Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  ‘What’s up, Mr S.?’ the orderly asked.

  ‘He’s dead, kid. Go back to your cell, please.’

  Nikki was just down the landing – like me, a strawberry blonde from Sheffield. Slightly built but tall, she was someone who’d say it as it was. She could be confrontational, and surprisingly enough many prisoner officers would rather avoid confrontation. Nikki didn’t hold back, but after a dodgy start we couldn’t have got on any better, and she became one of my favourite people to work with. Behind those specs of hers lurked a fierce willpower and intellect. She was also as tough as old boots. I called her over and got my fish knife out because I thought Nicpon was hanging.

  When I got to him there was a ligature, which I cut, but something about this didn’t compute. Then I realized he wasn’t hanging at all. He was stood, feet flat on the floor, arms by his side, body at an angle of forty-five degrees, neck back and jaw fully extended. This ligature – it was more like a washing line – wasn’t tied to his neck: it was wrapped around the bars furthest apart on the window, forming a big loop. He’d leaned forward into it like a ski-jumper on Ski Sunday. His neck and jaw pushed out like that: garrotted. It put me in mind of that painting by Munch: The Scream. He was fucking purple. It was a ghastly sight: the worst body I’d seen. Nikki was in the cell now too. He was rigid, dead quite definitely, and with the line cut he became a dead weight. I’d managed to lift him – thanks to the adrenaline – but when I put him down his legs got tangled in the table. I couldn’t shift him again.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Nikki, and we had a dark little laugh. Together we got him up, shifted his legs and laid him back on the floor. I cannot find words to describe accurately the smell of that corpse and the look on its face.

  Nikki ran her fish knife down his shirt and I started doing CPR. There was no point, but we were taught to do it anyway. ‘Who did the early start this morning?’ she asked.

  ‘That would be me.’

  ‘You’ll be in coroners’ court, then.’

  The alarm bell went; the defibrillator was fetched, as per protocol, and Hotel One, the nursing equivalent to Oscar One, bustled in and put a tube down Nicpon’s throat – again, no point but she had to try. The defibrillator read: don’t bother.

  This is where events started to diverge from the proper management of a death in custody I’ve just told you about, and badly. By now we were being watched by a small crowd of officers, a few of them larking around and talking football. Steadily the numbers grew, until all manner of folk had piled on the landing. That happens for an incident, but this was a death in custody, not a restraint. It didn’t need an army of soldiers.

  I asked Bradders to take over because with these clowns outside the door I could feel my anger rising. CPR continued until a doctor came upstairs and confirmed Nicpon had died. The Hotel One was very supportive. She asked if we were all right before leaving, no criticism there. The group of officers had moved off a little down the landing. Amid all the chat about City and United, one lad had actually asked what the smell was. I think that’s why they moved away.

  The next twenty minutes were a blur as it got even more like Wakes Week in Cleethorpes, a social event. Brews all round: appalling. Two overtime lads who’d seen it unfold were in shock. Not only at Nicpon’s body but also by the behaviour. ‘How can staff do that?’ one said. ‘It’s disgusting.’ He was off for two weeks.

  I went in the office where these six or seven lads were supping tea and still gassing. ‘What’s up with him?’ ‘Ought to grow a set.’ ‘It’s a dead con – what’s his problem?’ The standard macho bollocks.

  I’d been angry before, but now I was steaming. Bradders told me to take a break, get myself some air.

  For everyone doing something useful there were at least three hangers-on milling about, including big daft Mr Gobshite from the funeral escort who was announcing a ‘hot debrief’. Then an admin manager brought three office lasses up to have a neb at Nicpon – fortunately he’d been covered up by now. All it needed was a red rope and we could have charged for entry. Nikki and I gave each other a hug and went into a side room where she had a cry. I had tears in my own eyes.

  Fuck me if the IMB – the Board of Visitors as was – didn’t rock up now, three of them. When they stuck their noses around the door, Nikki’s shoulders were heaving and I must have looked upset myself.

