Inside Out

by Chris McGeorge

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

SHE WAS SENT DOWN...
Cara Lockhart has just commenced a life sentence in HMP North Fern - the newest maximum security women's prison in the country. She was convicted of a crime she is adamant she didn't commit.

SHE WAS SET UP...
One morning she wakes up to find her cellmate murdered - shot in the head with a gun that is missing. The door was locked all night, which makes Cara the only suspect.

BUT THAT WAS JUST THE BEGINNING.
Cara needs to clear her name, unravelling an impossible case, with an investigation governed by a prison timetable.
But as Cara starts to learn more about North Fern and the predicament she is in, she finds connections between the past and present that she never could have imagined.

Indeed it seems that her conviction and her current situation might be linked in very strange ways...

Release date: October 29, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 416

Sample

 

 

 

 

A ringing. Loud. Too early for the alarm. Must be his phone.

He opened his eyes and reached over in the dark. A 12-44. Couldn’t be real. But he had to check.

He got up, got dressed, turned the window on for a moment. There was an avalanche outside. Lovely. He turned it off again.

He left his bedroom, slipping his Cuff on as he went down the corridor into the control room.

Continell was at the desk, watching all the monitors, a half-drunk cup of coffee forgotten next to her.

‘Harper,’ Continell said, as he leant on the desk. She sounded worried. ‘One of the Cuffs just went off. No life signs.’

‘Which one?’ Harper said.

‘FE773 Barnard.’

‘That’s Lockhart’s cell? You got A/V on it?’

Continell didn’t even need to press any buttons. She already had it up on the screen. An overhead of a cell, two beds with two women sleeping. Then the cameras went to static.

‘A/V is lost for 12.3 seconds,’ Continell said, ‘and then …’

A sound. Loud. Like a roar ripping through the static. Gone as soon as it hit his ears. And the camera clicked back on. One of the women was still sleeping as before. The other was draped over the bed, head falling to the floor. Some kind of substance was flowing onto the floor from her forehead. Harper was glad the camera was black and white.

‘What—?’ He couldn’t say anything. ‘What happened?’

‘That sound,’ Continell said. ‘I heard it. Not on the cameras. I actually heard it. From two floors away. I think it was a gunshot.’

‘You checked the records on the door?’

‘No one went in or out. No prisoner. No guard. Lock wasn’t disengaged. Records are one hundred per cent, no one can change them.’

‘One hundred per cent?’

‘One hundred per cent.’

Harper picked up Continell’s coffee without asking and downed the rest of the contents. ‘Wake ’em up. Tell them to suit up. 12-44.’ He started out of the room.

‘Who am I waking up?’

Harper paused at the door. ‘All of them.’

Ten minutes later, they were all at the lifts. All in their armour. All carrying their service weapons.

They got in the lift. Went down two floors.

Harper paused them all at the entrance to the Unit. ‘This is the first time we’ve dealt with something like this. Krotes has signed off on the weapon usage, but no one is firing unless absolutely necessary. Let’s not be trigger-happy.’

‘Don’t need to tell me twice, Chief.’ Anderson smiled, pumping his shotgun. Why the hell had they given him a shotgun?

At least the others appeared more apprehensive. ‘OK,’ Harper said, ‘me and Abrams take point. Truchforth and Anderson take the rear.’

They went through the double doors into the Unit, and down into the Pit. Prisoners were waking up, shouting questions through their cell doors. They ignored them. Got to the cell they were here for.

Harper took a long breath, nodded to Abrams and the others behind him. Then held up his Cuff. The light on it went green. And so did the light above the cell door.

They rushed into the dark. Abrams had a torch and she found Lockhart’s face. The young woman was still asleep, or doing a damn good job at pretending. And then the torch went down to the puddle of blood on the floor, and then to Barnard’s face. A hole in the middle of her head. Her eyes open, forever.

‘Jesus,’ Harper said.

Then the lights clicked on. And they all saw.

Harper found himself frozen. As Anderson and Abrams rushed to Lockhart, woke her up, got her in cuffs. She was gibbering about not knowing what was going on. And then she saw Barnard, and was gibbering about how she didn’t do it.

Something was wrong.

Truchforth was scanning the cell, searching for it. He completed the quick search. ‘There’s no gun in here.’

Just a brief look-round. He could be wrong.

Lockhart was being dragged out of the cell. All three of them were restraining her, taking her off to the Hole. But Harper couldn’t move. All he could do was stand there, looking and thinking. About something …

‘Harper.’ Continell, in his ear. ‘I’ve been looking over the footage.’

