Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons
Page 19
Day soon transformed into night and Mum and Kelly went up to their rooms. I wished that I could go to sleep as well but had enough base in my body to keep a narcoleptic awake. It was during this period that panic really began to set in. I was convinced that there must still be a way of avoiding extradition so I powered up my computer and started frantically browsing Spanish law websites. I didn't even know what I was looking for. Everything was written in legal jargon and I couldn't speak a word of Spanish. I had more chance of finding lions in Antarctica than I did of stumbling across a loophole that would allow me to stay at home.
At 6 a.m., I finally abandoned hope and packed my bag ready for the trip. By this stage I was spaced out and exhausted so I just flung in the first few items of clothing that I found. Four pairs of trousers and a couple of T-shirts made it in. I was going to have to spend the next ten years without knickers or socks.
I had been told to surrender myself at Heathrow Airport, where the Spanish police would escort me onto my flight. Mickey drove me there and Mum came along to see me off. None of us were in a particularly talkative mood so we sat in sombre silence for the whole journey. I was in a strange limbo between being high and coming down. Every inch of my body felt crippled with exhaustion but yet my brain was still buzzing. Travelling to Spain in this state was going to test my endurance to the limit.
Five Spanish Interpol officers were waiting for me at the airport, which I thought was a bit excessive considering the fact that I had given myself up voluntarily. One thing I have learnt about the police is that they never do things by halves. They can always be guaranteed to send in an army to do a one-man job.
I said a final goodbye to my mum then followed the officers to the terminal. My plane was just your regular, run-of-the-mill commercial airliner. They didn't have a special aircraft for transporting criminals like in the film Con Air. I had to share a cabin with a load of happy holidaymakers, who were excitedly chatting away to one another about what they were going to do when they arrived. I was going to a place where I would hardly get to see the sun, let alone the sea or sand, which meant my mood couldn't have been further removed from that of the other passengers.
As I fastened my seatbelt and prepared for lift off, I suddenly realised that I had no idea where I would be going when I got to Spain. Would I be locked up straightaway or would the police take me to court first? I didn't want to spend the whole flight wondering what the next step was so I decided to put the coppers to good use.
'Excuse me,' I asked the officer sitting next to me, 'what happens after we get there?'
He pretended not to understand and looked annoyed that I was asking him a question. Even if he was unable to speak perfect English, he could at least have made an effort. He was being deliberately awkward.
After a couple of failed attempts to strike up a conversation, I eventually gave in and grabbed myself a magazine to read. There was no point trying to communicate with my miserable, Spanish travel companions. It was like getting blood out of a stone.
As the aircraft left the runway, I immersed myself in the private lives of Hollywood celebrities and glamorous TV stars. It was your usual trashy gossip but helped to take my mind off things. I would have liked to go to sleep but there was still no chance of that. I was just going to have to try to relax and enjoy my last few hours of freedom to the best of my ability.
I managed to remain relatively calm for the majority of the journey but towards the end of the flight, the last of the drugs left my body and I became extremely agitated. When you're at the worst stage of a comedown, somebody could drop a pin and you would jump a mile. Not knowing where I was going next had me feeling on the verge of a panic attack.
'What happens when we land?' I asked, hoping that my Spanish friends would be a little more co-operative now that we were nearly there.
The coppers shot me a look as if to say, 'You've been quiet for the entire journey. Why are you starting up with this again?' I wasn't in the mood for their shit so I repeated the question in a louder, more aggressive tone.
'You need to calm down,' the officer in charge told me. 'You go court and they decide whether you stay in country or go home.'
There was a possibility that I would be sent home? My mental anguish temporarily alleviated as I imagined landing back in England to a hero's welcome. The coppers had given me a ray of hope.
As the plane touched down on the runway, I felt conflicting emotions. On the one hand I was pleased that there was now a faint possibility of avoiding jail but on the other, it would be a relief if I was taken straight to prison from the airport – at least then I wouldn't have to keep thinking, 'Will I go or won't I?'
'Please remain seated until the aircraft doors are open. We hope you have enjoyed your journey and that you have a pleasant stay in Spain…'
The coppers watched me with an eagle eye as I waited to get up. They looked eager to get rid of me and acted as if I was the troublemaker of the century because I had raised my voice to them. The Spanish Old Bill aren't like the police over here. If you try to backchat them, you'll be lucky not to get a slap. They weren't used to anybody giving them lip. As far as they were concerned, I was a stroppy little madam who needed passing on to somebody else as soon as possible.
A group of Guardia Civil officers were waiting at the terminal and took me to a small police station within the airport. It was filled with metal cages like the ones you see in American prisons on the telly. I was ushered into the nearest one where I sat and waited to see where I was going next.
