by David Wilson
“There was a special group on tonight, and the psychologists are still talking to some of the prisoners. We can’t get them all away until the end of the session.”
“Jesus H Christ.” Munro was rapidly heading to the back of the class.
Dabell, who had spent some of his time as an officer in the “system”, as Greenbank liked to call the other hundred and forty prisons in the country, knew that while this was an accurate summary of why the roll check had not been completed, it was lame and unprofessional. Sensing his unease, Munro cooled off a little.
“Which wing?” asked Munro.
“D,” replied Dabell.
Munro consulted the internal directory, and picked up the telephone. As he dialled he told Dabell to start logging the numbers phoned in from the rest of the prison against the required wing totals that had been inked onto a whiteboard that had been fixed to the command suite wall, along with maps and photographs of the internal layout of the prison.
“Isn’t D the wing Dr Crowther works on?” Munro asked of one the prison support grades (PSG) who had arrived to lend a hand. Too frightened to speak, a “yes” was nodded in the governor’s direction.
Down on D wing, Kate Crowther had just finished her special therapy group with eight of the prisoners, and emerged from the counselling room, smiling and not in the least self-conscious of her silky appearance. She looked incongruously beautiful in what was unashamedly an ugly, male environment. She was the type of woman who didn’t give a second thought about her appearance, which in some eyes made her all the more attractive. She was a bustler, always in a hurry, eager to make connections, ambitious. There were those who would say this gave her little time to reflect, to apply caution. Sometimes emotion outran her fine intellect. As she stepped through the door she encountered a scene of Dickensian activity amongst the prison staff. Everywhere she looked they were running and counting and arguing with prisoners who wanted to know why they were being banged up early. “Get behind your doors,” was the general cry, rising to, “Get the fuck behind your doors,” shouted in any and every direction. Fat chance. Some refused to go, and others said that they were refusing to go, but were actually slowly moving towards their cells, in between pouring drinks of tea, and borrowing newspapers, or radios, or CD players, or just swapping stories about life, the universe and EastEnders.
Who could blame them for dragging out their last few minutes before bang-up? Locked up for the night, there was nothing to do except read and think about the mistakes which had led to prison. For a prisoner, every day in a cell was like being in suspended animation, but night held its own special terrors. Those were the skunk hours, when the imagination ran riot and sometimes you felt you were being eaten alive from the inside.
“What’s up?” she asked Charlie Robinson, the wing senior officer, touching his arm and trying to put him at ease.
“Hole in the fence; it’s a bloody hole in the fence,” he replied, breathless and red in the face.
Kate knew this was serious, and that Charlie shouldn’t be broadcasting the information to all and sundry. She was about to ask if she could do anything to help, when the senior officer handed her his mobile.
“Yes, hello, Dr Crowther – can I help?”
“Get your therapy group finished now, that’s an order. Give the senior officer back his phone and please do not leave the prison without seeing me.”
Kate didn’t need to ask to whom she was speaking. Munro’s voice was already familiar, with its impatience and barely suppressed anger, like a steaming volcano. She almost pitied Charlie as she handed him the phone because she knew he found it difficult to keep control, and anyway he was only twelve months from retiring. The only staff who seemed to keep D wing in order were Chris Sandel and Will Brock – two of the new, younger officers. They had been dubbed “super screws” by the inmates. They were a couple of jokers, a right comedy duo, thought Kate, but one of them, Will Brock, had an unnerving Charles Manson stare which he employed when something pissed him off, which seemed to be happening more often recently. It was a shadow, like nightfall, which drained his face of colour, imperceptible to most, but Kate saw it. They were on leave for a week – on an outward bound course in Wales, due back any day.
“Sixty – yes sir, sixty,” said Robinson on the phone to Munro.
“Are you certain?” Munro’s voice was so loud Kate could hear every word.
“I think so.”
“You think so isn’t good enough. You have five more minutes Mr Robinson, check again and be certain that there are sixty prisoners on your wing,” said Munro.