He looked up at the camera.

‘12.3 seconds the camera was down,’ Continell said. ‘I layered over the before and after images, on either side of that cut.’

‘What about it?’

Continell paused a little before speaking. ‘Lockhart doesn’t move. She doesn’t move even a millimetre. The images are identical.’

‘What are you saying?’ Harper asked.

But she didn’t need to answer. Because Harper was thinking it as well.

Was there a possibility that Lockhart didn’t do it?

They came for Cara in the middle of the night – barged into her cell and told her to get her things. No time for goodbyes. No grand sending off. Nothing but a pair of cold handcuffs and a delirious walk down a mostly sleeping cell block getting prodded in the back by a guard’s finger, until she emerged into the freezing night air of the yard. A van was waiting. As were two other prisoners with their own guard. The guards were both in SWAT vests.

The three of them were bundled into the van, each put into their own sweatbox – basically a cell inside the van. The guards went out of sight, to sit out of sight.

No one told her where she was going. She didn’t ask.

That’s how their journey started. That seemed like a day ago now.

The van was driving along at a steady speed. Were they on the motorway? If so, how long had they been on there? Not worth thinking about it when it didn’t really matter.

There was a soft constant weeping coming from the sweatbox next to hers. The woman inside it was crying. She had been for the last few hours – so much so that Cara had almost completely tuned it out now, except for the odd louder wail.

A wail came then, along with words, ‘Where are we going? You shouldn’t be allowed to do this. I should’ve been able to see my boy, tell my family … Where are we going?’

Silence, for a few seconds. And then a minute. And then ten. And then it became the norm again – the question left hanging, almost visibly, in the air. Sometime after that the sobbing from next door started up again.

And equilibrium was restored. For an hour or two.

Suddenly, the van swerved sharply, hurling Cara into the sweatbox wall, and moments later, the road became bumpier. The van rocked along for another hour, giving no respite in its erratic movements, until finally it seemed to drive onto a consistent road. Not concrete, but a fairly well-worn track nonetheless. They definitely weren’t on the motorway anymore.

Finally it stopped. In a great triumphant motion, the van was still.

‘Hey, driver?’ one of the guards said, banging on what sounded like the mesh between the driver’s cab and the body of the van. ‘Sitrep?’ But none was given.

Instead, the radio and the engine died. And then nothing.

Cara nervously glanced around her four white plastic walls, hoping she would find at least some clue as to what was happening. But of course there was nothing.

There were voices outside. The sound of a gate being opened. The engine again. The van moving in a low gear for about five hundred metres. Then nothing.

Cara couldn’t help feeling the impatience one felt when a plane landed and the seat belt sign seemed to be stuck on. And you always felt it was a fraction of a second more than it should have been before it turned off.

Then the back doors swung open. Dull sunlight flooded the van, and she blinked away sunspots, seeing the shadow of the driver on the wall of the van.

‘We’re here,’ the driver said, rather unceremoniously. Not to her.

And then the two guards were rustling. They unlocked her box last, leading all three of them out of the van one at a time. Cara jumped down to see that they were in an enclosed loading bay, and the sun was disappearing inch by inch as a large shutter closed behind them. As the shutter reached the ground, she had a strange sense that she might never see it again.

She looked around to see that her peers were thinking something similar. Her neighbour from the van, the crier, was still sobbing, wet tracks down her cheeks. She realised she knew her. From New Hall – her wing. The other woman was trying to hide her discomfort, but it came through. She seemed tough – black hair, black mascara (which must’ve cost a pretty penny in New Hall), and a haircut that wasn’t in style when Cara was incarcerated, but could be now – a buzzcut on her left side, and long hair on her right swept over – but she couldn’t hide her worry. ‘What’s going on here?’ she asked.

At one point, it would have been Cara who had the courage to speak up. But now all she saw was the pointlessness of it. And it was indeed pointless. The question left, unanswered.

The driver wordlessly turned and started to walk towards a towering red door that appeared to be more like a door into some bunker. The guards seemed to take the hint and pushed her and the other two prisoners to follow them.

At the door, one of the drivers knocked – a great booming THRANG that smashed into her ears.

Nothing. For a minute.

Cara looked around, and her eyes fell on the closest body in the strange huddle they had created. The younger guard was looking at her, and as their eyes met, his eyes quickly darted away. He looked scared of something – he was even shaking slightly. Why was he scared?

For the first time, Cara felt unsafe.

