The Rules of Restraint

by David Wilson

  He had to make it before dark or it would never happen, visibility was the key, and access, otherwise it was a needle in a haystack and too much to cover. It needed to be wide open, exposed, allowed to run free across the flat of the land. It could be done out here in the countryside with its depressed population and habit of solitude. In the city there were nooks and crannies and hiding places, too many crossed wires and mixed signals, too much complexity.

  A phone call was logged and it led, with alarming efficiency, to an address. It was the only coordinate, a map reference without fear or favour, or substance, but it was good enough. The art was in the imagination, that’s what he was paid for. He was the driver. The three-litre V-6 engine hummed across counties, traversing unpoliced boundaries. He came off at the A37 to Yeovil, towards Dorchester, then a right turn, far from the madding crowd, the restorative sea air just a rumour.

  It was an hour before nightfall by his calculations, a window of opportunity. The town was conventional, a hub of commerce, ribbons of residential, one new-build estate, one pocket of ex-council, larger houses on the outside. He studied the traffic flow on sat nav, major and minor routes, highways and byways, possibilities and probabilities, no certainties. He parked in the high street by the pub; there were not many people about. He registered faces, divined occupations, surmised status. These were simple patterns. There was no one who gave him a green light.

  He drove to the ex-council estate, the blue pinpoint merging. He knocked on the front door, politeness always the best approach. No answer, the door was locked. It was an easy break-in, through the hall and into the lounge, neighbours none the wiser. There were three photographs on the mantelpiece, he studied them and took them out of their frames.

  Back outside he purred the Jaguar S-Type slowly on its way, its dark green paintwork not standing out as it passed the small neat front lawns.

  Intuition took him towards out-of-town and a last lingering perspective, following the angle of the sun. He didn’t call it guesswork. He had a face, a name, and an inkling of intelligence concerning mobility. Hard times call for desperate measures that narrow the field.

  At a junction, he stopped to allow a mother pushing a pram to cross the road. She was holding the hand of a small child who was holding onto a soft toy that was ragged and frayed. Left or right? The bigger houses were nearer the sea with their clear blue sky views. A dominant well-being. He slowed for a cyclist coming round a corner along the narrowing high banked road. She forced herself into the hedge while he crawled almost to a halt and got a good look at her, a full sighting as she stared at him, the car an unfamiliar presence, a tourist perhaps, lost, on the lookout. He moved off at pace, working quickly. This was going to be tight.

  He powered on his iPod connected to the car speakers, Rage Against the Machine, full-bodied, adrenaline-crazed, Killing in the Name, gangsta rap volume, music to his ears. He turned the car around in a lay-by and drove back towards the town. The cyclist was ahead of him, he accelerated, his left bumper glancing against the rear wheel of the bicycle and it cartwheeled behind him in a tangle of limbs and spokes. She was in the middle of the road, the bicycle several feet away, twisted. He slammed the car into reverse, the judder of her body under his wheels depressing the suspension front and back, the resistance minimal as flesh collapsed into bone.

  Now you do what they told you.

  He exited the car and considered the spillage. The car was barely marked. He searched in the gore for a distinguishing feature, a take-home. Rubber gloving his hands, he pulled hard at her wedding ring, dislocating the finger joint. On its inner surface he saw her name engraved: Penny.

  There is no joy, there is no despair. He slipped the ring into his pocket, returned to the car. He turned up the volume to drown out the screaming in his ears.

  Motherfucker.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  That evening, the prisoners – or “residents” as they were described by some of the therapists at Greenbank – were slowly making their way towards the M1 and back to the wings. Most had been attending a psychodrama class in one of the old workshops, and there was some laughter about what had been said and done in the session. Others were returning from the gym, and were carrying weights, gloves and belts, their pecs puffed out just in case anyone was interested. A few were at evening education classes, and Greenbank prided itself on the number of courses available to prisoners. Even though the education department taught everything from basic literacy and numeracy to degree-level maths and computing, like most prisons which housed long-termers it was the degree work that attracted most interest, and tonight visiting tutors from the Open University (OU) had been taking a class. It was a class in criminology, and the OU tutors admitted they learned more from these sessions than the prisoners.

