B002RI919Y EBOK

by Peters, Joe

  Chapter Seventeen

  My Kind Defender

  My court hearing wasn’t until the middle of April, by which time I had been in Lewes prison for two months and staring at four walls was really beginning to get to me, pressing in on my mind like a vice. To relieve the frustration and anger, I started cutting myself, just as I had seen Lisa doing back at the squat. Now I could understand exactly why she, and so many other desperate young people, wanted to harm themselves: how it relieved the tension and vented some of the anger and hatred I felt towards myself. Matt said the authorities were talking about sending me to the prison hospital, but Frank spoke up for me and talked them out of it.

  ‘Leave him with me,’ he told Matt. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him.’

  They agreed to his suggestion, although they put me on suicide watch, which meant officers would look through the spyhole into the cell every hour to check that I was OK. I got fed up with being watched and stuck a piece of toilet paper over the inside of the hole.

  ‘You’ll get into trouble for that,’ Frank said, sighing, when he saw what I was doing. ‘Take it down.’

  ‘Fuck ’em,’ I said. ‘They’re only screws.’

  He just shook his head like a tolerant but despairing parent.

  ‘You’ll just get more days on the end of your sentence if you wind them up. It won’t go in your favour.’

  I knew he was right, but I was so bored and hyped up I was unable to control my impulses much of the time. Unable to sleep, I kept pressing the buzzer in the night and waking the screws up, just for the hell of it. It was partly boredom, partly bravado and partly because I just didn’t know any better. Matt had been made my prison liaison officer and I had managed to build a relationship with him, as I had with Frank. They both gave me serious talkings to and I took in some of what they were saying. I guess they were both having to make up for more than ten years of me lacking a father figure. If my dad had still been alive I would probably never have ended up in that state because he would have steered me in the right directions. I knew that and I was grateful to both of the men for caring enough to try to show me the error of my ways, even though I didn’t intend to show either of them that I was taking any notice.

  Matt spent a lot of time with me, coaxing me to tell him more about my past, taking me into his office, which someone had tried to make look less threatening by putting curtains up at the window to hide the bars. To begin with I didn’t want to tell him any more than he already knew. It was embarrassing to tell other men about the things that had been done to me; to admit that my own mother had hated me so much she had locked me up for years and then sold me to other men who abused me in the most horrible ways imaginable. I didn’t want to remember, either, the way my brothers and my stepfather had raped and tortured me all those years, because it was humiliating and showed the world how little my own family cared for me. But Matt knew that if the courts were told a bit about my past they would be more likely to understand how I had got myself into the mess I was now in. Smashing a few shop windows and snatching a few pairs of jeans would be more understandable acts, he explained, if people realized what state of mind I was in when I did it.

  I’m sure Matt had heard stories like mine before; virtually every runaway kid on the streets is escaping from his or her family and the vast majority have been abused physically, mentally and sexually. When you added on the pressure I was under with Lisa and the baby, however, he said he thought that the courts were likely to be much more understanding about the crime spree that they believed I had been on.

  He made me endless cups of tea and chatted to me in such a friendly way that I eventually mellowed and began to give him a glimpse into the hell that had been my life from five onwards. I still didn’t go into that much detail, but there was enough there for me to see his eyebrows going up once or twice.

  ‘You deserve a break, Joe,’ he said eventually. ‘You shouldn’t even be in a prison. I promise you I’m going to do all I can to get you out of here. The first thing we have to do is tell the governor a bit about what you have been telling me. That will mean I need you to give me permission to break your confidence. And we need to call the police in to investigate your abusers.’

  ‘What the fuck are you on about?’ I was horrified. The police were the last people I wanted to be involved with. They’d beaten me up and thrown me into prison. Why would I want to tell them any more about myself? I was scared of them, just as I was scared of every other authority figure. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘What you’ve told me is very distressing. These people need to be held accountable for what they did to you. They were meant to be looking after you. There have been offences committed here, Joe. Given everything that has happened to you, you shouldn’t be in here. You should just be given a caution and let out. They’re the ones who should be in prison.’

  I didn’t believe him and I felt a twinge of panic at the thought of Mum and Amani and the rest of them finding out I had grassed on them. Had I talked too much? Had I made a mistake in letting my guard down? Had Matt tricked me into trusting him, only to betray me as everyone else had in the past?

  ‘It was the pigs who put me in this place,’ I shouted. ‘I don’t want anything to do with them. I’ll deny it all. Don’t even think about it.’

  He took no notice of my protests and went to the governor with the whole story. The governor then called me into his office to ask me about it. But I had learned my lesson by then and I wasn’t saying another word.

  ‘There’s no point us calling the police in to take his statement,’ the governor said to Matt eventually, ‘if he won’t even speak to us.’

  On the morning of the Crown Court hearing everyone at the prison was convinced they were seeing the back of me. Frank and the others were sure a judge would listen to my story and realize I was in the wrong place.

  ‘Get your bag packed,’ Matt said when he came for me. ‘You won’t be coming back. I’m going to see to that.’

  Bubbling with excitement, I gave Frank a proper hug before leaving the cell–something I would never have been able to imagine myself doing a few months before.

