‘Follow me Mr Reynolds.’
He scuffed along behind him down a long white corridor, the only method he could use to stop his footwear coming off. He slid through a suspicious pool of liquid on the floor as he did so and past the ubiquitous wet floor signs. They passed multiple holding cells, all which were empty. It was painfully white and bright compared to the gloomy interior of the prison van and eerily quiet. He felt like a bride coming out of church as he walked between the officers lining both sides, but they had relaxed now, realising he wasn’t a frothing lunatic, just a tired, balding, middle aged man.
They reached the searching area which consisted of two changing cubicles with sides as high as an average man’s shoulders. A younger officer came in to join Duke as Will went in to the nearest one and turned round and faced them. His missus had told him when you went in to hospital to give birth you left your dignity at the door, with all and sundry looking at your privates. Prison was much the same.
They at least had the good grace to look uncomfortable, like it had to be done but they weren’t enjoying it either. Not all did that, perverts and power freaks were commonplace here. Of course it was a cooler windowless room and he felt dirty, smelly and embarrassed. He involuntarily shivered and he felt his mind imagining a blasting, boiling-hot shower sluicing through the film of grease and filth that was glazing his entire body.
‘Any chance of a shower please Mr. Duke?’ he pleaded.
‘Sorry mate, it’s late and we have been flat out. The prison’s chocker, that’s why you had to wait so long. We had ten lifers on their way to HMP Long Lartin unexpectedly arrive just before you. All murderers doing big stretches with so much stuff it was like they were moving house. I’ve never seen the S.O so angry, and that’s saying something.’
In a way they were moving house, he thought, the only house they would ever live in again. Even though he knew that prison rules stated every man was permitted a shower on arrival, he also knew now was not the time to ask. Prison was about getting as much as you can, when you can, and being smart enough to know the balance.
‘How was the old guy?’ Will asked, unsure as to why he cared.
‘He collapsed and pissed himself after he came in,’ Duke grunted. ‘You just walked through the aftermath. He went straight to healthcare.’
Duke handed him his underwear back after searching it, his nose wrinkling at the smell.
‘Look Guv, as you can see I reek. I know it’s too much for a shower but if I can just have some clean underwear, I’ll wash in the cell.’
Duke looked him in the eye about to say no, but for whatever reason nodded. When they got to the property desk he turned to the orderly and barked instructions to him.
‘Eighteen, get this man a full kit, clothes too, whatever’s left and fast, I want to get home.’
Small things Will thought, but he felt an insane amount of gratitude for something he was no doubt entitled to. The orderly returned and handed him a big opaque bag, tied at the top with HMP Paston Hill on it and gave him a conspiratorial smile. He should get a single cell considering what he was in for and all he wanted to do was get back to it and get these foul clothes off.
The orderly had been there last time too. He was a small overfriendly guy with a pasty complexion who looked a bit like Elvis with about three chromosomes missing. He also knew why they called him ‘Eighteen’. He had thought it was a joke like the one about the guy’s IQ in Aliens. It had piqued his interest though and he had looked it up when he got out. Turns out he was one of the UK’s most dangerous sexual predators and eighteen years was his sentence for grooming and interfering with his neighbour’s children.
Not a PC nickname but pretty witty. A very sick man he may be but reception orderlies had power, so he winked back and took the bag. Ironic that half the cons would have weighed him in had they known his depraved history, but as they arrived back late from court having missed dinner and he gave them a baked potato and cheese they thanked him profusely instead.
‘Sorry Mr Reynolds.’ The younger officer had come over to them. ‘The S.O said we haven’t got time to process you and you will have to come back tomorrow morning. You need to go straight to the wing.’
‘Do I get a phone call, or reception pack?’ Will asked.
From behind the property desk someone grudgingly said ‘Here’ and he signed for his tobacco pack. He could have had phone credit; in fact he was entitled to a free call right now. He thought about mentioning it, but who would he ring? He didn’t know anyone’s mobile number off by heart and his phone was no doubt being held for evidence which only left his dad’s landline. He could imagine how that call would go; ‘You were given every chance, and this is how you repay us. Lazy blood is what you’ve got. I said go and grab life, instead you float about like a leaf, letting any old gust blow you where it wants. Well you got your just desserts’. He could do without that chat.
