Chapter 18
UPS AND DOWNS
Well it's the day of my little sister's wedding. I told her that I would have done anything to be there and that I love her with all my heart. She told me not to get down and to try and be happy for her. It was one of the hardest phone calls I've had to make. I just wish I could stop crying. My heart is breaking. I still can't believe I'm missing my little sis's big day.
Diary entry from 29 July 2006
The months went by and I heard nothing about my transfer. Every day I crossed my fingers and hoped that there would be some news in the mail. I had no idea when my reply was likely to arrive, so it was just a matter of playing the waiting game. In the meantime, I was going to have to make the best of things and adapt to life in Topas as well as I could. Now that I felt a little bit more upbeat, I was no longer as stubborn and decided to make an effort to learn as much Spanish as possible. It was difficult at first but the other inmates helped me out and before I knew it, I could put together basic sentences. When you're around Spanish speakers 24/7, you learn their language a lot faster than you would in a classroom, which meant that I could soon speak enough to get by.
The gypsies saw that I was making an effort and became more sympathetic. They stopped giving me the evils on the wing and started helping me out instead. They even gave me a coat when I was cold during the winter. I think they respected the fact that I was trying hard to fit in even though I shouldn't have been there.
The public back home in England were just as supportive. Every other day I got a letter telling me how unfair my trial was or how much everyone was rooting for me. The local papers constantly highlighted my situation and John Bercow bombarded the Spanish government with letters pleading for my freedom. The biggest boost to my case came when the Mirror managed to find Antonio and got him to agree to an interview. He backed up my story one hundred per cent and even offered to sign a document to say that I was innocent.
Antonio was living on the Spanish mainland with his parents when Tom found him. His wife had been so furious when he was arrested that she had filed for a divorce and told their kids that he was dead. He had only spent six years in jail and served two of them in an open prison where he was allowed out for two days a week. It was blindingly obvious that he had grassed somebody up to get a shorter sentence. It was his second time inside for smuggling so why would the authorities have been so lenient to him if he hadn't thrown somebody's name into the mix? He was not only a low-life criminal but also one that dragged everybody else down with him.
'Terry is totally innocent. I can't believe she's in prison for a crime I committed,' he apparently sobbed down the phone during the interview. 'She knew nothing about the drugs. She will be going through hell in prison. She will be like a little bird in a cage full of tigers.'
It was all very well Antonio crying and making out that he was remorseful but at the end of the day, I wouldn't have been in prison in the first place if he hadn't tricked me into going to Brazil with him. I was glad that he was letting the world know that I was being made to suffer for his actions though. It was sure to help the case for my pardon and might encourage Interpol to agree to take me back to Britain.
I couldn't wait to see the story in print and hear the public's take on it. Tom sent me a copy and told me that it would be published in the paper within the next few weeks. Every time I spoke to Mum, I asked her if it had been in yet. Then, after days of sitting on the edge of my seat, I got a letter from the Mirror saying that Antonio had been in touch again. He had retracted his story and claimed that I had been in on the smuggling operation from the start. I couldn't believe the cheek of him. One minute he was bawling his eyes out and the next thing I knew he was trying to make out I was guilty. I felt like punching a hole in the wall.
Luckily Tom remained unconvinced by Antonio's fairy stories and didn't incorporate them into the article. The Mirror eventually pulled the piece though, which was a major disappointment. Antonio had clearly got cold feet about having his interview made public and lied through his teeth so that the paper wouldn't put it out.
The other girls on the wing all rallied round me when they heard what had happened. Andia and her friends were particularly sympathetic and suggested that I started going to the outside exercise area with them to help take my mind off things. This was one of the few parts of the prison where the men and women mixed freely with one another. She told me that an Irish lad called Aidan from the men's wing always went out there and pointed out that he would be a good person for me to get to know, seeing as we hailed from neighbouring countries.
You needed to apply for permission to be allowed out for exercise and I had put off filling out a slip until this point because a lot of sex offenders knocked about out there. Rapists and paedophiles inhabit separate wings in most British prisons but in Spain they are allowed to mingle with the general population and don't seem to get much stick. Sex crimes are a lot less taboo in Spanish nicks. Nonces are frowned upon by the other prisoners but very rarely get attacked, which is in stark contrast to the sex cases in English jails, who aren't even one hundred per cent safe when the guards are there.
'Will I be OK out there?' I asked Andia. 'I've heard that lots of nasty people go out to exercise.'
'You will be with us,' she told me. 'We won't let anything happen to you.'
'OK I'll do it,' I said. 'I'll put an application in this afternoon.'