The driver seemed to be waiting for something, like he was counting in his head before he decided to knock again. But eventually, he did.

Finally, the door swung open to reveal a burly man – black with a greying goatee. His muscular frame was not complemented by his guard’s jumper, embroidered with the name Harper. He held a tablet, looking small in his firm hands. He assessed each of the group in turn – a strange picture they must have made. ‘We have FO112, NH597, and FE773?’

Cara felt the older guard nod behind her.

‘And we have new guards … let’s see, Dale Michael and John Anderson.’

The older guard grunted. ‘Thanks.’

Harper sighed, ‘Relax, Mr Anderson, they’re not exactly going to add you on Facebook, are they?’

Anderson mumbled something under his breath, not best pleased.

Harper didn’t seem to care. ‘OK, residents follow me. Guards, follow your drivers to the main entrance.’

A shuffling behind Cara. She looked to see that the younger guard, Michael, was moving away with the drivers, but Anderson was standing his ground behind his quarry. ‘I’m sorry, but my job was to deliver the prisoners to their new cells. Not just to the front door. I have a duty. And I intend to carry it out. I can’t just leave these women on the doorstep – they are dangerous.’

Harper frowned, ‘And if you do not adhere to policy here, I assure you so am I.’

Anderson scoffed but turned away and followed Michael and the others.

Harper watched them go and then did something bizarre, something Cara would question whether she’d actually seen for days to come. He winked at her and smiled.

‘Ladies, please follow me.’

‘The guards are getting transferred here too?’ the woman with the parting asked, as the three of them followed Harper down a white corridor with a hideous grey-striped carpet.

‘Guards Anderson and Michael have chosen to help build this new establishment, yes.’

‘And what the hell does that mean?’ Parting whispered in Cara’s ear.

Cara shrugged.

The other woman had stopped sobbing, but had started chewing on a strand of her auburn hair. She met Cara’s eyes for the first time, as if in agreement with the others’ wonderment.

They were taken to a desk that appeared around a corner – two women were standing there in uniform, one middle-aged and blonde, one older and greying. Cara didn’t have time to look at the names on their jumpers. They had a whiteboard and, at the appearance of the three, started writing on it.

‘FO112?’ the blonde guard said.

They wondered amongst themselves, before Harper came to their rescue. ‘You’ll have new IDs here. Such is the new initiative. FO112 is Moyley.’

Moyley – that was her name, Cara remembered it now. Moyley was the crier, and her wing-mate. Parting turned round.

The two female guards wrote some things down on the whiteboard. And told her to pose with it against a lined wall. They took a photo. A mugshot.

It was much like what had happened when Cara had arrived at New Hall. Just the usual welcoming party. But now she was – ‘NH597’. ‘NH597. Lockhart. 12th June 2020’. A mantra. A talisman. This was what she was. She held the sign up. They took the picture. Awesome.

Next, they ushered her, without waiting for Parting to get her photo taken, into a cubicle. The older greying guard stayed watching as she was commanded to strip, which she did without a moment’s thought. Now it was almost second nature. She bent over while the guard searched her. She tried to switch her brain off as she rummaged around inside her.

Then it was done. She was told to turn around and was given a fresh pile of clothes to wear – her new wardrobe. It comprised of two T-shirts, two pairs of nylon trousers, some bras and pants, a purple static jumper, and a beige pair of canvas shoes.

‘OK,’ the guard said.

Cara waited for a second, then realised that was it. The guard wrote something on a pad and then glared up at her. Perturbed, she nodded to a door behind her.

So Cara went through it. It wasn’t exactly like she had a choice.

She came into an interview room, with a man in a white coat sitting at a table. ‘Ah, hello, Ms Lockhart, I am Doctor Tobias Trenner. I just have to ask you a few questions.’

She sat in the chair facing him, with a camera on a tripod pointed at her.

And the questions began, jumping wildly from mundane to fantastical. ‘Your full name is Cara-Jane Lockhart, yes?’ was juxtaposed with ‘Have you ever thought about taking your own life?’ ‘And you are 23 years of age?’ countered with ‘How many sexual partners have you had?’ and ‘You fully acknowledge why you are here? You are of sound mind?’ drowned out by the absolutely ridiculous ‘Is there any possibility you may be pregnant?’

After the taped conversation, the greying guard came in and Cara was moved around again through another door and to a desk, where she got her picture taken on a webcam and was asked to hold out her wrist. She was given a metal bracelet that seemed to be a slightly thicker version of a handcuff. It clicked around her wrist and a blue light throbbed on it.

