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‘Did you stay in touch?’
‘No.’
‘Did you keep in contact with anyone from the UHC?’
‘No.’
‘You like tattoos,’ said Strike.
‘Wha’?’
‘Tattoos. You’ve got a lot of them.’
‘So?’
‘Anything on your upper right arm?’ said Strike.
‘Why?’
‘Could I have a look?’
‘No, you fuckin’ can’t,’ snarled Reaney.
‘I’ll ask that again,’ said Strike quietly, leaning forwards, ‘this time reminding you what’s likely to happen to you once this interview’s over, when I inform my friend you weren’t cooperative.’
Reaney slowly pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. There was no skull on the bicep, but a large, jet black devil with red eyes.
‘Is that covering anything up?’
‘No,’ said Reaney, tugging his sleeve back down.
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure.’
‘I’m asking,’ said Strike, now reaching into an inner pocket of his jacket, withdrawing a couple of the Polaroids Robin had found in the barn at Chapman Farm, ‘because I thought you might once have had a skull where that devil is.’
He laid the two photos down on the table, facing Reaney. One showed the tall, skinny man with the skull tattoo penetrating the chubby, dark-haired girl, the other the same man sodomising the smaller man whose short, wispy hair might have been Paul Draper’s.
Reaney’s forehead had started shining in the harsh overhead light.
‘That ain’t me.’
‘You sure?’ said Strike. ‘Because I thought this might explain the pig nightmares better than the smell of pig shit.’
Sweaty and pale, Reaney shoved the photos away from him so violently that one of them fell onto the floor. Strike retrieved it and replaced both in his pocket.
‘This spirit you saw,’ he said, ‘what did it look like?’
Reaney didn’t answer.
‘Were you aware Daiyu re-materialises regularly now at Chapman Farm?’ Strike asked. ‘They call her the Drowned—’
Without warning, Reaney got to his feet. Had his plastic chair and the table not been fastened to the floor, Strike was prepared to bet the prisoner would have kicked them over.
‘Oi!’ said a nearby warder, but Reaney was walking fast towards the door into the main prison. A couple more warders caught up with him, and escorted him through the door out of the hall. Prisoners and visitors had turned to watch Reaney storm out, but swiftly turned back to their own conversations, afraid of wasting precious minutes.
Strike met the eyes of the large prisoner one table along, which were asking a silent question. Strike made a small, negative gesture. Further beatings wouldn’t make Jordan Reaney any more cooperative, Strike was sure of that. He’d met terrified men before, men who feared something worse than physical pain. The question was, what exactly was putting Jordan Reaney into such a state of alarm that he was prepared to face the worst kind of prison justice rather than divulge it?