Kate was beginning to feel guilty. She had probably overrun her special group, but it was going so well and the men were opening up. She should try and convince Munro that therapy wasn’t just about being nice to prisoners, but about making them accept responsibility for their actions and changing their behaviour. She was closer to understanding what drove some of these men to kill, and thinking about how to apply these insights when she worked with the police again as an offender profiler.
Kate left the wing office to see if she could catch sight of Bobby Lomas before he was banged up. She’d not been able to talk to him before starting the special group, and wanted to let him know that she’d changed the time of their next session, which had been scheduled for the following day, and that she wasn’t avoiding him. She knew there were whispers about her and Lomas, but there always was talk in prison about young female psychologists and prisoners, and over the years she’d learned to cope by ignoring any rumours. The process of therapy involved getting close to your subject, how else was anything going to be achieved? Women were vulnerable though in the pumped-up, cartoon-male world of prison, especially clever women like Kate, but she had managed to survive without becoming “one of the boys”. But Lomas presented a particular challenge. There was something other-worldly about him, like a hawk inhabiting a high mountain. His laugh was intense but brittle, as if he was hiding something broken that he was desperate to repair. Kate was determined to find out what made him tick; the next crucial stage in her career depended upon it.
Kate wondered if she could get Munro to meet Lomas, who, more than any other prisoner, was describing his crimes in ways that she knew were going to be useful in future investigations into serial murder. He was the best example of someone who was changing and showing remorse, and no way could that have been achieved in the brutal prison dispersal system. Wooldridge had agreed, and he’d more or less adopted Lomas as his “head boy”. Wooldridge had found the phrase amusing.
Kate searched and searched, but Lomas was nowhere to be found.
*
The command suite was now the centre of the prison’s universe, and Munro was its master. No one could leave or enter the prison, no one so much as breathed without his permission. That’s how he liked it. However, in a major incident of this kind, Munro was the “silver commander”, and an area manager in Prison Service Headquarters at Cleland House in London was the “gold commander” who outranked him.
Munro was explaining to the gold commander – his area manager, Margery Hardy – what he knew of the situation so far, and of his efforts to pull in an accurate roll. Their conversation was brief, and he promised to call again within ten minutes. He made a note in his log of the call and asked to be informed when ten minutes had elapsed. All around him the staff were writing numbers on boards, answering calls, and trying to keep track of the various personnel who were still in the jail. A local police liaison officer had been allowed into the prison to monitor events and gather intelligence. It was unspoken but clear that if D wing brought in their roll – the magic sixty – then no one had escaped and they could all go home. Less than sixty and the night would go on and on, and soon the place would be swarming with more police and the media. The police and media presence would increase exponentially depending on who had escaped and how serious were their crimes.
“You’re certain?” said Charlie Robinson, looking for reassura
nce as much as an answer.
“Have you checked every cell and made sure no one has doubled up or stuffed a pillow in their bed?”
When no solace was forthcoming, Robinson considered the ramifications and tried to guess at the repercussions that would follow. It was beyond him. He walked in a daze into the wing office and dialled the command suite extension.
“You’re kidding me. Who?” Munro put down the receiver and paused to gather his thoughts. Now the shit would hit the fan.
Munro swivelled in his chair, and spoke to the expectant faces: “Fifty-nine, and it’s Bobby Lomas. The bastard’s escaped. Get hold of Dr Crowther.”
Chapter Three
Inside, alone, fear takes over, rules are broken. There’s no restraint, shadows are conversations, fantasies emerge, confrontational, accusatory, irreparable.
Sharon Tate is swinging from a rope, blood pooling on the floor around her toes, spilling from wounds so deep he can slide a finger into the incisions in her chest, feel the soft lacerated tissue, torn membranes where the heart and lungs and liver were once whole. A sweet and pure woman. She’s modest, her underwear covering her nakedness but it’s stained too brightly, there’s a shocking leakage. A sudden trip and endless fall: helter-skelter.