  ‘Can we use the office?’ They’d come for a gander, that’s all.

  ‘No, you fucking can’t,’ I said and kicked the door shut.

  Nikki and I looked at one another and laughed. By this point I’d have bollocked Prince Charles.

  I’d a stinking headache and felt like shit, but things never stopped. There was still a three-hour police interview for me to get through in the association room in which they wanted to know everything: the events leading up to the incident, the incident itself, Nicpon’s background, every last detail. The policeman was brilliant, very thorough. Even then, though, we must have been interrupted a dozen times.

  When I finally left the jail it was half past four in the afternoon, by which time only the healthcare staff and Hotel One nurse had asked how I was. I hadn’t wanted people I didn’t know hugging me, but it would have been good if someone in authority had acknowledged that I might be feeling a bit fragile.

  It was a very strange feeling leaving Strangeways that day. I left the healthcare unit, walked down the main drag, went through a couple of gates, handed my keys in and stood shell-shocked in the car park. The nights were drawing in.

  As soon as I’d opened the door of my car and slid inside, my senses reeled. I stank. I sat there for a moment, got out, took my shirt off and threw it in the boot. The car park was busy at this time but I wasn’t fussed. I unfastened my belt, dropped my trousers and in they went too. Boots n’ all, everything down to my boxers. Some clown wolf-whistled. I got back in the car and drove home like that.

  I’d already phoned Amy to say I’d need a bit of space. In the driveway, I binned my clothes. I must have been in the shower for forty minutes and gone through a full bottle of body wash – scrubbed myself all over with a loofah, red raw. But I still couldn’t get rid of the smell. Amy brought me a cup of tea and asked if I wanted anything to eat. No. She went back downstairs to the little ’un. I was in work as usual the next day; so was Bradders, and Nikki too later on. It’s what you did: got on with it.

  From then on, every time I got in my car that smell just enveloped me. I couldn’t explain it, and I didn’t want to tell anyone. I spent sixty quid having it fully valeted at a time when we didn’t have a lot of money. Our lass, who didn’t know why I’d done that, went ballistic. I hung three air fresheners up in it – red, white and blue – it knocked Amy sick. I’d be sneezing constantly too. I’d drive with the windows down, whatever the weather. But nothing shifted the smell of Nicpon. I was driving home down the A580 about ten o’clock one night and it was more powerful than ever – it put me right back in that cell. I turned off the main road and pulled up at the kerb. It was pissing down. I loved that little Peugeot 406: it cost me 1,500 quid, the most I’ve spent on a car. But I got out and left it there. I had no coat, I was a mile and a half from home, all uphill, but, tired and cold, I walked.

  When I got home Amy asked where the car was. As usual by now, she copped a blast. That’s how I was with her after Nicpon. I apologized later, when she admitted she’d known something was wrong. I couldn’t tell her I’d left it in the road because it stank of a guy who’d died three months earlier. A long time afterwards a psychologist would explain to me how smell is a big part of memory. People buy perfume their mum used to wear; it puts you right back in a moment. On a rare day off I sold the car for fifty-six quid, less than it cost to valet. Fortunately, Amy’s mother lent us some money to buy another.

  Several months later, one fine spring day, I bumped into one of the lads who’d been on overtime that terrible night. He was standing outside the jail with his Alsatian.

  ‘All right?’
I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied. But the way he said it suggested he wasn’t. ‘You? You know that . . . thing?’ He went on, ‘Do you have nightmares?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve had nightmares,’ I said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. This guy had been in the job nigh on forty years. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, Sam, and I don’t want to see it again. It’s bothered me. I can’t get it out of my head.’

  17. This Charming Man

  From 2012, I really began to struggle with my right shoulder. Playing rugby at tight-head prop, I led with that side and paid for it now. The joint throbbed like toothache. I couldn’t sleep and, after a while, I’d no choice but to have an operation. A superstitious person might call it an omen for what I was starting to feel mentally. I tried to push the Nicpon saga to the back of my mind but, in hindsight, it’s easy to see that signs of stress were starting to show.

