Waiting for Wednesday

will survive the cold wind that cuts
through this city like a knife. I think you could grow to love it here. You could
certainly lose yourself in the crowds and the strangeness. There are days when I
fancy I glimpse your face among the crowds. A certain lift of your chin. A red
scarf. My heart turns over. Surrounded by people I like, I am lonely here without
you. My love, Sandy xxxxx



TEN
    Jim Fearby never gave up: his doggedness was
his gift and his curse. He couldn’t help it, he was made that way.
    When he was ten and on a school trip, he had
seen a demonstration of how to light a fire without a match. It looked simple the way
the man in the combat jacket did it – a board with a notch cut into it, a long stick, a
handful of dry grass and bark, a minute or so of rolling the spindle between his two
palms, and there was an ember catching at the tinder nest, which he gently blew into a
flame. One by one the class tried to do the same, and one by one they failed. When
Fearby got back home, he spent hours rolling a stick between his palms until they were
sore and blistered. Day after day he squatted in their small garden, his neck aching and
his hands throbbing, and one day an ember glowed beneath the tip of his stick.
    Fearby’s mother, who was now long
dead, had always declared rather proudly that her son was more stubborn than anyone she
had ever met. His wife called it bloody-mindedness. ‘You’re like a dog with
a bone,’ she would say. ‘You can never let go.’ Fellow journalists
said the same, sometimes admiringly, sometimes with incredulity or even contempt, and
recently with that shake of the head: old Jim Fearby and his notions. Fearby
didn’t care what they thought. He just rolled his spindle, waited for the ember to
catch and grow into a flame.
    It had been like that with George Conley. No
one else had cared about Conley, barely thought of him as a fellow humanbeing, but he had struck a spark in Fearby, who had sat through every single day of
his trial. It was his passivity that touched him: Conley was like a beaten dog just
waiting for the next blow. He didn’t understand what was happening to him but
neither was he surprised by it. He’d probably been bullied and jeered at all his
life; he no longer had the hope in him to fight back. Fearby never used words like
‘justice’ – they were too grandiose for an old hack like him – but it
didn’t seem fair that this sad lump of a man should have no one to fight his
corner.
    The first time Jim Fearby had visited George
Conley in prison, way back in 2005, the experience had given him nightmares. HMP
Mortlemere, down in Kent on the Thames Estuary, wasn’t such a bad place and Fearby
wasn’t sure what it was that had particularly got to him. There were the resigned,
tired faces of the women and children in the waiting room. He had listened to their
accents. Some of them had come from across the country. There was the smell of damp and
disinfectant, and he had kept wondering about the smells the disinfectant was covering
up. But, almost embarrassingly, it was mainly the locks and the bars and the high walls
and the barbed wire. He had felt like a child who had never properly understood what a
prison was. The real punishment is that the doors are locked and you can’t go out
when you want to.
    During the trial, pathetic little Conley had
been bemused, almost numb, in the face of so much attention. When Fearby had met him for
the first time in prison, he was pale and utterly defeated. ‘This is just the
beginning,’ Fearby had told him but he seemed barely to be paying attention.
    Fearby had seen on his road map that
Mortlemere was next to a bird sanctuary. Afterwards he had parked his car and walked
along a path by the water, mainly so that the coldnortherly wind could
blow the rank prison smell off him. But even so he couldn’t seem to shake away the
stench, and that night and for many nights afterwards, he had dreamed of doors and steel
bars and locks and lost keys, of being shut in, of trying to look out at the world
through glass so thick that nothing was visible except blurry shapes.
    In the years since, in the course of writing
articles and finally his book,
Blind Justice
, he had visited Conley in prisons
all over England, up in Sunderland, down in Devon, off the M25. Now, visiting him at HMP
Haston, in the Midlands, Fearby hardly noticed his surroundings. The parking, the
registration, the entrance through multiple doors, had become