  ‘You’re going to be all right,’ he said, patting me on the back. ‘Let’s not see you back in here, lad. You’re not one of us.’

  Matt was determined that I should make a good impression on the judge and jury and even sorted out a shirt and jacket for me to wear, ignoring my sullen protests. Once I got there, I could see why he had thought I should dress up, since it was the full Crown Court scene, with men wearing wigs and gowns and talking in big booming voices that echoed round the panelled walls. The posh bloke from the Crown Prosecution Service read out all the charges, reciting all the dates and details. They were basically accusing me of doing every non-dwelling robbery that had occurred in the city over the previous two years, even though I hadn’t been living there that long. The total came to 465 charges of criminal theft and damage. He made it sound as if I was the criminal mastermind, as if they had managed to catch the top man of some organized crime syndicate. He also mentioned that I had assaulted a police officer, although the police didn’t want to press charges on that one.

  My QC applied for bail.

  ‘How old is your client?’ the judge enquired.

  ‘He’s just turned seventeen while in custody, my lord.’

  ‘So he went to Lewes prison at sixteen?’ He seemed as mystified as everyone else. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘We were unable to find a bail hostel for him, my lord.’

  ‘I object to bail,’ the CPS lawyer interrupted. ‘Mr Peters is a high-risk individual.’

  ‘We don’t feel we should send him back to Lewes,’ my QC argued on. ‘Special rules were made for him by the governor because of his youth, but we don’t feel we can ask for that again.’

  ‘Well, we need to set a trial date for this,’ the judge said, and I was sent back down to the cells to wait while they sorted everything out.

  My Q
C came down a while later to assure me they were doing everything they could to get me out. I couldn’t wait to be free again. He came back a couple of hours later, looking glum.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to go back up to the courtroom and we’ll explain to you what’s happening.’

  It seemed that the same thing had happened again. They couldn’t find a bail hostel with any room for me and so I was going to have to go back to Lewes prison.

  ‘We can’t just let you go roaming the streets,’ the judge said, ‘and we can’t find anywhere else. I understand that the prison governor has severe reservations about you being there, but I don’t see any alternative at the moment. We will mark your case as urgent, so that you are there for as short a time as possible.’

  The screws couldn’t believe it when I turned up again at the gates of Lewes.

  ‘Not you again!’ they said, looking genuinely shocked. ‘What are you doing back here?’

  ‘They couldn’t find me anywhere to go, could they?’

  ‘The governor’s not going to be happy about this,’ Matt said, shaking his head.

  ‘Can I get back to my wing?’

  ‘Hang on a second. Let’s have those clothes back that we lent you.’

  Once I was back in my uniform they took me through the first set of bars and I could see Frank playing pool through the next set.

  ‘Oi,’ I shouted, ‘Frankie! I’m back.’

  He froze without even turning round. Seeing him made me a bit tearful. Despite all my outward swagger and noise, he took me back under his wing with a sort of gruff kindness.

  I was set to return to court during the first week in June, which meant another two months in prison. The time looked as if it stretched ahead for ever. The other prisoners had all seen through my bravado by that stage and treated me well, often sharing their sweets with me when they didn’t have to, as if I was just another kid. Now that I was less afraid of the other prisoners, the biggest problems were boredom and missing Lisa. I thought about her all the time, wondering where she had been taken to and whether she was missing me as much as I was missing her. I tried to find out where she was so that I could write to her, but no one was able to give me an address.

  Frank did his best to entertain both of us during the endless days we spent together. He would tell me jokes and we used to pass hours in the cell playing ‘I spy with my little eye’, but he would cheat, naming things that weren’t even in the cell, teasing me and making me angry.

  The one useful thing that came out of my boredom was that I had the opportunity to learn to read and write better. I wasn’t completely illiterate at the start but I had been at school for such a short time I had never really caught up with other kids of my age. Creative reading and writing classes were a good alternative to being banged up in the cell all day and I actually found that I enjoyed writing little poems and expressing myself in ways I had never thought I could.

  I continued to have sessions talking to Matt and he tried to get more out of me about what had happened at home and in Uncle Douglas’s house. And a prison probation officer came in to talk to me in order to prepare pre-sentencing reports for the judge to read at the end of my trial, but I had said more than I was comfortable with already and didn’t want to talk about my past any more, or go into any more detail. In the end I was quite nasty to both of them, telling them to ‘mind their own business’ in an attempt to shut them up so that I could get on with my life. I was fed up with looking back all the time, wallowing in self-pity.

  My QC had been into the prison to see me a couple of times and had warned me that I would probably end up being sentenced to about six years for all the crimes they were taking into consideration.

  ‘I can’t do six years!’ I said, horrified.

  ‘You should have thought of that before you started on this crime spree.’

  ‘I didn’t do four hundred and sixty crimes,’ I protested. ‘I couldn’t possibly have. I haven’t even been living in the area long enough.’

  ‘Well,’ he looked doubtful, ‘according to your co-defendants, Jock and Jake…’

  ‘Co-defendants? They were the ringleaders. I just followed them.’

