The Human Face of Monsters

I work in a women’s high-security prison. This isn’t one of those girls-behaving-badly situations. This isn’t shoplifting, tax fraud, or somebody getting overzealous with a parking ticket. These women are killers. Cold-blooded killers. The sort of people whose crimes end up narrated in hushed voices over true crime documentaries while mournful piano music tinkles ominously in the background and grainy photographs slowly fade across the screen. And yet, somehow, this has become my normal. My keys jangle with self-importance as I patrol my usual stretch of cells, sounding less like a prison officer and more like a medieval town crier announcing the arrival of someone considerably more important than she really is. The women know me. I know them. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. Take Wolverine. Not her real name, obviously. Nobody remembers her real name anymore. The nickname came from the claws. Five-inch fingernails, sharpened to wicked points that look capable of opening a tin of beans — or a major artery — at twenty paces. The very same claws that landed her here after she flew into a jealous rage when her husband cheated on her. She gouged his eyes out. Both of them. Even now, the thought makes my stomach knot. It’s monstrous. Unthinkable. Pure evil. And yet… I’ve grown rather fond of her. There it is. The uncomfortable truth. She’s funny. Kind, even. She remembers everyone’s birthdays. Once she spent three weeks making me a tiny papier-mâché hedgehog because I’d mentioned liking hedgehogs in passing — then apologised for the slightly wonky ears. It’s difficult to reconcile the woman who made me a cheerful woodland ornament with the woman who removed another human being’s eyesight. But that’s prison for you. One minute you’re discussing arts and crafts, the next you’re remembering exactly why someone is serving life without parole. Nothing is ever simple. Further down the corridor lives Mad Pat. Now Pat must be pushing ninety. Permed white hair, round spectacles, and knitted cardigans in colours apparently inspired by tropical fish and mild hallucinations. She looks exactly like the sort of grandmother who keeps biscuits in a decorative tin, slips you a fiver when your parents aren’t looking, and asks whether you’ve eaten enough vegetables. Rumour has it she’s a serial killer. Nobody seems entirely sure how many. The numbers vary wildly depending on who’s telling the story. But everyone agrees on one detail. Knitting needles. And a deep-rooted hatred of men. Which is admittedly quite the combination. I stop at her hatch and slide through breakfast. “Morning, Pat.” “Morning, love.” She smiles. She always smiles. “Did you sleep well?” “Like a baby.” “Was the camomile tea, wasn’t it?” “It was,” she says. “Worked a charm.” A charm. Honestly, listen to us. Does that sound like evil? Does that sound like somebody who’s allegedly buried half a football team’s worth of husbands? No. It sounds like my nan. And that’s precisely what unsettles me. A few cells along is Hot Wheels Sharon. The nickname came after she stole a mobility scooter and led police on a three-hour pursuit around a retail park. To this day, it’s regarded as one of the least intimidating police chases in British history. But that wasn’t the worst of her crimes. Back in 1998, Sharon faked her own death to avoid a prison sentence. An elaborate scheme involving forged paperwork, a suspiciously convenient boating accident, and what investigators later described as “an alarming amount of commitment.” She remained at large for nearly two years before eventually being discovered in Costa Rica, sipping piña coladas on a beach and living under the name “Shazza de Costa.” Which, if anything, demonstrated exactly how much effort she’d put into the rest of the plan. And then there’s Silent Sue. A woman so quiet that when she sneezed last month half the wing thought somebody had fired a gun. We’ve gone entire shifts where nobody realised she was awake. These women have become fixtures in my day. Background characters. Familiar faces. Neighbours. Colleagues, almost. And sometimes that’s what scares me most. Because beneath the prison uniforms and criminal records they’re just people. People who laugh, complain, get excited about biscuits, and ask whether you’ve had a nice weekend. People who remind me, far more often than feels comfortable, of people I already know. And perhaps that’s the most frightening thing about evil. Not that it’s different. But that it isn’t. Then there’s Jaws. The last cell. The quietest corner of the unit. A lonely pocket of shadow tucked away at the far end of the corridor, where conversation seems to die before it reaches the walls. No officer likes going down there. Nobody says why. They just don’t. Now I’ve never quite worked out why she’s called Jaws. The obvious theory would be teeth. But she barely has any. In fact, she removes the remaining ones herself. With her fingers. No pliers. No hesitation. Just a quick tug, as casually as somebody picking fluff off a jumper. Then she writes messages on the walls with them. Actual teeth. Human teeth. Not words exactly. More scratches, symbols, and strange little markings that nobody can make sense of. At night, when the prison settles into silence, I sometimes hear it. Scratch… scratch… scratch. The sound drifts down the corridor. A tiny noise. A ridiculous noise, really. Yet somehow worse than screaming. I imagine her crouched in the darkness, carving cryptic messages into concrete with bits of herself. The sort of image that creeps