He wondered how his relationship had soured like that as they left him alone on a bench, head tilted back, counting the ceiling panels. He remembered sitting opposite his dad at the breakfast table just before he started senior school, him all smiles, his eyes keen and interested, asking him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He should have just said ‘Prison, twice please’ as it would have saved a lot of disappointments. It couldn’t have turned out any worse. Back then he had been waiting for someone to tell him what to do, to guide him, but no-one had and now thirty years on he concluded nothing much had changed.
Looking back towards the reception entrance, Will allowed himself a small smile. So much for Jake’s grand entrance. He stumbled in like a shabbily dressed stick insect. Curtain haired and tall, but painfully thin. Head drooped, floppy limbed and eyes fixated on his footwear. He looked like a marionette whose strings had been cut. He could hear him mumbling his acquiesces and Jake was soon standing next to him, signing for his things.
Jake looked at him and shrugged, as if to say, ‘You know how it is’.
The big senior officer walked past and bade them follow him through a succession of double doors, locking them behind. They arrived at the house blocks and Will saw the big clock in the central hub said nine p.m. as Cave took them onto a wing with a big A1 sign above the gates. Thankfully it was after bang up and it was empty and pretty quiet. He took them to cell twenty-two and gestured them in with a provocative point of his fingers.
‘Here’s your kennel,’ he snarled.
Jake’s question came out in a feeble high pitched squeak.
‘Which one of us?’
‘Both of you fuckwits, now move’
Will couldn’t stop himself replying. ‘Surely you don’t put murderers in with YO’s?’
‘He’s twenty-two Einstein,’ Cave replied, leaning in so his face was only a few inches from his. His breath was foul, as though hunks of rotting meat were hanging off his teeth. ‘And you will go wherever the fuck I tell you to go, just so I know where you are.’
Like children they trailed in. The sparse cell smelt atrocious, like a decaying swamp. Ill-fitting curtains blocked out some of the fading light and a lonely black sock floating in the toilet was the only sign of its previous inhabitant. Two narrow bunk beds were screwed to the left hand wall and on these were laid the dirtiest pair of mattresses Will had ever seen, and he had seen some. Only the bottom one had a pillow, although this looked like a dying haemophiliac had spent the last year blowing his nose on it. Before he could ask for bed linen the door slammed shut behind them.
Jake stood in front of him looking more than a little stunned. Like he had put his hand in his pocket expecting to pull out an apple but had removed a hand grenade.
Will sighed. ‘You can have the top bunk Jake.’ He watched as Jake pulled himself up as though the floor was on fire. He put his bag on the bed and heard a light crinkle so he looked inside. Eighteen had put two bags of crisps in, Walkers too and two yellow looking apples. Thinking that was a little unusual he shrugged and passed an apple and a bag of crisps up
to Jake and then said, ‘Here, you can have the pillow too.’
Will eased himself back onto his bunk and unsuccessfully tried to get comfortable. The mattress was wafer-thin in the centre where a hundred other unlucky souls had compressed it over the years. He shuffled onto his side and facing the wall thought that now was as good a time as any to remember what he had done. He closed his eyes and pulled the weight of his memories over himself with as much enthusiasm as a tramp with a heavy wet blanket.
3
26th August 2014
He completely awoke just after dawn but he hadn’t slept. The whole night was a haze of sweating semi-conscious thoughts. You would have thought in prison you would have all the time in the world to sleep, but few did. It was baking in the cells, an oppressive close heat which had you dreaming of breezy clifftops. He recalled last time, sweating in just his boxers, day dreaming of wind farms and hailstorms.
It was the noise that kept you awake though and last night had been no different. The shouts of the bad, conducting their business after bang up and the shrieks of the mad and the sad as they tried to come to terms with their predicament stretched into the night long after the idiots had given up competing on who had the loudest stereo.