  Anyway, I’d been off four weeks, arm in a sling, when I had a call from a manager, who said I had to come in for an interview. For once, it wasn’t a disciplinary.

  As healthcare was desperate for staff they had decided on a recruitment drive. Twelve officers were required, not four. Fair dos, quite right too, but those of us already in the job had to apply again. I was narked about that, as you would be, but went to the interview and passed, along with Nikki. Ten new staff came to join us and the unit went on to run as professionally as before. The patients, however, were as challenging as ever.

  Bobby was quite intimidating, six foot three and I’d guess around sixteen stone. In his early forties, he was coming to us from Monster Mansion, Wakefield, as a kiddie killer bound for a mental hospital.

  This guy had been ill from childhood. He’d never come under mental health services, never been in hospital, never been diagnosed and held down a job. He had a normal family life with a wife and two young children. His missus went out one day and left him with the kids, as you do. When she came home, he was watching television.

  ‘Where are the children,’ she said. ‘In bed?’

  No, he told her, they were in the bathroom.

  When she went to see, he’d strangled them both to death, an unimaginable horror.

  Bobby’s issues were clearly medical. Once, when he hadn’t yet been on an unlock, he’d come out on the landing with a TV and held it over Bradders’ head while she was talking to someone. If he’d hit her with it, or dropped it, there’d have been nothing I could do.

  ‘Bobby,’ I said, as quietly and reasonably as I could manage, ‘what’s up, lad?’

  Bradders turned around to see what was going on and you could see the fear in her, as you can imagine. He was a big lad. That telly was heavy and he could have killed her.

  ‘The voices,’ he said.

  The couple of minutes he stood there seemed to last an hour. Bradders backed off and people had their hands on the bells, ready.

  ‘The voices,’ he repeated.

  ‘Do you not want the TV, lad?’

  ‘No, boss,’ he said, bringing it down and giving it me.

  ‘Do you want to go back behind your door?’

  ‘Yes, boss. I do.’

  Wow. That was some moment. On the out, incidents like that would leave people traumatized. On healthcare, they happened with such regularity that it almost became normal.

  Bobby was genuinely unwell. Not so Cliff, who had also killed his children. He’d moved on and his ex-partner found someone else, which he didn’t like. That’s quite often the case, isn’t it? He took his revenge on her via the kids, a two year old and four year old, strangled brutally. What’s more, he had them record a message to their mother saying goodbye.

  It’s hard not to take such things to heart when a prisoner like that comes into jail. Especially when, like him, they then fake mental illness. You might want to throttle him in turn, but have to stay calm. Maybe he thought that acting crazy would get him an easier time. He sat behind his door, rocking, all very premeditated and phoney. He was even talking to the birds, like the Birdman of Alcatraz. He kept it up for a couple of months, before running out of steam as they always do. If you aren’t mentally ill you can’t blag it forever. He ‘came round’ and decided to go after a degree.

  The woman who came in to tell him about education had no idea why he was in healthcare. We shot the bolt, so the door couldn’t be locked when she’d entered, and waited outside. ‘What a nice young man!’ she said when she came out – she was clearly impressed. I let that ride. Then she started telling me about his ambitions and how it would be a pleasure to teach him.

  ‘Even though he’s killed his kids,’ I muttered.

  KK threw me a look and asked me to leave the office, but honestly . . . the tutor left and never came back.

  And then there was Mark Bridger. In early October 2012 I was watching the news at home with Amy, getting ready to go on afternoon shift, when the breaking news had come on that a man had been arrested in Machynlleth in Wales for the abduction and murder of April Jones, the five-year-old girl who had been out playing with friends near her home. He’d lured her into his car and then killed her. Our lass asked if we’d be getting him in Strangeways. I thought so, I told her. When I get there he’ll be on healthcare, I predicted, and I wasn’t far wrong. An hour after I arrived, Bridger did too.