It's impossible to eat whilst you're on speed but when it finally leaves your system, you feel ravenous. I was hoping that the coppers would bring me some food but I had no such luck. They didn't even give me anything to drink. Fortunately I was whisked out of the cage after a couple of minutes and shoved into a police van. I knew that there would be no point asking the officers where they were taking me. After a brief drive through Madrid, the van pulled up at a large, white court building, similar to the ones that I had been to in England. I was marched through the front door in handcuffs and taken to a filthy, cramped holding cell containing twenty other prisoners. I was the only English girl in there. The others were a mix of Spaniards and Romani gypsies. The gypsies all wore long, traditional skirts and leggings and had olive-coloured skin. The Spanish girls seemed like your typical petty crooks. Many of them bore the telltale signs of drug addiction and I got the impression that very few were strangers to the prison system.
None of the other inmates came across as particularly hostile. They just seemed surprised that I was there. I didn't exactly fit the mould of the average Spanish criminal. Most foreign prisoners in Spain are either North African or Latin American so I was a bit of a novelty. Some of the girls attempted to talk to me but I couldn't understand a word they said. They were probably trying to figure out what I had been convicted of.
I was eventually left alone and sat down on an uncomfortable wooden bench that stretched from one side of the cell to the other. Was this going to be what the next ten years of my life would be like? Nobody had attacked me or given me any grief for being English, but they had looked at me as if I was an alien and I didn't like the idea of having people pointing at me wherever I went.
Every now and again, a guard opened up the door and called one of the inmates out into the corridor. I hadn't got a clue where they went after this. All I knew was that they didn't come back again. As the number of prisoners gradually fell, I began to wonder when it would be my turn to leave. I was dying for a fag and desperately hungry. If nobody fed me soon then I was going to pass out.
After half an hour of sitting on my own, I decided that I was going to have to do something to get the guards' attention. I was so dehydrated that my mouth felt like a desert. It was ridiculous that nobody had offered me a drink since I had touched down in Spain. If I didn't cause a scene, I would most likely die of thirst.
'Somebody get me out of here!' I shouted. 'What the hell is going on? Why a
re you keeping me here so long? I haven't had any food or water. Somebody help me!'
An English-speaking lawyer was standing just outside the cells and came to see what I was making so much noise about. His name was Ricardo Perez-Clague and he was the first person I had met since landing in Spain who talked to me like a human being.
'I will go and get the officers to unlock the door,' he said. 'Please wait here and try to remain calm.'
A minute later, the cell door opened up with a heavy clanking sound and Ricardo came in carrying a slip of paper, some yoghurts and a sandwich.
'This explains why you are here,' he told me, handing over the paper. 'It says that you are being held pending transfer to Soto del Real prison.'
That was my hope of getting sent back home dashed on the rocks. The Spanish authorities had made an irreversible decision to steal a decade of my life. There was no getting out of it.
'I will leave you with this food. If at any point you need a lawyer, here is my calling card.'
I took the card and thanked Ricardo for his help. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have had a clue what I was waiting for. As he left the cell, I wondered how long it would be before the guards sorted my transport out. I felt as if I had been staring at the same four walls forever. It was a sensation that I was going to have to get used to.
The food that I had been given was barely edible. The bread was as hard as a brick, the cheese could have passed for rubber and the yoghurts were past their sell-by date. In ordinary circumstances I would have hesitated to feed them to a dog but I was ridiculously hungry so I wolfed them down in seconds. I was polishing off the last mouthful of rancid yoghurt when I realised that I still had nothing to wash it down with. The dry, stale sandwich had made me even thirstier and I was also beginning to get very cold, which was surprising given that the winters in Tenerife had all been fairly mild. I knew that mainland Spain had got a cooler climate but assumed that it would still be fairly temperate. I hadn't packed any warm clothes to wear which was a big mistake because Spanish winters can fall below zero degrees centigrade.
After what seemed like an eternity of sitting dry-mouthed in a freezing, empty room, I eventually curled up on the bench and tried to get some sleep. It was now three in the morning and I hadn't had a cigarette since nine o'clock the previous morning. I wanted to drift off to a place where I could dream of drinking cool, refreshing water and smoking pack after pack of fags.
I had been asleep for all of two seconds when a loud, shrill noise woke me up with a start. What on earth was this? A crazy, aggressive-looking, little woman was blowing a whistle in my ear and shouting frantically in Spanish.
'¡Sígueme! ¡Es hora de ir a la cárcel!'
She might as well have been saying, 'Gibberish, gibberish, gibberish.'
'What are you doing?' I asked, my head battered by exhaustion and nicotine withdrawal.
'Come on. We go prison now.'
