The Rules of Restraint

by David Wilson

  Brock would have been a mod back in the day, but only if he could ditch the scooter. He loved the look, hated the wheels. He liked clean cut, sharp creases, amphetamine energy, Roger Daltrey’s style with Pete Townshend’s anger. He was nuts about The Who even before he was a teenager, playing his dad’s records, jumping up and down on the sofa and twirling his arms around. His dad would join in, pretending to be Keith Moon, and they were the best of times, his dad playing his favourite songs on scratchy seven-inch vinyl, before everything went bad between them. Then nothing was ever the same again.

  The instructors never properly understood Brock. He’d completed an engineering apprenticeship, but had given all that up to join the prison service. His engineering skills gave him an eye for detail and an instinctive knowledge of how materials worked, but perhaps not so much how humans worked. Week after week he’d come top of the POINT class tests. No one was surprised when he won the cup for the best POINT on their course, but his success troubled some of his instructors. Whilst he was a natural leader and someone who could go far, there was something about him they couldn’t reach. His theories on prison reform were cogently argued but he didn’t always go by the book.

  To add fuel to the fire no one could work out the relationship he had with Sandel. Once or twice whispers around the college speculated on how close they were, but no one had the nerve to confront them in the open, within range of their clenched fists.

  It was during equal opportunities training that things got tricky. Sandel didn’t understand what everyone was getting excited about. Brock on the other hand knew exactly what was at stake. Like every government agency, the prison service was committed to equal opportunities, and the college instructor had started their first session by asking the POINTS for another word for “equal” and “opportunity”. Eventually they came up with “same” and “chance”, and the instructor concurred.

  Brock disagreed and said that minorities were given more than the same chance, for example, when they were allowed into university with lower A Level results, and challenged the instructor on why this could happen in an age of equal opportunities. On that occasion the subject was quickly changed, but thereafter, every time the issue was raised in class, Brock would use his intellect to chip away at the instructor whether the subject concerned women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, lesbians or homosexuals. And because most prison officers were conservative, he was always able to turn the class to his way of thinking.

  On one or two occasions it had got so bad that the instructor reported Brock to Dr Alec Dee, the head of the college who asked to speak to him in private. Dee liked to run the college as a boarding school. The POINTs were his “boys”, even though almost a quarter of them were women, and he wanted to believe the best in them all. With the prison population rising every day and staff in short supply, Dr Dee was loathe to throw anyone off the course.

  Brock turned the tables and charmed Dee with his contrition, good sense and positive attitude. He went to great lengths to acknowledge that the world didn’t always operate according to rational or moral principle and that leeway should be applied in particular circumstances where there was a clear breakdown, no matter how frustrating that may be, even when it was an obvious example of injustice and stupidity. He also said that the opposite should apply in certain circumstances. Dee chose not to do anything formally, which meant that there was nothing on Brock’s personal record of service. Dee liked to think of Brock as an angry young man, who will come around. “You’ll see, in time we’ll all have reason to remember teaching Officer Brock. He’s got a very interesting future ahead of him.”

  At its heart the POINT course was as much about socialization, about learning how to fit into the culture of being a prison officer, as it was about acquiring skills. An essential part of the course was going out at night into Wakefield, and experiencing what the city had to offer. There, social as well as professional bonds would be made, and over the years, as they were promoted from officer to senior officer, and from senior officer to principal officer and beyond into the governor grades; they would look back fondly to their POINT course and the fun they had in Wakefield. The POINTs, or “baby screws”, as they were called by the locals, had money in their pockets, and brains in their groins.

  Brock and Sandel were usually reluctant to join in, and preferred to keep themselves to themselves, clean their bikes and work out in the college’s gym. However, under pressure from some of their classmates they agreed to go out on the Thursday of the second-last week of the course for a curry, followed by a pub crawl.

  It was all going well, but gradually tongues became loosened, and Andy Beck, who had suffered more than once from Sandel and Brock’s C & R practice, started to ask too many questions.

  “So, is it true that you two are poofs?” Beck looked at his classmates, and then at Sandel and Brock.

  Brock didn’t bat an eyelid. Sandel frowned as if he didn’t understand the question.

  After a long silence Beck continued: “C’mon lads, own up. It’s clear you’re turd bandits, chutney ferrets, marmite miners,” he was flagging after six pints of Stella, “umm, fuckin’ Oklahomos,” he was convinced there was a live bullet in there somewhere that would hit its target, “brownie kings, butt pirates, and you – Brock – are obviously on top.”

  Brock winked at Sandel. They both stood up and walked over to Beck. Sandel grabbed his cheeks and kissed him hard on the lips, holding him so tightly in his strong hands that Beck could hardly move. Sandel continued the kiss, the effect like an electric shock stunning Beck into submission. When Sandel tried to force his tongue down his throat Beck emitted a strangled cry as if a heavy vehicle had run over his foot. Sandel knew it was time to stop so he pulled away and that’s when Brock stepped in and swung a right hook to Beck’s nose which split in two sending him onto the floor holding his face and screaming in pain. There was blood everywhere.

