His cigarette butt from his ashtray, along with his two pairs of shoes had now been taken to the laboratory for forensic examination.
Under intense interrogation, and knowing that the results of the forensic tests would prove a match, he admitted to the crime.
The detective cautioned him and read him his rights as he was taken to a holding cell.
The cell was little more than a windowless metal box, where up to twelve inmates can he held on one of the three steel benches bolted to the wall. An ancient sink and toilet were at the far end of the cell. They were rusty and discoloured. The smell from the toilet was overpowering.
On the sound of jangling keys, an officer opened the door, holding a pair of overalls.
‘All right, strip,’ he shouted as he threw the thin white overalls to John.
The officer was wearing a pair of thin plastic disposable gloves that John associated with an internal examination of his arse.
He took off his clothes, passing them item by item to the waiting officer whose gloved hands squeezed and shook every inch of the fabric before tossing them into a box by the door.
‘Alright, now stand up,’ the officer instructed, as he went through the checklist.
John stood naked facing him, as the officer looked him up and down.
‘Lift up your equipment then turn around, bend over, and spread your cheeks.
He flinched as the officer’s finger probed around the inside of his arse.
‘Now stand up, turn around and open your mouth,’ the officer ordered. With a small silver torch, he checked his mouth and nostrils. ‘Put the suit on, lad, and sit there,’ he said, pointing to the metal bench.
Another officer walked into the cell and whispered something in his colleague’s ear.
He was transferred to a cell to be held overnight before the next days court hearing. An officer brought him a sandwich and an apple on an airline style plastic tray containing a plastic beaker of weak tea. He didn’t eat or drink as he sat on the side of a hard bed, holding his face cupped in his hands.
He had asked the officer for a pen and a piece of paper. He wanted to write a letter of apology and regret to Jennifer. There was a long pause before the familiar jangling of keys opened the cell door. The officer threw four pieces of paper and a pencil on his bed. ‘If you’re going to stab yourself with the fucking pencil, do me a favour, and wait till my shift is over in ten minutes,’ he said, leaving the cell and locking the door.
The case was heard at Preston Crown Court ten days later. No jury were required, due to his guilty plea. The spectator’s gallery was full with newspaper reporters and the general public. A small group of regular churchgoers from Fleetwood sat on the back row. Jennifer didn’t attend.
The hearing was quick. It took the judge five minutes to deliver his verdict and on his summation he stated, ‘You were given the opportunity and trust of entering back into society after a five-year spree of crime. You have failed the authorities, your sister and yourself with your latest killing of an innocent and respected pillar of society. I consider you to be an extremely dangerous man who plausibly gains trust from others. I am sending you to the only place where you can be of no danger to the public. You will serve a further sentence of twelve years without an appeal or parole. Take him down.’ John Bell lowered his head as he was escorted from the dock.
The next morning, he was transported to Armley tight security prison in Leeds.
At the end of his two hour journey, he peered out of the small window of the security van and saw the prison loom ahead. Snow had started to fall on what appeared to be a medieval fortress of blackened stone structures.
The van drove through the gates and into the prison yard. The driver shouted out of the window to a guard who opened the gates to the main door.
He was escorted out of the van by two guards who led him through a side door. John looked up at the tall building, charred with decades of grime. The building is segregated from the main yard by both distance and its own razor-wired fence enclosing the main gate.
‘You’ve been inside before, Bell, so you know the drill,’ the officer said sternly. ‘Go through that door and take a shower, then pick up your prison issue and wait there and proceed next door for intake processing,’ he said, pushing him through the door.
‘Stop right there, Bell… strip and shower,’ another screw shouted.
He could hear bedlam and shouts coming from the locked cells. A couple of screws opened the row of cells as the inmates spill out and assemble in front of a long steel table set up against the wall adjacent to the showers.
