The Sleepwalker: The Dark and Addictive Thriller by Knox Joseph

Author:Knox, Joseph [Knox, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, thriller, Mystery
ISBN: 9781473542082
Goodreads: 43686667
Publisher: Transworld Digital
Published: 2019-07-11T07:00:00+00:00

3

Category A’s have a sense of hopelessness that’s hard to articulate. Most offenders are high risk, serving life sentences, with little likelihood of release before death or old age. Strangeways had recently beaten out stiff competition for the highest suicide rate of any prison in the country. When the walls are sixteen feet thick, it’s the only realistic means of escape. We were escorted to the segregation unit, while the prison officer filled us in.

‘Most of these guys can’t hack it in the main pop for one reason or another. You’ve got your fruitcakes, you’ve got your juveniles being tried as adults and you’ve got your self-harmers.’ He turned a key in a beaten steel door, leading us on to the wing. ‘And obviously, you’ve got your chomoes.’

‘Chomoes?’ said Naomi.

‘Child molesters,’ he said, closing the door behind us.

It crashed shut and he turned the key again.

‘They’re on the same wing as juveniles being tried as adults?’

‘I know,’ he said, misreading her tone. ‘Poetic justice, eh?’

He led us into E Wing. Four floors of barred cells with steel-grid walkways. It sounded like a soup kitchen falling down a flight of stairs. As we passed the cells I heard conversations go dead. Inmates shifting forward to watch us, eyes trailing Naomi. No one shouted or did anything to disturb us, and I got the feeling they were memorizing her.

‘What’s our man in all this?’ I asked.

‘Man?’ he laughed. ‘You’ll see …’

‘We’re excited enough without the element of surprise,’ I said.

‘Well, I suppose Adam’s what you’d call a switch. Sometimes he’s a he, sometimes a she. Today he’s somewhere in between.’

‘Is that why he’s segregated?’

‘That and substance problems.’

‘What’s his poison?’

‘Spice,’ said the guard. ‘Same as all the others. Makes the time pass quicker so it’s popular stuff in here.’

I’d heard of family men coming here sober, leaving with unbreakable bad habits. Life failed them first, followed by the system. Buried inside Strangeways, they acquired the skills to fail themselves.

When we reached Adam’s cell, the guard asked the other man inside if he’d give us a minute. He agreed with a docile shrug, waiting while Adam was cuffed to a restraint. This was done gently, on account of the overlapping new and old self-harming scars covering both the prisoner’s arms. He was slim and wore his hair in short pigtails with light make-up.

It didn’t quite cover his black eye.

He had a single tear tattooed beneath it, which I took to mean that he’d murdered someone. No one spoke until the prison guard had taken the other cellmate, jingling down the gangway. I started to introduce myself but Adam got in there first.

‘Know this place was built in 1868?’

I shook my head and let my eyes cast over the peeling paint. The dim lights and the dents in the walls. ‘I thought it looked older,’ I said.

He laughed easily. One short burst but right from the nose.

‘Was built two years after Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment.’ He pronounced the author’s name phonetically, and I thought he’d probably never heard it said out loud.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.