It was strange that we were in a hurry all of a sudden, considering how long I had been waiting. The woman didn't even look like a guard. She was in plain clothes and could have been another prisoner for all I knew. I was contemplating telling her to bugger off when a load of Guardia Civil came marching into the cell and slapped a pair of cuffs on me. I knew by this stage not to try to ask them any questions. They would only ignore me so there was no point.
The coppers ushered me down a corridor and through the front door of the court.
'Get in,' an officer ordered, pointing to a van parked opposite the entrance.
I clambered aboard the vehicle and plonked myself down next to a hard-faced Spanish convict. She was dressed from head to toe in expensive designer clothing and looked very pale, which I figured must have been because she had spent a lot of time in prison. There was something about her that said, 'I'm someone important'. She was definitely a cut above the small-time thieves and drug addicts that I had shared the holding cell with. I thought it best to avoid speaking to this mysterious, well-dressed lady. I got a vibe that she wasn't in the mood to be disturbed.
The two of us sat in silence as we were driven through Madrid. After about ten minutes, we stopped off at the local hospital and the guards picked up a Filipino drug mule, who had swallowed condoms filled with cocaine. The poor girl had fallen ill and had to have the drugs surgically removed from her stomach. She looked as if she had been dragged through hell and back. The staff had obviously discharged her early from the hospital so that she could start her sentence as soon as possible. She didn't seem to me to be anywhere near fit to travel.
So there I was, sitting aboard a prison van with the hardest-looking woman in the world and a half-dead drug mule. I didn't speak their languages so there was no point talking to either of them. I don't think the Filipino girl was in a particularly good state to hold a conversation anyway. She must have been desperate to do what she did. Perhaps she was trying to earn enough to raise her family out of poverty. Whatever the motivation for her crime, I got the impression that she had already paid the price.
I tried to get some sleep during the journey but it's impossible to get comfortable with handcuffs on. My two travel companions kept looking at each other as if to say, 'Gosh, who have I ended up with here?' They were probably giving me the same look too but I was far too tired to pick up on it.
It was 4 a.m. by the time we reached the prison and I could hardly make out the building because it was pitch-black outside. I just saw the outline of a huge wall covered in barbed wire. It looked a hell of a lot bigger than an English jail. I wondered how many prisoners it held and what types of things they were in for.
I would have been absolutely terrified if I had known anything about the place that I was heading into. Soto del Real has housed its fair share of big-time crooks over the years. ETA terrorists, Colombian drug lords and even Russian mafia bosses have all been locked up there at one point or another. It is a maximum-security prison, which means that there are no petty criminals within its walls. Everybody who inhabits the jail is somebody the authorities have deemed to be a serious risk to society.
As the huge, mechanical gates opened up to let us through, I felt butterflies in my stomach. I was heading into the belly of the beast. Part of me was eager to get inside so that I could go to sleep but the more rational part of my brain was absolutely terrified. Prisons are scary buildings. When you go inside, you feel as if any sense of dignity or individuality that you might once have had is being stripped away from you. I now belonged to the jail; I was the property of Soto del Real.
The Guardia Civil ushered us out of the van and into the reception area. It looked like the reception of a hospital and seemed to be where all the new arrivals were issued with prison numbers. None of the staff at Soto were in uniforms, which I thought was a bit weird. In English jails, the guards wear them to distinguish themselves from the prisoners so that inmates can't attempt to switch places with them. In Spain, this method of escape is a little more difficult to pull off because prisons are constantly circled by police. Anybody who manages to make it outside of the front gate is unlikely to get far. The constant police presence also eliminated the problem of people throwing drugs over the walls. There was a police station right next to Soto so nobody who looked even vaguely dodgy could have got within a hundred yards of it without being nicked.
A male and a female guard were in charge of assigning prison numbers. They kept pointing at me and laughing to one another, which confused the hell out of me. I have since found out that this was because the prison numbers in Spain begin with the year of your arrest. They were probably making jokes about the fact that mine was eight years earlier and speculating where I might have been for all that time.
The girl in the designer clothes was taken straight up to her cell after being processed. I wondered what the deal was with her. The prison staff seemed very wary of her, as if they were handling somebody who was extremely dangerous. She was definitely a person that I didn't want to end up getting on the wrong side of.
The drug mule remained silent for the whole time we were there. She seemed very timid and withdrawn and had a detached look in her eyes, as if she had suffered from such an immense trauma that nothing mattered anymore. I couldn't help but think that prison wasn't the best place for her. They should have at least allowed her some more time to recover in hospital.
Rather than handing us back the clothes that we had arrived in, the guards issued us with bright orange jumpsuits, presumably so that they could have a laugh at our expense. I looked like a giant satsuma. We were then escorted up a flight of stairs to the induction wing, which is where inmates stay on their first night inside. The idea is that it gives them time to get acquainted with prison life before they move onto the main wing.