It took a week for the guards to get back to me and tell me that I was allowed out. To be honest I was almost hoping that they would say no. It was scary enough on the wing and there were only women there. The idea of rapists and kiddie fiddlers milling about the place made me feel sick to my stomach.
The first thing that struck me when I stepped out of the door was how different the exercise area was to the yards in English prisons, which are small pieces of concrete with little room to actually exercise in. This one looked like a school playing field. There was a running track around the outside and a football pitch in the middle, with groups of people stood around chatting on it. Nobody came across as particularly predatory but I couldn't help noticing a few faces that I had seen on the news. I recognised a woman who had made the headlines for a horrendous crime against a little girl. Her and her husband had been abusing their daughter and the woman had thrown acid into the daughter's face to try and prevent her from going to the police. The evil cow was walking round the field with her husband as if they were just your average, carefree couple.
'What are you looking at?' Andia asked me, sensing that I was becoming increasingly agitated.
'It doesn't matter,' I told her. 'Let's go and find this Irish boy.'
I wanted to get away from those two sick people as quickly as I could. I had associated with characters who were on the fringes of criminality before I came to jail but never willingly mixed with anybody who had done the kind of evil things that those two abominations had done. As far as I was concerned, they could no longer even be considered human. They were vile monsters and I was glad that they had ended up in Topas. I just hoped that they were finding it as difficult as I was.
'Look there he is,' said Andia, pointing across the field to a tall, well-built lad, who looked as if he spent all day in the gym.
Aidan was definitely in shape. He could have given Popeye a run for his money and had the kind of twinkle in his eyes that only our friends from across the Irish Sea can have. The only problem was that he was clearly a Catholic; I could tell from the makes of clothes that he was wearing. Irish Catholics refuse to wear brands like Reebok or Lonsdale that incorporate the Union Jack into their logos and tend to avoid clothing made by British companies. How was he going to take to an English Protestant? Would it be a problem for him or had he left all that behind him when he came to Spain?
'Hi I'm Terry, pleased to meet you.'
I was bracing myself for a torrent of sectarian abuse.
'Nice to meet you too,' he grinned. 'I've heard a lot about you.'
&n
bsp; 'All good I hope?' I asked him.
'Of course,' he told me. 'What brings you to a place like this then?'
I didn't want to bore him with my life story so I summarised the events of the last few years in as few words as possible, which must have taken a good fifteen minutes.
'Jeez, it sounds as if you've had quite a time of it.'
'Yeah not half,' I laughed. 'What about you then? What are you in for?'
'Kidnap.'
Wow. I hadn't been expecting anything as serious as that.
'I didn't do it though,' he hastily added. 'The boys in blue fitted me up.'
If we were in England I would have probably thought 'Yeah, right' but given how corrupt the Spanish Old Bill were, he could well have been telling the truth.
'Join the club,' I laughed. 'So are you out here every day?'
'Yeah,' he told me. 'You should come out for a chat more often. You're all right for a Brit, you know.'
I smiled and told him that I would meet him in the same place tomorrow. Over the next few weeks, our friendship quickly progressed into a jailhouse romance. He was quite shy and reserved but had a cheeky side to him, which was very endearing. I should have learnt my lesson from the first two Irish boys, but he seemed quite well rounded to begin with. The first sign that our relationship was going to be problematic came when I asked him what part of the country he was from.
'A place called Tallaght in County Dublin,' he told me. 'It's a good Catholic area. They don't like you Brits round those parts.'
'Why's that then?' I asked him.
'A lot of people support the IRA. I don't blame them either; they've done a lot for our country.'
Oh dear. Now I had been out with UVF, UDA and IRA sympathisers. At least nobody could accuse me of political bias.
'What about you then? Where did you grow up?'
'A little village called Wingrave,' I told him. 'It's not a bad place to live. Nice and quiet. Near to Aylesbury too, where there are plenty of good raves to go to.'
Aidan raised a single eyebrow and gave me a disapproving look.
'You're not into all that shite are you? What do you want to go out polluting your body with drugs for every weekend?'
I should have guessed that somebody who was so into health and fitness would be militantly anti-drugs. I tried to explain to him that I had stopped taking them but he seemed disgusted that I had ever gone near them in the first place. Our lifestyles before we came to prison couldn't have been more different. We were like chalk and cheese. The only thing we had in common was the language that we spoke.