Two screws pull out boxes from underneath and place them on the table. They made piles of grey blankets, towels, sheets, soap bars and small bottles of hair shampoo to each separate pile with a tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush dropped into the plastic mugs.
He was suddenly standing in a puddle of piss as the inmates stripped and joined him in the row of showers before collecting the sheets and towels from the table. The showers produced only lukewarm water, but given the suffocating heat of the block, he was grateful for it.
A senior screw with a shaved head and grey stubble stood at the end of the table with a clipboard, ticking off the inmate numbers as they collected their rations.
Freshly showered and deloused by the disinfectant shampoo he had been ordered to use, he was marched through a metal door and told to stand by a small desk as a pock marked faced screw took his photo-I D and fingerprints.
‘Right, Bell, you know the rules, no stealing, no drug taking, no drug selling, no fucking and no sucking. If you must get some cock action, let the other guy suck you,’ the screw said sternly, as he consulted his clipboard with obvious distaste. Looking up he glared again at John and said, ‘Stick your dick up the arse of one of those HIV homos and get Aids – which you will – and you’ll spend your time in the prison hospital wing with all the other dying faggots and cock suckers, so its up to you, Bell.’
Bell knew the form, he was aware that the prison housed a large majority of homosexuals and prostitutes and was also aware that the prison had a combination HIV and hepatitis ‘C’ infection rate of sixty percent. He had heard from the guys in Strangeways that this place had a high HIV rate and was a far harder place to do your bird. The intake processing had certainly been a more punishing ordeal than he had experienced when he first entered his other two penal institutions.
He was taken back to the metal table to collect his pile of belongings for his cell. Being assigned to cell 58 on the upper floor, he was marched along the corridor to the chanting of inmates peering through their door as he entered his cell in the centre of the landing.
He put his pile on the vacant lower bunk. Nick Bradshaw had taken the top bunk, but he was in the exercise yard with most of the others.
He looked around his bleak eight by six foot cell with a twelve-foot high ceiling containing a fluorescent tube protected by a wire mesh screen. An integrated stainless-steel toilet and sink unit, cinder block walls stained brown and yellow from decades of cigarette smoke and lots of graffiti.
It was worse that the old wings in Strangeways before he was transferred to the newly-built wing and the open prison in Berkshire had been like a five-star hotel in comparison. The beds were jutting out three feet from the wall; only one man at a time could comfortably stand up.
He had never been subject to prison overcrowding in Stangeways, but this place was full to capacity.
They had taken his wallet and belt but he had been allowed to keep his wristwatch. He lay on his bed studying the patterns of mould and wall sweat on the ceiling beyond the rusted springs on the top bunk.
It was a category ‘A’ wing, as were his others. Child molesters, paedophiles, rapists and murderers, from as young as 22 up to 90.
He went to his open door to look at the commotion he heard from the corridor. A group of screws raced past as two others had pinned down a guy during a psychotic rage. Other inmates banged their metal cu
ps on their walls, adding to the already din.
Bell didn’t sleep that night. He lay awake listening to the moans, groans, crying and occasional screams from his surrounding neighbours, remembering the many nights he had heard the same nightly calls throughout his previous prison term.
He thought of the quietness of his bedroom next to Jennifer’s, listening to the lashing of the sea on those windy nights, the white crisp linen sheets and the seagulls diving low over his garden.
Nick Bradshaw, his cellmate had arrived there five years ago. He was a child molester and had been tried and convicted for raping his son, starting when the child was 3 years old and continuing until the boy was 14, when he drowned him in the bath.
He was a strange guy. He would lie on the floor and make animal sounds through the six-inch gap under the door.
Some of the inmates were barely in their teens and given extra protection by the screws when they showered, as they listened to the avalanche of shouts, hoots and whistles cascading down on them from the guys peering over the iron fence. Nick Bradshaw always made sure he had the best view of the young lads.
Bell went to the food hall, the noise was overpowering. He stood in line to collect his breakfast and carried it back to his cell, avoiding a scuffle which had broken out along the corridor.
