Close by Martina Cole Page B

stank of despair and front. The front most people put on for family and friends when they were looking at a long sentence. Front was how you coped with being told by a judge that you were being locked away for the best years of your life, that you were a menace to society and prison was all you would know from now on. Front was pretending that you accepted what had happened. Front was what made you get up in the morning after such an abomination, and was what made you carry on through every day after that. Front was, in the end, all you had to rely on.
    Front was also, unfortunately, more often than not what had put the majority of the convicts there in the first place.
     
     
    Kevin Craig sat down and Lil smiled at him tremulously.
    'Thanks for coming.' He afforded her the respect her husband's reputation automatically afforded her. 'That's all right, mate.' Her smile was wide, but her nerves were making her feel faint.
    She was heavily pregnant once more and her huge belly was evident as she sat down and tried to make herself comfortable.
    As she looked around the visiting room she felt the fear once more. She looked at the women with their kids; dilapidated, scruffy, trying to be cheerful, trying to make some kind of connection with the men who had fathered their children and who might not hold any of them close again for years.
    This was all her nightmares come to life, losing her Pat to the prison system. Seeing him banged up and vulnerable and watching him shrink a bit more as every year passed, she knew that her physical make-up would make her seek solace elsewhere even though the man would not, could not, ever match up to the man she had lost through no fault of her own.
    Kevin smiled at her then as if reading her mind. 'Tell Pat and Dicky that I have put me hand up, wiped me mouth and took the onus off them. But my old woman has to be taken care of. I am only a bagman, I collected the rents, that's all. Make sure the protection is paid; they owe me, they owe me big time.'
    Lil didn't hear the underlying threat in his voice, she just felt relieved; this was something she could cope with, something she knew all about. He was telling her what she was supposed to be telling him. Keep your trap shut, your head down and your arse up and everything would be all right.
    Kevin's wife, Amy, was a mate of sorts. They lived near each other and they talked if they met in the market. She knew his kids by sight and she talked to him about them, assuring him that they would be well taken care of. That they would not go without, even though she knew that they would be going without the most important person in their life after their mother.
    Although, from what she had heard from Amy, she wasn't so sure about that now. But she knew better than to say these thoughts out loud.
    Instead, she told this troubled man that he was not to worry, his family were safe, and at the same time she was praying that she would never have to visit her husband or children in a place like this.
    Lil hated the whole depressing aura of prison. It was like a living tomb to her. People lived inside the prison walls, but they might as well have been long dead because they were only existing, and that was not what life was supposed to be about.
     
     
    'Lil is sorting it, relax.' Patrick sounded far more confident than he felt, but he knew that Dicky would not pick up on that. Kevin had been nabbed completely by accident, and they were all still trying to clear up the mess.
    Pat was shrewd enough to know that Kevin had been served up, and he would be very interested to know who the culprit was. It had to be someone close, because he kept his business dealings quiet; even Dicky didn't have any real idea of how enormous his empire had become. But then again, no one did. He used different people for different things. Never telling his right hand what the left hand was doing.
    It worked better that way. People only know what you tell them. Well, if you didn't