  As they walked back to their wings, anxiety levels seemed to have dissipated but there were some serious faces amongst the prisoners. The psychodrama class had a habit of getting under their skin, revealing personal histories and reminding the prisoners of the lies they told themselves, the damage they had done to others. Kate described these psychodrama sessions as “therapy by stealth”. The prisoners would relax into a role only for painful memories hidden deep within their psyche to overflow, exposing the fragility of their carefully constructed identities.

  Psychodrama wasn’t for the faint-hearted, and many of the prisoners found it harder to complete a psychodrama course than to survive in the “system”. In a conventional prison they could hide behind an image of themselves that they had meticulously fashioned, or which had been created for them by the media. At Greenbank things were different; they were being asked to be honest.

  Mazurski was lost in his thoughts and contemplating what had happened in the session. He was of average height with shoulder-length corn-coloured hair that was thinning on top. He had grown a full beard in an attempt to give himself a benevolent soothsayer look, someone who, in his fantasy world, might be approached for spiritual healing. Reflection was the basis of his personality, and it had taken him nearly twelve months to say anything at all on his group. But tonight the class had been hard. He had opened up. He hated talking about his childhood.

  The therapist made him lie on the floor of the class, face down, not saying a word. “Listen,” she had said. “And tell us what you hear.” Perhaps the trigger had been the simple act of lying down. He didn’t know why, but for the first time he heard the true voice of his father.

  So now he was walking back to the wing in a daze, worrying that he had allowed everyone to hear too much about the sordid past he called his “childhood”, and which, until this evening, he’d kept a secret.

  His father would come back from the pub and make him lie still as he pushed himself deep into his aching body. Mazurski would lie there until his father was done; he was a human toilet. Sometimes the pain was so great that he couldn’t walk, and he’d have to stay off school. He still needed medication for the internal damage that had been caused.

  His mother knew of course, but she was either powerless to stand up for him or she preferred that he got abused instead of her. He never could work her out. “He’s just a poorly boy,” she’d tell the teachers or nosy neighbours.

  The therapist had called tonight’s session a “breakthrough” but Mazurski wasn’t so sure. How would his parents react? They still visited him, safe in the knowledge that their past was undiscovered, even after all the press interest that had accompanied his arrest. There had been muck-raking, and cheque books, and interfering neighbours but they hadn’t even come close to knowing the secrets that they had all locked away. In time Mazurski’s parents were considered victims too, pitied for what they had to endure, and seen as all the more saintly for still being prepared to visit the son that had gone bad.

  Mazurski’s problem was that he thought his childhood horror was normal, that he was not alone in his misery. In his mind he was one of many children who were suffering, their innocence torn to shreds, crying and sobbing all
over the world, a great wail of despair the soundtrack to his every waking moment. Children needed to be protected, and if mothers and fathers couldn’t provide protection, then he was going to do it. Hadn’t Jesus said “suffer the little children to come unto me”? Mazurski didn’t think he was Jesus – “I’m not stupid,” he’d remind the staff if they mistook his silence for ignorance, but then Jesus didn’t turn up when children were harmed. He hadn’t been saved, and it was still going on, everywhere. He saw cruelty against children every day: he read about it in the newspapers, online, and watched it on TV. It was easy to blame paedophiles and demand that they be brought to justice, but no one bothered to mention that it was the nice mums and dads who abused most kids. Stranger danger, that’s a laugh thought Mazurski – name and shame the mums and dads. Let the little children come unto me – John Mazurski, “The Playground Man”.

  He heard the first voices when he was seventeen. He’d resisted at first, but the whispering grew louder and louder. For days Mazurski would watch small children as they played, waiting to see which was the weakest, the brunt of the others’ jokes and childish cruelty. He was going to save them. It would only take a second, and the child, who only a moment ago might have been hopping and skipping, running and laughing, was bound and gagged and carried into the back of his van.

