. Then more of the leaving guards arrive and comment on the sweet-wrapper guard’s early arrival. Even I’m getting fed up with their comments now but it seems he’s forgotten about hearing me say the password. The room fills up with more of the new shift arriving and I move into the