  ‘Well, you did a “no comment” interview at the police station, which has gone against you because the others from the squat have all talked and cooperated with the police. They’ve all said you are the number one when it comes to the robberies. They’ve admitted to one or two minor misdemeanours, but they will probably get off with a caution because of their openness.’

  Although I was furious with the others for dropping me in it, and even though the idea of serving six years or more filled me with horror, the small boy inside me couldn’t help standing a bit taller at the thought that everyone seemed to think I was some sort of Mafia don. There were moments when it made me quite cocky as well as angry. If it was true that they had all said these things, it meant they hadn’t even lived by their own code of sticking together and saying ‘no comment’. I had been the only one who had stuck by the rules I had been set.

  In the courtroom I had to stand next to the others from the house, as if we were all being tried together, when I knew they had already set me up to be the fall guy for everyone’s crimes. The only one who wasn’t there was Lisa, because she was still sectioned and in fact she had never been involved in any of the stealing, even though she had benefited from the results. The judge, after studying the papers, decided that because I was apparently so much worse than the rest of them I should be tried separately. I was now going to be given my own jury and, having been coached for the last few months by all the old lags in Lewes, I was pleading ‘not guilty’.

  On the day of my trial my QC failed to turn up and no one could find him. It didn’t break my heart because I hadn’t liked him or believed he was really on my side. When the court officials called his firm, they said they weren’t going to be sending anyone else because they had decided not to represent me any more. I must have got up his nose just as much as he had got up mine. The prosecutor was a woman that day and the tone of her voice suggested that she could see through the brave front I was putting on and felt sorry for me.

  ‘I’ll defend myself,’ I said when I was told I didn’t have a lawyer any more–anything rather than be shipped back to Lewes while they started the whole process all over again.

  The judge looked down at me over the top of his glasses.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he instructed.

  I was taken down to the cells again while they tried to work out what to do and a while later the lady prosecutor came down to see me.

  ‘We can’t get hold of any QC to represent you,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone else you know?’

  ‘I don’t know anyone. He was representing me all the way through. The solicitors at the police station appointed him.’

  ‘The judge is furious up there.’ She was looking at me very thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think this is very fair on you, Joe. Some things have been brought to my attention…’

  I realized at that moment that she must have read some of the reports Matt had done about my childhood and that was why she was being more understanding than the rest of them.

  ‘I thought those reports were supposed to be confidential,’ I said grumpily.

  She ignored my protest. ‘Is it true? Did all those things happen to you as a child?’

  I stared down at my hands. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Really we should talk to the police about it.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to the police about anything. I’m in here because of the police. Why should I help them?’

  She tried to gently explain how I was actually spiting myself with my attitude, and how I might be able to make my position much better by cooperating.

  ‘Wait there a minute,’ she said and when I glanced up I noticed that she seemed to have tears in her eyes. ‘I’ll see if I can get you a duty QC.’

  When she came back she shook her head but sat down purp
osefully, as if she had a plan she wanted to confide in me.

  ‘I can’t find anyone who’s free,’ she whispered conspiratorially, ‘but this is what I am going to do. I am going to drop all these charges against you apart from four. I think they’ve gone a bit over the top.’

  ‘I’ll be totally honest with you,’ I said, ‘because you’re being fair to me. I did do a few of them smash and grabs.’

  ‘Would you like to tell me which ones you did, and then I will see what I can do?’

  ‘Will you send me back to prison if I confess?’

  ‘No, Joe,’ she said, ‘I will get you out.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. For the first time I could remember, something was actually going my way. Someone with influence was actually offering to help me. By the time we went back upstairs she had told me she was planning to accuse me of going into the shops and taking things after someone else had done the actual breaking in.

  ‘If you plead guilty to these charges,’ she explained, ‘the jury will be dismissed and you will be saving the taxpayer money, which will definitely go in your favour.’

  I didn’t understand much of what she was saying, but I really wanted to trust her, to put my fate in her hands and let her look after me.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll plead guilty then.’

  ‘And would you agree to letting me represent you as defendant as well as representing the prosecution?’

  I shrugged, completely unable to grasp what she was on about but knowing she was the first person to actually sound as if she might be on my side.

  ‘If you want,’ I said.

  It took a while to explain to the judge what was going on, and I could tell that he found the prosecutor’s suggestion shocking.

  ‘Do you think that would really be in the interests of Mr Peters?’ he enquired.

  ‘Mr Peters is in agreement,’ she said.

  He seemed to see the sense in it, since no one else appeared to be willing to step forward and speak up for me. Now that we were all finally in agreement the case started to roll, with the prosecutor reading out the charges, while at the same time mentioning my terrible childhood and the fact that I had run away and was living on the streets. She already sounded more like a defence counsel than a prosecutor. She then told the judge that they had discovered that I wasn’t the ringleader at all, and that the others, who had already been set free, had stitched me up. As far as I knew she was basing all this on the report that Matt had given her and the things I had said. I was shocked and touched that she believed me at a time when I still didn’t trust anyone in authority. I stayed quiet and listened in amazement as she talked about how I had ‘honestly’ put my hand up to the four charges and how I had been anxious not to waste the court’s time.