  “Lie still, lie still,” he’d tell them gently but forcefully. “It’ll be ok.” But of course it never was.

  For Mazurski “protection” meant the ultimate escape into the welcoming arms of another world, where all was good and kind and loving, but death did not come quickly. First he would strip the child bare to cleanse them of their parents’ influence and then they were washed, as if they were being born again. Mazurski was preparing them for their new life. His final act was to pop their eyes out, to release their souls to heaven. Most would die of shock, but to be certain he’d smother them until he was certain they had gone. Afterwards Mazurski felt fulfilled, swelled by righteousness, a feeling that surged through his veins like liquid honey, convinced he had saved another child from the hell of life.

  He’d cover their bodies in runes to celebrate the happier life they had gone to. There was no happiness on Earth, but everlasting peace in heaven. And as the first child died, Mazurski was already planning the second, and the third. He could remember some of their names: there was little Jimmy Conway, Frankie Farmer with the freckles, Sammy Duffield, seven years old, a cheeky chappie, but he forgot the rest, the names were too personal. He was on a mission, and no one could stop him. Why would anyone want to? He was doing good.

  Mazurski was meandering down the corridor, stopping every so often to contribute to the dialogue that was being conducted in his head, and he was becoming more and more isolated, but he was still some way from his wing. No one gave him a second glance. Mazurski wasn’t popular – child killers never were in jail, not even in Greenbank, and he had few friends who would watch out for him. He had survived in the “system”, mostly “on the rule” – segregated from the mainstream population for his own safety.

  John Johnsson was coming down the corridor the other way. He was in a hurry and looked flustered thought Mazurski, even though he was deep in thought, almost in a dream. As John passed he nodded. It was so unlike John to acknowledge him, the deputy governor was usually aloof except around his favourites. Mazurski felt a sudden rush of gratitude; maybe after his therapy he wasn’t so alone and worthless, perhaps he could be part of something bigger than his own small sour nightmares. He felt sure this was the beginning of something new, that he had finally been cleansed.

  The shadows that had been slowly following his path quickly caught up with him. There was no noise, not even at the last moment. The first Mazurski knew of anything unusual was losing his balance, and being pulled quickly by his feet into one of the disused workshops that was going to be transformed into a classroom. He wanted to shout, but a gloved hand and then tape wrapped around his mouth stopped him from screaming. He felt like he’d been plunged underwater, except the liquid was viscous like crude oil and his body wouldn’t do what his mind instructed. Time seemed to stand still, as his trousers and then the remainder of his clothes were stripped from him. His hands were bound, and he knew from somewhere deep in his memory that the warm feeling he was experiencing was from being pissed on. He lost consciousness as the first of his eyes was gouged from its socket.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chris Sandel eased the Blade down two gears into third, shifted his weight, flicked the bike to his left and rounded the corner. As he came out of the bend he caressed the road with his knee-slider and accelerated hard. This was why he loved his bike, the power seemed endless, nothing could stop him, it was as if he had been propelled into another dimension where he was master of all. However, no sooner had he crouched low behind the screen to try and max-speed the straight than Will Brock appeared in his mirror, and then overtook him, extending his middle finger as he flew past. Brock’s was the more modern bike, and so Sandel took some comfort from the fact that if his 1994 Fireblade wasn’t the fastest at least it was closer to the standard, classic CBR 900. Brock, on the other hand, had splashed out on a 2006 CBR1000RR. Not that Sandel’s bike was bereft of love and attention. It had a full race exhaust system that lent it an animal roar. In bike-speak, it “walked the walk and torqued the torque”. Even so, he’d just been creamed.