The philosophy of most of the prison officers is that inmates should work out their disputes among themselves where the screws wouldn’t need to get involved.
Fights between inmates were constant, as the overcrowding caused tension in and out of the cells. The population was double the occupancy, often housing three to a cell designed for two, which always resulted in an outbreak of unpleasantness.
Bell didn’t go far from his cell, apart from the mandatory one hour exercise in the yard, spending most of the day reading in the small room at the end of the corridor while he waited for news of a work detail.
Nick Bradshaw was hanging over the rails looking down at the guys in the shower block as Bell sat hunched over his breakfast tray. He walks back into the cell, takes Bell’s banana off his tray and squats on the toilet in front of him, squeezing and grunting like he’s in labour. The stench is overpowering in the sweltering heat of the wing.
Bell goes over to the small window, looking at a few snowflakes fluttering in the wind as Bradshaw continues his arduous labours on the toilet. Once he had finished, his washing routine was to hang his head inside the small stainless steel basin, wipes his hands on his huge skinned head, then dries them on his long, dark goatee beard.
Bell had palled up with the guy in the next cell, number 60. He was known on the wing as ‘Big Bear’ due to his enormous size and hair covered body. He came over as a quiet and harmless sort of bloke, keeping himself to himself. He’d been held indefinitely, pending investigation for assault, rape and extortion. Not the type of neighbour you would choose but far safer than most of the others on the wing.
Bell laid on his bunk, looking through the open door to the corridor, listening to the usual screaming, laughing and occasional sobbing from the other cells as Nick Bradshaw mutters something in his sleep from the top bunk.
While the others were at work detail, Bell and Big Bear would amble around the exercise yard. It was normally the quietest place to be. It was cold and the dirt would swirl around their feet as they walked around the enclosed area, a few metal benches scattered around the sides of the eighty-foot wall topped with twisted barbed wire.
Big Bear wouldn’t need an excuse to remove his shirt to proudly display his variety of tattoos extending from his wrists to his shoulders and the massive eagle covering his entire back. A piece of string secured his ponytail as he walked around in the freezing cold weather.
He’d only been back in his cell for half an hour, when the screws walked along the corridor closing and locking all the cell doors.
Bradshaw laid flat on the floor of the cell, barking and screaming under the door. He is quickly joined by a dozens of other inmates returning the sounds.
Bell lay on his bed with the palms of his hands over his ears to muffle the sounds until animal sounds, clanging, pounding and screaming subside to a normal and tolerating level.
He had not experienced this type of noise or these types of inmates in all his years of his time in Strangeways. He had been segregated with an older set of lifers, where here he had been thrown onto a wing of any ages and any crime, due to overcrowding.
Drugs, violence, sex and gang warfare were rife here. The screws turned a blind eye to most it, letting them sort out their own differences and take sex from whoever they fancied. The young skinheads were the most vulnerable.
It’s the usual din which wakes Bell. The inmates were banging on the cells, wanting to be let out as the jangle of keys could be heard getting closer as the screws opened the cells one-by-one, the inmates spilling out onto the corridor, making their way to the food hall.
They are given twenty minutes to pick up their breakfast trays and return to the cells. Towels, soap and toilet paper had been stolen form Bell’s and Bradshaw’s cell when they returned. ‘Bastard mother fuckers,’ Bradshaw shouted, banging his fist on the stained wall. The towels and soap were no big deal, but they were only issued with two rolls of toilet paper per cell per week, with no exceptions. The streaks of hard shit on the walls proved it wasn’t the first time Bradshaw had been without toilet paper.
Across the corridor in cell 61, Lester the molester starts screaming and banging his head on his cell wall. Two screws and a nervous looking male nurse arrive and carried him off, his feet dragging on the steel staircase, still screaming as they pull him along.