into your head at bedtime and refuses to leave. One evening I hear it again. Scratch. Scratch. I glance at another officer. “What do you reckon she’s doing?” He shrugs. I grin. “What? Trying to tooth her way out?” I laugh. He laughs. We both laugh. Even Jaws lets out a wheezy little cackle from somewhere inside the darkness. We all laugh. Which probably should have been my first warning sign. As it turns out… The joke is entirely on me. The shift continues. Doors. Headcounts. Paperwork. The endless bureaucracy required to keep dangerous people safely locked inside a building. I keep half an eye on Jaws all day. The scratching. The weirdness. The teeth. I become convinced she’s planning something. Because obviously she is. Nobody normal writes on walls using their own molars. Then afternoon count arrives. I stop at Wolverine’s cell. Look inside. And freeze. Empty. Completely sodding empty. I stare. Blink. Look again. Still empty. For a brief moment I wonder whether I’ve somehow wandered into the wrong cell. I haven’t. My brain refuses to process what my eyes are telling it. A high-security prisoner cannot simply vanish. That’s not how prisons work. That’s not how walls work. That’s not how reality works. Frankly, that’s not how anything works. Yet here we are. I unlock the door and rush inside. The cell is untouched. Bed made. Books stacked. Everything exactly where it should be. Neater than my own house, if I’m being honest. I search every inch. Under the bed. Behind the sink. Inside every cupboard. Nothing. Then I spot a poster hanging on the wall. An enormous photograph of none other than David Hasselhoff. Why David Hasselhoff? I have absolutely no idea. Apparently Wolverine found him irresistible. Then again, this is a woman who once removed a man’s eyesight over a marital disagreement, so who am I to question her taste in men? I pull the poster aside expecting a Shawshank-style tunnel. Nothing. Just wall. Solid wall. Mockingly solid wall. I question the others. Mad Pat merely adjusts her reading glasses. “I was doing my crossword, love.” “Pat, a woman has vanished.” “I’m trying to remember a seven-letter word for betrayal.” “Pat.” She blinks at me over the rim of her spectacles, entirely unmoved by the fact a convicted murderer appears to have evaporated. Then she returns to her crossword. The others deny seeing anything. Convenient. Very convenient. The entire wing suddenly develops a severe case of collective amnesia. A woman has escaped a high-security prison. On my watch. This is, to use the appropriate professional terminology, a complete and utter shit show. The investigation lasts hours. Then days. Nobody can explain it. No broken locks, no damage, no explanation. Nothing that makes sense. It’s as though the prison has simply swallowed her whole. Until somebody examines the ventilation system. Specifically, a vent located high above Wolverine’s bed. Far too small for a human being. Or so everyone assumed. Until they found the evidence. Tiny claw marks. Hundreds of them. Scores etched into the metal like tally marks left by some persistent predator. Running all the way through the shaft. The truth emerges slowly. Wolverine hadn’t dug out. She’d climbed. For months she’d used her claws to scale the walls every night after lights out. Back and forth. Again and again. Building strength. Building technique. Testing routes. Learning every inch of the ventilation system. Then, little by little, she’d used those same claws to widen sections of ducting from the inside. Millimetre by millimetre. Night after night. Patient as a spider. Patient as something that already knows it will eventually get what it wants. The final discovery comes from reviewing old security footage. There she is. Smiling. Chatting. Making hedgehogs. Being helpful. Being charming. Laughing with officers. Remembering birthdays. Looking for all the world like somebody’s favourite aunt. All while secretly preparing her escape. And that’s when I realise something. I never once suspected her. Not really. Because I liked her. Because somewhere between the handmade birthday cards, the conversations, and the papier-mâché hedgehogs, I’d stopped seeing Wolverine as a threat and started seeing her as a person. While I was watching Jaws scratch messages with teeth and convincing myself that madness looked like danger… The real threat was the woman I trusted. The woman who remembered birthdays. The woman who made hedgehogs. The woman who smiled. These days I still think about that. About Wolverine. About Pat. About all of them. The truth is, evil rarely arrives looking like evil. It rarely announces itself. Sometimes it arrives carrying a crossword. Sometimes it offers you a cup of tea. Sometimes it remembers your birthday. Sometimes it sits opposite you for years, chatting about the weather while quietly reminding itself where the exits exist. I watch enough true crime to know how charming killers can be. Yet somehow, given enough time, enough conversations, enough ordinary moments, I forget. Perhaps we all do. Because it’s easier this way. Easier to believe that monsters are different from us. Easier to imagine there’s something in their eyes that gives them away. Because monsters are easier to manage when they don’t feel like monsters at all. The truly frightening ones are the people who remind us of ourselves. And every now and then, when the prison is quiet, I still hear scratching in the dark. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. The sound still crawls under my skin. Only now I wonder if it was ever the right cell at all.