  The two bikes had identical custom resprays of red, gold and black, and the sense of togetherness that Brock and Sandel created was finished off by their matching Furygan leathers. They both wore black, two-piece leathers on the ride to work; they saved their one-piece race suits for track days, and whilst Brock was slightly the larger, and older of the two, they both fitted into size forty-six Highlander jackets, and Vulcaine pants. Boots and gloves were, of course, compulsory – Brock in particular always seemed to be wearing gloves whether on or off the bike – and their look was topped off with grey, chrome Arai helmets with black visors. Neither could remember exactly why they preferred Furygan leathers, but the black panther on the chest and arms of the jackets looked cool, and the leather was waterproof.

  It was a perfect morning for biking, and the trip to the prison would be a pleasurable twenty minutes of jousting for position on the twists and turns of the lanes that led to work.

  And the good thing about early shifts, especially on a Saturday morning, was that there was very little traffic. The roads were their playground, where they could break every rule in the book, reaching three figure speeds, overtaking on blind bends, doing hundred yard wheelies. It was a riot, a knife-edge of mad extremes with death a millimetre of misjudgement away. It was a compulsive release from the safety-obsessed mundanity of everyday life. When they reached their destination they’d pull off their helmets and laugh out loud, high fiving. That’s when they knew how good it was to be alive.

  They’d met on the first day of the Prison Officer Induction Training – the POINT course – at the prison service’s training college in Aberford Road in Wakefield, and the bikes provided them with an immediate sense of solidarity. Within two days they were best friends; a friendship which was made all the more intense when they realized that they were both going to work at HMP Greenbank. The course lasted for twelve weeks, during which they’d learn all the basic skills necessary to act as a prison officer.

  The POINT course had been revamped in the wake of the escapes from Whitemoor and Parkhurst in the mid-nineties, and now there was more emphasis on security skills than ever before. Every day they’d have to practise search techniques in three key areas: prison cells, the college had a dummy cell built within one of the classrooms; searching prisoners (one of the instructors would dress up as a prisoner); and searching the grounds. There was radio practice, and crucially they had to learn control and restraint, “C & R”, the approved method of handling a “recalcitrant prisoner”. This consisted of a combination of judo holds and wrestling that relied on a three-man team of prison officers grabbing hold o
f the prisoner as quickly as possible, putting pressure on his wrists, laying him on the floor of his cell, and wrapping his legs into a figure of four before he was allowed back onto his feet. The prisoner would now be under their control, to be led out of his cell and taken to wherever the staff wanted him to go – usually to the segregation unit.

  Sandel and Brock took to training with remarkable enthusiasm – especially the C & R. There were no actual prisoners at the college, and so the POINTs would practise on each other. On more than one occasion the C & R instructor had to tell Brock and Sandel, Brock especially, to go easy on some poor fellow trainee who had the misfortune to be picked as their “prisoner”. “He’s a colleague, dammit, not a fucking con,” the instructor would yell, and once he’d added, “Anyway you’ll not be needing C & R at Greenback – just kiss the poor darlings better!”

  That appeared to rattle them. They had volunteered for Greenbank, and every so often an instructor would ask why. Brock usually explained for them both. He described how they were interested in psychology, and anyway Greenbank was close to where they lived. If pushed, he’d also mention that his uncle had once been employed there – in the works department – but there was some conflict and he’d now left the service.

  Sandel didn’t know why he’d applied for the prison service and knew very little about Greenbank and cared even less. He’d fallen into the job as he had with nearly everything in his life. Ambition wasn’t his thing, but he was intelligent and exceptionally competent in most areas so he could easily get by without trying too hard. If you managed to get him thinking at all he’d say he found life a bit of a joke, hard to take seriously, too many numb-heads in charge, too many swots sucking up to teacher. It was a bit boring really when all he wanted was to have a good time. Bikes made sense, they gave him a buzz, made him feel immortal. Given half a chance he’d have sewn the death’s head patch onto his leathers and joined a chapter of the Hell’s Angels. He liked their outlaw code of honour but he wasn’t badass enough to live the lifestyle. He wished he’d been around in the sixties when the rockers would “ton up” to the Ace Café on the North Circular and then ride on to Brighton Beach to do over the mods.