He quickly climbs up onto the bed and grasps her tightly to halt the descent, her body wet and slippery, hot wax in his arms. She’s a sheer heft of pregnant womanhood, as heavy as the dread that is filling his insides. The way things have turned out. I’m coming down fast but don’t let me break you. “I’m already dead,” pleaded her fleeing friend Abigail Folger as Krenwinkel knifed her over and over, making sure the job was done. Jay Sebring is tied to the other end of the rope, he’s been shot and stabbed seven times, he’s dead, so he cuts the nylon rope, no easy task and lays Sharon gently on the bed, rolls her onto her back, straightens her legs and arms and covers her eyes with a sheet, hiding his guilt. She can’t feel pain now or fear for her life or see the word “pig” written in her own blood.
They will come for him the two guys, he’s seen that stare on YouTube, it’s unmistakable, he’s done his research, and he knows they know. He brings out a blade, taped to his groin, passed mouth to mouth to mouth from one end of town to the prison and he begins to cut his arm, painstaking striations, and watches the blood weal up, the pain a momentary release.
The bang-up was unexpected, Charlie Robinson hollering like that, all red-faced, it had him almost swallowing his stomach and he startled like a panicked rat scurrying back to his cage.
This is the end. Since those two fuckers turned up, Brock and Sandel, from nowhere, smooth operators. Bobby Lomas had changed, he could tell. He turned off the light and there were shadows under the door, running this way and that. A hole in the bloody fence, were they escaping to the outside or coming inside? His heart was pounding. Sharon’s body is cold, and her photos are from 1969, but Bobby Lomas had given him a whole new world of heat, of feeling. He wanted to hurt him now because lately he was never there, always with someone else.
He cut into his arm, wanting to reshape it into a word, another language, an “O” hollowed out like a full moon, down to the bone but it wouldn’t kill him like a stab into the aorta. And he wanted to die. He pulled up his shirt and cut from his pubis to his sternum, the glistening razor slipping from his hand, so he dug deep, flaying with his fingernails, trying to draw the skin from each side of his ribcage and he could imagine the pumping organs throbbing, brazen with nakedness, as hot as the flush of his deep self-loathing. He held onto Sharon, the mother ship, promising to cover her up, erase the images of decades of violation, the universe gloating over her semi-nakedness, the molten core of his sin. If he was going to make amends, he would have to do it now.
Chapter Four
Munro’s mind raced almost as much as his car’s engine as he drove back to the prison from his room in The White Hart. He’d had a restless night. He’d wanted to sleep at the prison, but thought better of it (what would the staff think?), and anyway he hadn’t left Greenbank until the early hours. Even the wino he’d seen a few times outside the hotel would have been kipping under a bush or snoring in the cricket pavilion on the green at that time of night. By then the hole in the fence had been repaired, he’d written a press release and at the insistence of the prison service’s press office, had agreed to address the media later in the morning. Munro didn’t like speaking to the media, but with someone as prominent as Lomas on the loose, people needed to be reassured. He thought about that word for a moment – “reassured”. How the fuck was he going to reassure the public when the Varsity Blue had managed to escape from jail? Advise them not to wear college scarves? Stop students going to lectures? The police liaison officer had been helpful, and Munro was informed that the last girl Lomas tried to attack was now under police protection. He also knew that the National Crime Squad (NCS) was sending a detective inspector to start an investigation into the escape.
He’d managed to have a quick word with Kate Crowther before he left the prison. She swore blind that she was not involved with Lomas except as a professional counsellor and that she had not helped him escape. She blushed a little with what he assumed was exasperation that he’d even asked the question, but perhaps there was a degree of bad conscience. He didn’t pursue it – he was too tired, and he knew he’d regret saying what he really wanted to say. He did share with the police liaison officer the rumours about Kate’s relationship with Lomas. Perhaps could be something going on there, and she wouldn’t be the first psychologist to go native with a prisoner. Psychopaths have a particularly seducing streak that can charm even the most reluctant psychologist, and Lomas was one of the creepiest psychopaths he’d come across. Munro had agreed to meet Kate later in the day with the investigating officer from NCS to see what light Kate could shed on Lomas’ state of mind. Munro was also keen to find out more about her research project. He knew it was about serial killer motivation, and that it was government funded, but what was her motivation? What was she getting out of it?