He knew he had partaken in the cacophony, jolting upright, a shout still on his lips and banging his head again on the base of Jake’s bed. Despite his nonchalance Jake too groaned and grumbled in his sleep.
The constant roll counts with bright torches shone through observation panels and the jingle of heavy keys and slow clump of heavier footsteps harried you through the night. When exhaustion tipped you into the abyss just before dawn you were pulled out soon after by the slamming doors and the loud jingle of locks being opened as they roused and then argued with that day’s reluctant courts. To say Will felt less than prepared for what today might bring was a serious understatement.
Jake leapt down from the bunk like a Barbary ape as the rhythmic unlocking of the fifty-six cells reached their door. A poor night’s sleep had seemingly restored his energy levels and confidence.
‘Come on man, I’m starving,’ he beamed. ‘You snooze, you lose. I know these weasels.’
Will nodded. That was very true. Even though breakfast was only a 200 ml carton of long life milk, a few tea bags, two sugar sachets and a bowl of cereal, it was another commodity. The wing workers would work with unusual and efficient haste knowing that the busy officers would only hold them so long and anything left was theirs. That carton of milk or the sugar could mean an extra smoke at the end of the day, or a couple of squirts of aftershave before your woman’s visit.
Will tried to relax as he stood in the line behind Jake. He had a protector last time he was here, but he was long gone and he felt exposed and vulnerable. He could smell the man behind him. His rank morning breath curled over his shoulder like a mugger’s embrace. It seemed like he had eighty sets of eyes on him, but as he glanced around he never caught anyone staring at him and tried his best to put it down to paranoia. The servery inmates nodded at him but seemed only interested in getting back to bed and the officers didn’t give him a second glance. He inhaled his breakfast in his room and soon found himself hastening to the showers, knowing it would be busy but desperate to be clean.
The shower room was basic indeed. A bare square tiled room, four metres by three, with four showers slightly too close together so it was infuriatingly easy to touch the man next to you as you raced through your ablutions. All the heads were taken but as he arrived two guys on the end two spaces turned round and looked directly at him. They were big, well-muscled stereotypically Slavic looking types, with shaven heads and square features.
Prison showers are not a place for the timid and Will was tempted to do some over the top Mr Bean type charade where he pretended he had forgotten his soap and back out. The stench of his own body made him stand his ground and he braced for some conflict but they both just nodded at him and walked past, towels wrapped round their waists, one of them whistling like they had just come out of some highbrow sauna.
He showered quickly, his mind now going into overdrive and was grateful to get back into the relative safety of his cell. Jake returned later bursting with gossip.
‘Hey man, they all know what you are in for,’ he whispered, as though it was a good thing. ‘If you need anything just ask, everyone knows me here, I’ll look after you.’ Will suspected Jake would struggle to look after a hamster but nodded anyway.
Before he could say anymore the door was pushed opened and an evil-looking mature man came in. He had a greasy shock of yellowy grey hair, slicked back and pulled into a small ponytail. If he had any teeth they had retreated out of sight for safety. He had a head like Skeletor and a complexion that suggested he had never been in the vicinity of a fruit or vegetable. He pointed at Jake and growled in a thick Irish accent.
‘Fucking out, now!’ Jake’s loyalty clearly didn’t stretch very far and he raced out the door like a greyhound leaving his trap. His place was taken by a wide fellow with a face that looked like he had been losing at boxing all his young life. The eyes that stared out of this visage though were aged, flinty and wired. Will felt his legs and arms go instantly weak and numb and he involuntarily backed up to the window. The big bloke soon had him by the throat, his back being moulded onto the bars of the window. He didn’t try to struggle; God knows he wasn’t a fighter. Instead of receiving a blow, the smaller man came to his side, pressed his face against his ear and began to talk in a low threatening voice. His breath was hot and sour, a combination of cigarettes and absent dental hygiene.