‘This is your Cuff,’ the guard said. ‘It acts much like an ID card, with a built-in vital tracker. It will automatically open any doors that you are allowed to go through, and restrict you from the ones you’re not. It also has a tracker, so we can see where you are at all times. If you somehow manage to get somewhere you’re not supposed to be, the light on your Cuff will turn red. You have 30 seconds to return to where you should be before the Cuff will emit an electric shock much like a taser.’

Cara opened her mouth to say ‘What?’ but someone got there before her. She turned around to see Parting had been dropped off behind her.

The guard asked Parting to hold her wrist out.

‘No.’

The guard said nothing, just raised her eyebrows.

And Parting, who must have seen the futility of the situation, put her wrist out. A Cuff closed around it.

‘You may find things a little more high-tech here than New Hall. This prison is the first of its kind after all.’

‘What do you mean?’ Parting said.

But Cara was focused on something else. The guard had a Cuff of her own. With a pulsing blue light just like theirs.

Harper interrupted them, appearing out of nowhere. She automatically looked at his wrist. He had a Cuff too. So the guards were being tracked as well? ‘Are these two ready, Continell?’

The guard, Continell, nodded.

‘Good, I’ll take them along, you and Abrams can manage to bring Moyley, I assume. Tobias is taking a little longer with her. She’s a gusher.’

‘Of course,’ Continell said.

With a curt nod, Harper guided Cara and Parting through another door, to a long white corridor. At the end of the corridor, they came to a black marble wall with three lifts. It looked like something from a hotel, only adding to the patchwork nature of the building she had seen from the outside.

Harper stepped forward and pressed the call button.

The left-hand lift doors opened and although Harper stepped forward, another male guard and a female prisoner lurched out. The woman was wide-eyed, scraggly ginger hair waving around in clumps. She was chewing on the sleeve of her top and emitting a strange moaning sound.

The guard just dragged her out. ‘Come along, Ray.’

‘But it wasn’t him,’ Ray, presumably, said.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ the guard muttered. Pulling her out of the way of Harper and his deliveries.

‘It sounded like him, but it wasn’t him,’ Ray wailed.

‘We’re going to see the doc and he’ll clear this right up.’ He started pushing her down the corridor, unlocking another door halfway down and propelling her into it. ‘Come along.’

‘But—’ Ray started and then the door shut, cutting her voice into a muffle.

Cara and Parting looked back around to Harper. He didn’t seem willing to give any answers.

Prison was an acquired taste – some people just couldn’t hack it. Cara once thought she was one of those people – that she was destined to drive herself crazy, pacing up and down, mumbling about how she shouldn’t be there and this wasn’t what her life was supposed to be. The days were so long, the meals were so tasteless, the showers so humiliating. But … then something happened. One day she woke up. One day she realised that all she could do was carry on. So she did – and the days went by a little quicker after that, the meals had more flavour, the showers … well, no, the showers were still the showers. But, somehow, somewhere, she’d found some peace.

She’d given up.

And she couldn’t be happier she did. Although it wasn’t the same happiness she used to feel. This happiness was soaked in grief.

Harper led them into the lift and pressed the button. A mere ten seconds later, and the smoothest lift ride ever, the doors opened onto a scene much like the one downstairs.

A white sterilised room, with white tiles and white floors, with a currently unmanned guard’s station in the centre. Harper led them past it, through a set of double doors.

The noise was the first thing to hit them. It sounded like a public swimming pool when the children’s floats came out. The noise was so massive and echoing and triumphant, it was hard to conjure up any coherent thoughts. Like a tremendous school of fish snaking and winding towards one goal, voices disappeared into one another to make an uncontrollable din. It was, unfortunately, a familiar sound – New Hall was exactly the same.

Therefore, Cara was hardly surprised when she got through the double doors and was greeted with an equally familiar sight. They were on a metal balcony looking into a long rectangular hall lined with cells on either side, and a mosh pit of flowing bodies in between.

Women were standing, sitting on plastic chairs, leaning on tables, playing board games, lounging on a ragged sofa, ducking and diving between tables, draped over the metal stairs.

Some of the women down in the Pit quickly realised they had company, and were pointing upwards and sneering. Some others just stood motionless. While more still were telling their friends. Soon most of the women were looking up.

‘Hoah,’ one shouted, ‘new ones.’

A few more heads looked up and around at the alert. Most didn’t bother.

