Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

animals. Did you know a dairy cow can live for twenty years, but they turn them into dog food after six, when the milk starts to dry up?’

‘I did not,’ I say. ‘So what are we doing out here?’

‘Oh, if you could just water those two rows, that’d be great. Especially the eggplant. He needs a lot of care.’ Cedric smiles, as though this is funny. ‘Watering can’s over there. Use the worm tea.’

‘Worm tea?’

He shows me the worm farm—a big black tub, where earthworms are devouring kitchen scraps. He twists a faucet near the bottom of the tub, and urine-like fluid trickles out.

When the worm tea runs out, I fill the rest of the bucket with rainwater from another tank and start tipping it on the plants. Cedric is doing something with the poppies on the other side of the greenhouse.

I’m hungry, and I don’t really have time for this. Tonight I’m supposed to help abduct the new prisoner, who will expose me as an impostor. But maybe I can get some clues from Cedric about the hiker, or who killed Samson.

Almost every case I’ve ever worked has had a drug angle. ‘How do you make the opium?’ I ask.

He doesn’t turn around, so I can’t see the expression on his face, but his arms stop moving and his shoulders tense up. ‘Excuse me?’

‘You make dope, right?’ I say. ‘I was just wondering how you do it.’

He looks back at me, like he’s trying to read my mind. I find myself thinking neutral thoughts, as though he might really be psychic.

‘What makes you think I grow opium?’ he asks. A bet-hedging question is as good as a confession.

I cringe. ‘Is it a secret? Shit, I’m sorry. I haven’t told anyone.’

He stares at me for a long time and then says, ‘What the hell—I’ll show you. Come over here.’

I put down the watering can and go over to his little field of poppies. They are bigger than they looked at first, the vivid papery flowers almost two inches across, wobbling on foot-long stems.

‘You can make lots of things from poppies,’ Cedric says. ‘Codeine, morphine, heroin. But opium is easiest. Look. This one’s ripe.’

He plucks one of the poppies and starts scraping the head with the blade of his gardening shears. The scoured head starts to bleed. ‘I’ll leave this one overnight so the sap leaks out,’ he says as he works. ‘After that I’ll dry it in the oven on a low heat. Hey presto: opium powder.’

‘How did you learn to do this?’

‘I read about it in a book, then it was trial and error, basically. I don’t know even how most people get drugs. You remember all those lessons in school? Just say no?’

I nod. ‘This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs …’

‘Ah, you got that one. All kids are told to avoid drugs, but the messaging is subtly different. White kids are told drugs will fuck up their brains. Black kids are told drugs will land them in prison.’ Cedric inspects a flower. ‘Anyway, the commercials told us to just say no. They made it sound like everyone was doing drugs except me. I was desperate to say yes, only I didn’t have anyone to say yes to. So I tried this instead. You can buy poppy seeds from anywhere. You don’t need to know anybody, like a dealer. You don’t need …’

He catches himself, but I hear the rest of the sentence anyway. You don’t need to have friends.

‘I can’t produce much from a crop this small.’ Cedric gives me a sharp look. ‘You can try some if you want, but I don’t have enough for a second regular user.’

‘Is that why you haven’t told the others?’ I wonder if any of them have already figured it out. Zara didn’t look surprised when Cedric slept through the doorbell yesterday.

‘No,’ Cedric says. ‘I don’t know why, exactly.’

I can guess. It’s easy to convince yourself something is okay. You can come up with all sorts of rationalisations, reshaping the world so you’re a hero, or at least not an asshole. But it’s much harder to convince yourself that other people will think it’s okay.

You can take a bite out of a corpse and tell yourself he felt no pain, and that he was a bad guy anyway. But you’re not going to tell anyone else you did it, ever. You know they won’t see your point of view. Because, deep down, you know your point of view is bullshit.

‘They wouldn’t understand,’ I prompt.

‘Or maybe they would understand too well.’ Cedric starts scraping another poppy. ‘They care about me. They might try to help me.’

I wonder if any of the Guards actually care about Cedric. I haven’t seen any sign of that. Killers can have emotional connections to other human beings. A group of soldiers might massacre a village and still love their own wives and children. But while the Guards have common enemies—the police, the inmates—that doesn’t make them friends.

‘And you don’t want to be helped,’ I say.

Cedric and I make eye contact. For a moment, I feel like he sees me, the real me. It’s like he’s looking through a powerful telescope that can see the dark, distant edges of my universe, where other people have seen only a scatter of stars.

I can see by the look on his face that he feels the same way. That I understand him more deeply than he wishes to be understood.

‘You loved Samson, didn’t you?’ I say.

It’s a shot in the dark. Two-thirds of me expects to be wrong. But Cedric flinches, as though I’ve hit him.

It was the way he reacted to the body. Just sat next to it, and said, ‘Oh.’ At the time, the word seemed uncaring, or even flippant.