‘I know what you did and I’m not fucking happy about it. Darren was a fucking mate. Now this is a taster, to let you know this is my fucking wing. I want anything of yours, you give it to me. Quickly. Or Jo-boy here, takes a lot more.’
With that he stepped back. Will’s mind quickly cleared and he had time to breathe deeply as everything all of a sudden seemed to be running in slow motion. No answers came so he just tensed his stomach as the inevitable punch arrived. He still let out a whoosh of air and sprayed his milky rice crispies over Jo-boy’s chest and then slumped to the floor.
Incredulous at this impromptu shower, no doubt the first for a while, Jo-boy lifted him off the floor by pulling both of his ears up. His face was a mask of hate and he used the lifting movement to arch his back. As the head-butt came, Will did the only thing he could do to save his face and looked at the floor. The bang of heads echoed around the room and his legs gave way and he slid back down. All of a sudden a loud voiced bellowed into the cell.
‘What’s going on here?’
‘We accidentally bumped heads Guv,’ Jo-boy laughed.
‘Leave,’ the officer replied. As the two travellers left, the man looked down at Will. He was in his late-twenties and had the usual apathetic attitude to violence most prison officers seem to develop. ‘You OK?’ he asked. Will nodded, still stunned by the blow. He could almost hear the man’s brain whirring over whether he could be bothered with the necessary paperwork that reporting the incident would generate. Idleness or indifference won the day. He nodded his head and spoke as he put his key in the lock.
‘No induction for you this morning, you got a legal first thing, so be ready for mass movement.’ With that he stepped out and Jake came in, the officer locking the door behind him.
‘Great,’ sighed Will. A legal would mean a visit in the prison from probation, the police or a solicitor. None of which were particularly welcome. Mass movement was the time for work, when the wing gates were opened and five hundred or so of nature’s finest were shepherded towards work like a herd of unruly, angry bulls. There was a complete lack of control and it was easy pickings for those out for revenge.
‘Sorry man, I didn’t know what to do. I shit myself,’ Jake simpered. ‘They say Jo-boy killed someone in Pentonville. I told a screw when no-one was looking something was going on in our cell. I wasn’t sure if you could handle it or not.’
As Jak
e helped him onto the bed, Will figured this would be a painful stay. The bleakness of his situation caused his breath to catch in his throat. If things didn’t change he would be having some long nights here, waiting for the doors to open. You can’t run away here, or move home. Not unless you wanted to squeal and then he would be joining old matey from the bus ride here on the nonce wing. Jesus he thought, imagine twenty-five years of mainstream prisoners trying to spit through the wing gates at you.
* * *
He waited until the last minute to leave his cell when the prisoners were let out to go to work and walked to the visits hall where they did the legal appointments virtually on his own. The slippery stoat of a fellow who had been appointed at the court was nowhere to be seen when he went into his booth. Instead there was some sharp suited elderly city type with an attractive but efficient-looking woman. She had a note pad and thick trendy glasses. Neither of them stood as he entered. Neither of them offered their hand.
‘My name is Grant,’ the man declared. Will assumed it was Mr Grant, as his tone dismissed any notion of informality.
‘Sit down Mr Reynolds. I only really have one question for you. Have you talked?’
He did have only one question but he asked it about ten different ways. When he seemed happy that Will hadn’t talked, he spoke in a tone that suggested he was used to being listened to.
‘Your legal representation has been paid for by a helpful third party. They have hired the best. I have not come here for particulars, just to explain the general defence. You three were set upon by heavily armed persons who were unknown to you. You were out for a drive with old school friends and know precisely zero. You ‘hit the deck’ as they say, saw nothing, only looking up when everyone was gone. We will be laying this at Darren’s door. He won’t be answering any questions. With his personal history it will be perfectly believable. They may even drop the case. No-one likes to see war heroes dragged through the mud unnecessarily. You say nothing, to anyone, at any time, unless directed by me. I’m sure you understand the consequences of not adhering to these rules, in both the short and long term.’
Lazy Blood: a powerful page-turning thriller Page 2