  He was with us ten months, and I spent a lot of time with him, far too much. High-profile prisoners weren’t unusual in healthcare: we had murderers, child killers . . . all the scum we could handle. But out of everyone I’ve ever worked with, Pawel Nicpon apart, only one prisoner ever really got inside my head and stayed there.

  Bridger was all over the press, and there were only two places he could be located: seg’ and healthcare. Such a high-profile child killer couldn’t go in the VP units, whether it be opposite the Cat A prisoners on A Wing or E Wing, because the cons in both would have either cut his throat or strung him up, perhaps both. If you ask me, seg’ wouldn’t have him because he was on an ACCT form and threatening to kill himself, so that would be too much mither. So healthcare it was.

  A big part of the hatred I came to feel for Bridger was fired by how the service reacted to such an individual. The first three days knocked me sick, ‘Are you all right, Mark?’ ‘How are you doing?’

  The IMB matrons were all over him like a rash. I don’t want to broad-brush everyone. The two ladies we usually saw always tried to find the good in people and help, while also appreciating that some of the characters we had were beyond redemption. The three IMBs who came on for Bridger, though, gave you the impression they wanted something to boast about at a dinner party – ‘Oh, you’ll never guess who I saw today’ – a thrilling little tale to dish out with the French onion soup. ‘Mark has had a letter from his mother and father,’ one said. ‘He is very upset because his dog is getting old and will have to be put down.’

  People were constantly coming on to interview him. We had one officer who dealt with veterans in custody: fair enough – lots of ex-squaddies suffer PTSD, leave the armed forces and turn to crime. One thing police were worried about in Bridger’s case was weakness of evidence: they wanted as full a picture as possible of his words and actions, however trivial they might seem, and we’d been told that anything Bridger came out with should be documented and a report filed. We’d also been told that Bridger had been in the army, although when the case came to court he admitted that was a lie because he hadn’t wanted people in Machynlleth ‘to know about his past problems’. This veterans officer, who like the rest of us at that time still thought Bridger had been trained by the SAS, visited him in his cell. On leaving, the officer said he must speak to security immediately: he’d been given a map. Him and everyone else: the police had been dicked about with five different locations for April’s burial. The officer went off excitedly with his confessional ‘map’, only to be disappointed like all the rest. He was a really manipulative sod, Bridger.

  A psychologist came to see him too. Psychological i
nput is very limited in prison; there’s not a lot of it in there. As a psychologist, you’re not fussed about having Joe Bloggs, a smack-addicted cat burglar off Moss Side, on your CV, are you? It’s not a feather in your professional cap, that. Of the hundreds of inmates to cross my path down the years that needed such treatment, Bridger was the only prisoner I knew who got it before sentencing. Normally, the psychologists worked solely with the SIU (special intervention unit) which I’ll come to later, and seg’, and dealt almost exclusively with terrorism, violent offenders, and personality disorders.

  In healthcare, Bridger was out a lot more than he would have been elsewhere in the jail, so he had a lot of interactions where that charm I am on about kicked in. Staff would go starry-eyed and take every word he said as gospel. I found it sickening. He was a sneaky, despicable creature. Later, I read the psychologists’ reports. One described him as one of the worst killers of the last century, quite a claim when you think of all the serial killers and their like in the hit parade.

  Physically, he was around the same height as me and of similar build, six foot, fifteen stone, so maybe not quite as heavy. I expect he could have been intimidating to lads who didn’t have that presence. If he thought someone was weak he would quite definitely take advantage, although at heart he was a coward. There was no way he was ever going to be restrained or anything like that.

  Every patient had a named nurse on healthcare, including Mark Bridger. Each nurse would have a couple of patients they’d have one-to-ones with, like a personal officer. We called his named nurse the Princess (in a lovely, not sarcastic way) and she had been on a long weekend. I remember her coming in, Tuesday it was, and I was sat with KK.

  She took her job seriously, as they all did, and told us that Mark – the nurses always used first names – had been self-harming in her absence. We’d both been working, so it seemed unlikely. ‘Do you want a look?’ she said, and we went along to his cell.