  Brock and Sandel carefully put C & R locks on Beck’s wrists, pulled him to his feet, and marched him out of the pub, tweaking his wrists just a bit more than they needed to on the way out.

  They took him to the local hospital, where he was patched up, and nothing more was said about the incident. The assault had been too swift and professional for anyone in the pub to have noticed, a couple of classmates had mopped up the blood, and no one on the course was going to tell.

  After that Brock and Sandel were left to themselves, and even on the final night of the course they decided against joining in the end-of-term celebrations. Instead, they put on their leathers and rode their bikes up and down the A1(M) until the early hours of the morning.

  *

  Brock motioned to Sandel, who was some fifty yards behind him to watch out for the first of the two potholes in the road. They both flicked their bikes left and right to avoid the holes, but slowed down, blipping their throttles, to savour the final few minutes of their route before they entered the prison. Dismounting their bikes, they removed their helmets and grinned at each other. The familiar tick-tick of cooling engines was like the blood pulsing through their veins, tingling the end of their fingers. Brock took out a cloth from inside his leathers and wiped down the fairing on his bike, giving the petrol tank a buff and rubbing off any road tar marks. His bike was perfection, form and function in harmony, the flawless precision engineering more than mere material performance, it was an ideal he strived for.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Munro was at his desk long before Sandel and Brock entered the prison. Mazurski’s murder, the second in the jail was not, by any stretch of the imagination good news, and then there was Wooldridge’s murder to consider. His conversation that morning with prison service headquarters had been painful. Too many eyes were now being focused on Greenbank, and the “Minister”, Munro was informed, is “extremely embarrassed”. This was civil service-speak for “get your act together” and Munro hardly needed to be reminded of his conversation with the Home Secretary about the necessity for a “firm
hand” at Greenbank. Here he was just three months down the line with two murders, a self-inflicted and an escape on his hands, and the Home Secretary about to try and explain things on the news. He’d already made up his mind to go down to Cleland House – the prison service’s headquarters in London – on Monday and meet up with Margery Hardy, the area manager, in an attempt to save his ass.

  Munro knew there was to be a parliamentary question in the Commons about events at the jail, which had been put down after the Ian Clark murder, and now there was a second murder to contend with. A drafted reply was going to be emailed to him later that morning so he could amend any inaccurate details and get sight of what might be said publicly about the murders before any further information was released to the media. It would also help him brief the staff, and he’d already telephoned Kate and Knight to bring them up to date about Mazurski and had asked them to come and see him, bad luck it was a Saturday.

  Something had to be done. He’d still not heard from Morag in Oxford and it was beginning to nag him, a deepening kind of dread, but then so were a lot of other things right now. He’d add her to the growing list.

  Munro listened to Radio 4, waiting for Today to start and the inevitable report of what had happened last night at the jail. The news had got out pretty quickly this time. Every jail has at least two or three staff who, despite the risks, leak on a regular basis to the local or national press depending on the nature of the story. There was that prison officer Scott Chapman who was given three-and-a-half years for leaking stories about Jon Venables, one of the killers of two-year-old James Bulger. He made over £40,000 tipping off the tabloids, but what a price to pay. His defence pointed out that the most “at risk” people in prison were: number one, an ex-prison officer, number two, an ex-policeman, and number three, a sex offender. Munro knew all too well they were prime targets. Prisoners liked to assert their own brand of moral authority and if it meant sticking one on a former screw they’d be queueing up. What was also mentioned at the Chapman trial was that the prison officer could look forward to punishment by prisoners using boiling water with sugar so it sticks to the skin or assault with the handle of a plastic toilet brush embedded with twin blades so the cuts are far apart and can’t be easily stitched. Munro shook his head wearily at that, he’d seen so much worse. Thankfully the prison service’s press office had attempted to get some of the more gruesome details removed from the news bulletins about Greenbank.

  While the shipping forecast was being broadcast, Munro tried to recollect if this was the worst disaster of his long career. Sure he’d had his fair share of riots and rooftop protests, but it was easy to get public opinion on your side when that happened. He remembered once revealing the Christmas menu to the local paper when he had worked in a young offender institution at the start of his career. He thought he was showing how civilized the prison was being, but the public took against him vociferously, accusing him of treating the prisoners too well compared to OAPs or the homeless, or the unemployed, the disabled, the sick, the mentally ill, the list was endless. He’d always tried to do what little good he could for humanity.