‘Pay them no mind,’ Harper was saying as Cara hurried to keep up with him walking across the gangway, ‘they’re mostly harmless.’ They reached the nearest staircase, and Harper had started to descend. Into the sea of women. Cara wanted to do anything but. As she stepped back from the staircase, a hand gripped her shoulder. Parting’s.

‘I’ve got this, Butcher, I’ll go first. Let me through,’ she said and smiled. Before going down first, two steps at a time – almost like she couldn’t wait.

Butcher.

Parting knew who she was.

Butcher. The name New Hall had picked out for her. Her reputation preceded her. And all these women would know who she was too.

Nevertheless, she found it somewhere within her to start the slow way down the steps. Harper was at the bottom now, and some women came to meet him – shouting incoherent things and gesturing in incoherent hand signals.

‘Ladies, come on, please. It’s not the first time you’ve ever seen new arrivals, is it?’

Harper started to walk forward and the women began to part. She and Parting were the last to set down in the Pit, and they stayed as close to Harper as they could.

Now, they could hear individual shouts, and some of the women were recognising Cara as she went past.

‘It’s the Butcher! It’s only the damn Butcher.’

‘You’re gonna fit in right well here, Butcher.’

‘Careful, the Butcher’s about. And she’s got an entourage.’

‘The Butcher’s on the prowl tonight,’ one woman, lost in all the faces, sang. ‘So get your loved ones hid.’ The song, the song they’d sung at New Hall. ‘We may be the scum of the Earth. But at least we …’ How did she know it? Was someone else from New Hall here?

‘Shut up,’ a booming voice erupted.

The women stopped, wheeled around. Cara and Parting did too – it was hard not to. A woman in prison attire was descending the stairs they had previously walked down.

‘What the hell is going on?’

Cara felt her shoulder being grabbed, and then Harper was pulling them both through the crowd.

‘I was at the hairdressers, and I come back to this!’ the woman shouted. She was short and stout, and took one step at a time. Then Cara’s head was jostled around and she lost sight of her. ‘What is going on in my district?’ She almost sang it out like a gospel singer.

Cara didn’t really care. She just wanted to get through the throng of women as quickly as possible and if this new woman was able to distract the crowd, so be it.

It worked. And they were free to follow Harper over to a white door on the left side. There was a light above it. Red. But as Cara and Parting stepped forward, it turned green.

‘Only the two of you and the guards in this unit can access your cell,’ Harper said. ‘You are not permitted to go into anyone else’s cell. No one is permitted to come into yours. Likewise, you will be permitted to go elsewhere in the Unit at certain times of day – the yard, the dining room, the laundry, the showers, et cetera – accessing the various doors just as you have done now. To make sure no one is where they shouldn’t be, these doors always lock behind you and cannot be kept open. This way, we know where every prisoner is at all times, and you are protected from anyone else. Any questions?’

‘Why do you have a Cuff?’ Cara said.

‘We have Cuffs for much the same reason as you,’ Harper said, holding up his wrist. ‘It unlocks doors, and keeps track of our vitals. But we also have key cards for overrides in communal areas.’

Cara and Parting looked at each other. Parting shrugged. She didn’t seem bothered by it. But something about it bothered Cara. Like the guards were prisoners too.

An awkward silence for a moment.

Cara was sure she’d have plenty of other questions in due course, but none came to mind in the moment.

‘So everything you need should be in there,’ Harper was saying, ‘you both have a washbag on your bed with the appropriate necessities. And you have your wardrobe there, I see.’

Cara looked down at the unimpressive bundle of muted fabric in her arms.

Harper checked his watch. ‘It’s half four. You must be starving. We’re going to keep you separate from the other residents today, because well … they get a bit excited by new arrivals, as you’ve seen. I’ll bring you some dinner after it comes out, around six. Then, tomorrow, we can see about incorporating you into life here. Contrary to how it looks, it’s not that bad. Come along now.’ Harper guided them into the room backwards. ‘Welcome to North Fern.’

They stepped through the open door. Harper stayed on the outside of the room. The door shut. The mechanical lock clicked.

Parting sighed and looked around. ‘What the—?’

This made Cara finally turn and take in her new home. The cell was small, cramped, but not unbearable. There were two bony-looking beds, one on each side – plastic mattresses and rigid purple duvets – both made up, with a small washbag placed on each pillow. In between the beds was a sliver of floor leading up to a shared bedside cabinet.

The last detail of the cell was a small alcove, where there was a toilet and a sink, shielded by a waist-h. . .