Page 63 of Girl, Entangled

‘It depends. Some do a few weeks. Some stay years.’

Ella was scrambling for an angle here, because the answer was somewhere in this building. She just needed to dig deep enough. ‘Were they paid?’

‘The teachers? Only the good ones. The ones who came in to run the vocational stuff, the craft classes especially, they came through outside outfits. Referral schemes, charities, that sort of thing.’

Ella latched onto that. ‘Wait. Charities?’

‘Well, rehabilitation programs, mostly. You’d get a former inmate who’d done his time and come out the other side and made something of himself, and the program would send him back in to teach a skill. Woodwork. Ceramics. Sewing. It’s good for everyone, on paper. The man teaching gets to give something back, feels useful, stays out of trouble. The men in the class look up and see a guy who was sat where they’re sat a few years back and now he’s walking in and out of the front gate a free man with a trade. It’s the whole point of the thing. You can reform. Here’s a man who did.’

Ella’s pulse was loud in her own ears.

A former criminal, mingling with other criminals.

‘You must have a log. You must have names!’

Roy bit his lip and looked unhopeful. ‘Can you narrow it down?’

While Ella hadn’t mocked up an official behavioral profile, she had everything she needed circling her brain. ‘The person I’m looking for is almost seven feet tall. He’s built like a wall. He’s white, male, between 28 and 40. He would have been quiet, reserved, perhaps even a little timid. He’d have come up through one of these programs himself. He wouldn’t have come to you out of nowhere. Somebody put him on a referral list because somebody wanted to give him a second chance at being a person. He’d have done time, but not for anything violent. He’d have been the only one in his class growing up who looked the way he looks, and people would have either left him alone or taken it out on him, and either way he’d have been on his own a lot. He’d have a mother in the picture, or the memory of one, and not much else. He’d have been looking for somebody to tell him how to be in the world. He’d have found it in here. Somebody in this prison taught him what a man is, Roy, and the man who taught him is dead now, and our killer is finishing what he thinks his teacher started.’

She stopped.

Roy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he stood, went to the filing cabinet in the corner of the office and hauled the bottom drawer open hard enough that the whole unit rocked.

He started going through it with both hands. From where she stood, Ella could see what it held, rows of laminated cards stood up in dividers like records in a crate, and every one of them was a prison ID. Photographs and names and barcodes, hundreds of them, the dead and the released and the transferred all filed together.

‘You said you didn’t keep them,’ Ella said. ‘Visitors, instructors. You said they signed in and out and that was it.’

‘We don’t.’ Roy didn’t look up. He was walking his fingers along the dividers, lips moving. ‘We didn’t keep his because we had to. We kept his because he needed it kept.’

‘Needed it?’

‘Held here. So he could pick it up at the desk every week and hand it back when he left.’ He pulled a card halfway out, frowned at it, pushed it back. ‘It was the arrangement.’

‘What are you talking about? Who?’

Roy continued ransacking the drawer. Then he stopped, gripped one hard and pulled it out. ‘Got it!’

He handed it over. Ella took it, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in the hand that held the card.

SIMON VARRO.

WORKSHOP INSTRUCTOR.

TEXTILES.

And above both, in the little window where the photograph went, a face.

She’d been carrying an idea of the man in her head for three days; a wall of shoulder in a doorway, a hood with two holes cut for the eyes. Now there was a face inside that outline. He was looking just off the camera, his head was too small for the breadth of him, and there was something in the set of the heavy features that turned the back of her neck cold. Plenty of innocent men photographed badly. This was not that.

This was him.

‘Why does the prison have this, Roy? Why hold one man’s badge and nobody else’s?’

‘I told you. He needed it.’

‘Why?’

‘Miss Dark, Simon Varro couldn’t talk. He was completely mute.’