Big Bear shared his cell with a kid of 19, but he looked 12, so thin his ribs poked out through his bony chest. His name was Robbie Appleton, but Big Bear called him ‘little bitch’ as he fucked him regularly as soon as light were out.
Bell was washing his socks and shorts in the sink while Bradshaw sits on the pan tearing pages out of a hardback library book he had nicked, to wipe his arse.
‘Who needs fucking shit paper?’ Bradshaw says, bending forward groaning.
Two long-term inmates and a screw wheeled a trolley along the cells, opening two at a time to replace bed sheets and towels, all bleached and ironed.
As the inmates threw their dirty sheets in the trolley, two prisoners were standing naked outside their cell as two screws ransacked the cell after finding some illegal substance behind the toilet bowl. Towels, sheets, clothes and furniture were being thrown through the door onto the corridor. The screws came out to the waiting occupants lined-up outside the cell, naked. Bell and the others watched over the railing as the screws ordered them to bend and spread their cheeks while a screw inserted a gloved finger up their arse, determined to find more contraband.
More inmates gathered along the corridor as they chanted and shouted at the screws while they watched the little drama.
They all go back into their cells and the screws walk along locking the doors as the food cart rumbles down the corridor, supervised by the meal porter.
The cart moves from cell to cell as trays are shoved through the slots. Bell’s slot opens and a tray comes sliding through. Cold ham and salad with a plastic container of chocolate sponge.
After fifteen minutes, he was ordered to push the empty tray back through the slot, empty or not.
The cell doors are open again. The screws seem to open and close the cells whenever they feel like it, not only when a disturbance arises as they had in Strangeways.
Bell’s door is unlocked as he watched Lester the molester trying to drag a new arrival into his cell.
‘Get your sweet fucking arse in here, you cum sucker,’ he shouts, as he pulls the young skinhead into his cell. The screws do not respond to the lad’s cries.
Bell laid on his bed with wet pieces of paper over his eyes to shield the glare from the fluorescent light on the ceiling and small knots of wet toilet paper in his ears to muffle the sound of the new young lads cries and moan
s as Lester violently fucked him, encouraged by the chanting of the group who had gathered at the open door to watch.
Bell was drifting off to sleep when his cell door opens.
‘Shower time, you two,’ the screw at the door shouts, ‘you know the fucking drill.’ He opened four cells at a time where you had to leave fully dressed and holding only your towel and soap.
Bell and Bradshaw join the other six and head for the shower stalls at the end of the corridor on the lower floor. There is a metal bench bolted to the floor outside the showers for their clothes and towels. Bell quickly stripped and stepped into the stall. Peter Forester took the next stall, a good looking 26-year-old who had got twelve years for murdering a punter while he worked as an escort and prostitute.
Bell gazed in disbelief at the tattoo on the lower part of his back with the words, ‘Put it here’ and a tattooed pointed arrow went straight down to the crack of his arse. Forester rubs soap between the cheeks of his arse, looking over his shoulder at Bell, his eyes searching his body and remained stationary as they reached the sight of Bell’s cock.
After his shower, Bell and Big Bear walked around the exercise yard, unescorted. The yard was as big as a football field, a huge area of crumbling asphalt but a welcome change from his claustrophobic cell and stinking cellmate.
The walls were higher than those at Strangeways, but with the same dual razor wire twisted around the top. Surveillance cameras were mounted on top of the walls twenty feet apart, the screens viewed constantly by screws in the security room.
Big Bear showed Bell two blind spots which the cameras couldn’t reach. These isolated areas were used for drug deals, gang rape or beatings.
Bell looked up to the sky, thinking of the esplanade walks he would take after a meal with Jennifer, then suddenly being placed to walk around a limited area with thieves, murderers and rapists, where he regarded those types as purely troublesome in his years in Strangeways. Now he sees them as tribal savages in the only true and stable home they had ever known. A home which many would return to again and again.
Inseparable Bond Page 24