Aidan was obsessed with the gym. He spent every waking moment working out and got incredibly moody when he missed a session, which led me to believe that he was probably using steroids. He had a fiery temper and would often work himself up into a rage for no reason at all. I should have ended things the minute I realised what he was like but felt as if I needed someone there to comfort me when I was down. I even put in for a conjugal visit with him, which turned out to be a very foolish move. It made me feel like a sordid prostitute going to a cheap hotel for sex. I think it might have been OK if he had been somebody who I really loved but he was such a moody character that it was difficult to know how I felt about him. There were times when he could be kind and compassionate and it wasn't as if we were always at each other's throats. On the day of my sister's wedding, I was glad that he was there to act as a shoulder to cry on. It would have been awful going through that alone. Missing out on the most important event of her life had me on the verge of a breakdown.
I phoned Kelly up at eleven o'clock on the morning of the wedding and told her that I would have done anything to be there with her and that I loved her with all my heart. I should have been the chief bridesmaid but yet there I was, reduced to being told what her dress looked like over the phone. All of the other prisoners did their best to cheer me up and even the guards were nice to me but I was still horrendously upset. As it approached 2 p.m., the time the ceremony started, I closed my eyes and pictured Kelly walking down the aisle as all of the guests marvelled at how beautiful she was. I would have given my right arm to see her say 'I do'. Aidan was full of sympathy and did his best to make things as easy as possible. It was at times like this that I was really glad of his company.
After the wedding, I became even more determined to get out as soon as I could. I didn't want to miss out on any more events like that; just the one was bad enough. It had been almost a full year since I had entered the prison and I still hadn't seen the lawyer that Fair Trials had told me they were sorting. I knew they wouldn't let me down but the tension was still killing me.
It was October 2006 by the time my solicitor finally came to see me. She seemed very down to earth and had a sympathetic face, which was a breath of fresh air after being locked up with nothing but hard nuts for so long. Her name was Mari and although she was Spanish, she spoke perfect English.
'It's good to finally meet you,' she told me. 'I must say, your case is a very unusual one. If you had been tried in England, you would never have been convicted but I'm afraid our legal system isn't quite the same as yours. The diary entries that were used in evidence were not translated by official translators. They shouldn't have even been accepted by the court, but seem to have slipped through unnoticed.'
This was news to me. I asked her to translate the prosecution's account of what I had said and was shocked to learn that vast sections of it bore no resemblance to what I had originally written. One of the translations read, 'Right now I'm sitting at the airport, very bored and a bit worried, dreaming about what I'll do with the money. I feel this will be a long fucking night but if everything turns out right, I'm having a party tomorrow.' They had completely reworded what I had written and added a random F-word to make me seem rough and uncouth, as if I was the type of person who would willingly accompany a crackhead on a smuggling trip. I very rarely swear and certainly did not include that word in my diary.
Another entry read, 'Cheer up. This is our last day in this shitty place. The goods did arrive so we can have a party and get stoned.' I'm not in a third-rate gangster film and don't say things like 'the goods did arrive'. I don't use the phrase 'stoned' either. They had twisted things around and added bits to put across a false image of me. Until then, nobody had brought what they had done to my attention. If I had known about all this during the trial then I could have pointed it out to the judge and he might have dismissed the diary entries as evidence.
'Are you going to write to the government and tell them this then?' I asked Mari, hoping that it might be grounds for them to re-open the case.
'That's not how things work here,' she told me. 'If they think that you are criticising the Spanish justice system then your pardon will be less likely to be successful. The best thing you can do is to collect as many supporting letters from influential figures as you can. The more the government sees that people are supporting you, the greater the chance you will have of being released.'
So what she was basically saying was that they can give you an unfair trial in Spain and then penalise you even further when you complain about it being unfair. It sounded ridiculous to me but if I had to keep my mouth shut to get out then I was just going to have to bottle up everything that I wanted to say until I was released. I had a feeling that I still had a fight on my hands, but felt a damn sight better off now that I had got the chance to sit down and discuss my case with someone in the know.
Mari gave me a new lease of life. The fact that she thought I was actually likely to get a pardon changed the way I looked at being inside. Topas was no longer somewhere that I would have to endure for years on end; it was just a momentary stop-off point before I cleared my name and got on with my life.
The following month, I got an even better piece of news. The British Consulate had written to let me know that my transfer to England had been approved. This was it; I was on my way back home. Even if my pardon didn't come to fruition, I was still going to get to spen
d the majority of my sentence in a place where everybody spoke English and I got proper medical attention. Aidan had just been told that he was being transferred back to Ireland too so we would both be out of there before we knew it. Now it was just a matter of sitting tight and waiting for Interpol to sort out the arrangements for my flight.
Mum was ecstatic when I spoke to her on the phone later that day.
'I'll tell you what, it'll save me a fortune on flights,' she joked. 'It means you'll get to see the new arrival too.'
'What new arrival's this then?' I asked her, wondering what the hell she was going on about.
'Kelly's pregnant.'
OK wow. That was unexpected.
Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons Page 24