  But riots and rooftop protests – no matter what the cause, were a different matter. Munro had learned that the public generally thought prisoners were animals, no matter what their crime, who should have been hanged anyway, so they rarely cared if there was tough action to bring them back into line, which was what the staff also wanted. Munro was good at that type of hardline incident management. He could do tough, it was his speciality, but tender was a weaker point. It didn’t make any sense to him. Even so, sometimes he’d be overwhelmed with grief, locked away in some private hell, crying to himself, and he’d try to understand, but none of it added up. He felt like that when Morag went to university for the first time, his little girl gone, it hurt so much he had to turn his back so he didn’t embarrass everyone. At work he could knock heads together, run a system that had definition and fixed points, lines drawn that you did not cross. Maybe sometimes he went too far. It was recommended he attend an anger management course at his last position, they had to cover up an incident, but he quietly told HR where they could stick it.

  One of the hardest things he had to cope with in his life was the failure of his marriage – he still regretted not seeing his former wife Anne.

  Poor Anne. She had tried hard, but it became clear that she was sharing her marriage with another restless bedfellow – his career. It wasn’t as if Munro had played around, like most of his colleagues, but the reality was that he was always in the prison, and never at home. Anne hadn’t gone to university after school and had married him because she wanted to be a dedicated homemaker, devoted to supporting her man. But she only ever saw the ugly side, his depressions, his distraction, his relentless, perfectionist obsession with climbing the greasy pole; each setback a source of long periods of self-doubt and introspection. When Morag was born, he lavished what little attention he had to spare on her. She was everything to him. God knows what he would do if anything happened to her. Anne couldn’t be married to an emotional cipher, marriage needed work too, input and generosity. He had failed her.

  The shipping forecast ended, and the news began. Last night’s events at the prison were the lead story. The perfect, measured pronunciation of the announcer seemed incongruous to the facts being outlined: “The therapeutic community at HMP Greenbank, which locks up some of the most dangerous offenders in the country, faces a new crisis this morning with the news that a second inmate has been murdered. There will be more on this story in a moment.”

  There was a knock at Munro’s door; it was Kate and Knight. “Sit down,” Munro pointed to some chairs. “Close the door.”

  James Naughtie summarized the story as a prelude to an interview with the Home Secretary.

  “Home Secretary, do you support capital punishment?”

  “Good morning Jim, no, as I have said on many other occasions I do not support capital punishment and if I may say so, your question is wholly inappropriate to the events at Greenbank.”

  “How so? Two prisoners in as many days have been murdered – isn’t this simply a form of capital punishment by, as it were, the back door?”

  “Absolutely not, and with respect that’s a ridiculous assumption. We do not yet know who murdered Mr Clark or Mr Mazurski, and that is why we have a police investigation ongoing within the prison. There should be no suggestion that these murders were in some way officially sanctioned, if that is the implication of your question.”

  “But you would not disagree with me if I was to comment that these were two of the most notorious offenders in this country, and that many will be quietly celebrating this morning with the news of their deaths.”

  “That I cannot comment on, but I can assure you that this is a matter being taken very seriously and I know the governor is working inordinately long hours helping the police to bring the culprit or culprits to justice.”

  “Can you comment on stories circulating this morning about how Mr Mazurski – the ‘Playground Man’ was murdered? It has been suggested that he was suffocated, then had his eyes gouged out, and that this was, of course, how he killed his child victims.”

  “There is a police investigation ongoing, so I’m afraid I am unable to comment on specific details of the case.”

  “Is there anything that you can tell us about how these prisoners met their deaths?”

  “I will be making a statement this afternoon to the House, and you’ll understand that I would not want to reveal here on this programme details that I should first put before the House.”

  “Home Secretary, thank you very much.”

  Munro turned off the radio. It could have been worse. The Home Secretary had implied his support. The news had not yet been leaked that Mazurski’s gouged out eyes had been found stuffed into his anus.

  Munro turned to Kate and Knight: “So what are we going to do about all this?”

  Munro spread the day’s newspapers onto his des
k, each either celebrating the death of Clark and Mazurski, or laying into the Home Office for its handling of this latest penal crisis. Wooldridge’s murder wasn’t yet getting any coverage, it hadn’t been picked up by the nationals and no one had made connections. It was only a matter of time though. Crisis. There was a word that was all too often applied to the prison service, but how inappropriate it seemed. A crisis was something that had a beginning and an end like the Suez crisis or the oil crisis or the current England cricket team. But the “crisis” in prisons seemed to have gone on for as long as Munro had been a prison governor.

  Knight spoke first, drawing together what he knew.

  “There are obvious similarities with the MO of Mazurski and Clark, assault followed by eye-gouging. But there are significant differences. For example the tape used to gag them was not the same type.”

  “Clever,” said Munro.

  “Clark’s nose and mouth were sealed using industrial strength extra power black duct tape. No chance of ingress of air through that, suffocation inevitable, although, as we know, cause of death was knife wounds through both eyes penetrating the frontal lobes of the brain, dead pretty much instantly. Mazurski’s breathing channels were stopped using packing tape printed with the words ‘Handle with Care’, red print on white, message repeated every three inches along the tape length. His eyes remained uncovered and, as we know, they were removed, popped out like little greasy marbles.”