As he pulled into a potholed, single-track road that served as the prison’s drive, he caught a glimpse of the TV cameras setting up outside the gate lodge. “They’re early,” he mumbled, checking his watch; it was 6.30 a.m. He parked his car in an empty bay, grateful that he had made the works department remove the signs that identified parking spaces by rank and role. “What better way to let a terrorist know who is in or out of the prison,” he had explained.
It was also a good way of remaining anonymous when the media was about, as he could pass himself off as another member of staff. There were plenty of staff about. He saw Jim Dabell, who had struggled to get in the prison’s roll the night before, Dave Cotterrill, who acted as security officer for the prison, and the “two Jacks”: Jack Wright, the corpulent chairman of Greenbank’s branch of the Prison Officer’s Association and Jack Cook the rather more successful, and certainly slimmer, passive drug dog handler. He half-recognized one or two others, but mostly it was discipline staff at this time of the morning, one or two civilian teachers, and some of the works staff whose job it was to keep the prison operations functioning. He caught sight of John Johnsson, it was the earliest he’d seen his deputy appear in the prison.
He rang the gate lodge bell, installed when the prison had been opened in 1963, and was waiting for the heavy wooden door to be unlocked when he heard his name being called.
“Munro, Munro my friend, sorry to hear about your problems. Bloody hell, a runner. You must be feeling awful, and so soon after taking over. That Bobby Lomas, a tricky character at the best of times. I kept my eye on him.”
It was Wooldridge, offering an outstretched hand, and gesturing to the cameras.
“They got in touch last night, and sent a car all the way to Dorset to pick me up. They’ve promised to take me back as soon as the interview is finished. I could hardly refuse. I was certain you’d understand.”
“Of course, Wooldridge,” replied Munro, calculating the fee that
Wooldridge would pocket out of this mess. It would save him a grilling by the TV cameras and Wooldridge would cop the flak if it went tits up. It was Wooldridge’s regime that was in the spotlight. Munro could stay in the shadows. But all of a sudden:
“Governor, Governor Munro?” asked the reporter unable to believe his luck. “A word if you will. Bobby Lomas, assess in a sentence the threat to society of this evil maniac.”
The gatekeeper came to Munro’s rescue and Munro stepped inside the prison, leaving the reporter and Wooldridge standing vacantly by the prison’s wall. The interview could wait, but Munro asked the gatekeeper to have someone bring a TV up to his office so that he could catch what Wooldridge said on the morning news. Munro handed over his key tally – number 1 – and received a set of keys in return. These he attached by a steel chain to his belt, and then he thrust the keys into his pocket. The gatekeeper noted the time of the handover in his ledger and Munro was let out of the other side of the gate lodge and into the main body of the prison.
Beyond the walls – on the “inside” – the prison gardens were an oasis of flowers and shrubs which scented the walk from the gate lodge to the flat, grey, anonymous buildings that served as the prison.
Munro had no time to linger, and like all governors he walked briskly – it was a defence mechanism learned by anyone who wanted to survive in the prison service. Governors were required to do a daily round of their prison, and if the prison was large and spread over a wide area, like Greenbank which covered more than ten acres, a round could take all day. There was another reason for speed: to avoid being collared by prisoners, every one of which wanted a piece of him, a complaint here, a demonstration of positive progress there, some juicy prison gossip in exchange for preferment. Munro found the atmosphere at Greenbank less threatening than other prisons, unless everyone was very good at hiding it, he couldn’t be sure. However, he was yet to be given the eye that suggested his legs might get broken sometime, in a dark alley somewhere, or his house might mysteriously catch fire.