by Mike Ripley
‘How long are you going for?’ I almost added: this time.
‘Back on Friday. Plane lands at 8.15 – that’s pm, so don’t panic. You could pick me up from Heathrow if you like.’
Amy concentrated on packing yet another dress into an already-straining suitcase.
‘And you want me to drop you there tomorrow as well?’ I said, as if I’d just remembered it.
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘Well, actually, I’ve been volunteered to pick up one of the band over in Chadwell Heath about 12.00. We’ve got the offer of a warm-up session at a pub down Canary Wharf.’
‘On a Monday lunchtime?’
‘They don’t get much entertainment down Canary Wharf.’
‘Well, okay, I’ll take the Freelander and stick it in the Long Stay car park.’
‘No, that’s always a hassle, don’t bother with that.’
I had a vague feeling I might need the Freelander. Far too many people had seen me in Armstrong lately: Spider, the Turners and even Steffi Innocent.
Now there was an idea.
‘I promise you there’ll be a cab here on the dot of 12.00,’ I said confidently. ‘On me. You won’t even have to fiddle your expenses. And I’ll pick you up on Friday night. That’s a guarantee. What about tickets and stuff?’
‘I’ll e-mail Debbie at the office and she can bike them round first thing. All the paperwork can be downloaded from the office computer into my laptop. I don’t have to go in.’
She stood back from her suitcase, which covered most of the bed, and glared at it, willing the pile of clothes to shrink.
‘Why this sudden concern for my welfare?’ she asked suspiciously.
Typical.
‘Welfare? Whose welfare? I want to make sure you don’t miss your plane. That way, I get you out of the way for five days while I get to go and revisit my misspent youth, touring with the boys in the band, making good music, staying up late, getting drunk and taking drugs and fighting off the groupies.’
She screwed her eyes up and waited for the moment.
‘Damn, you must have a long memory,’ she said.
First thing on Monday morning, I rang Rudgard & Blugden Confidential Investigations. Steffi Innocent picked up the phone. I’d just known she would be the first one in the office, at her desk by 8.30.
I told her I had a job for her, an important job. She asked if I was hiring her and I said no, giving her a chance to pay off her debt to me. Before she could ask what debt, I said there had been a development in the case she’d got me involved in and I needed her and her Tixilix taxi at 12 noon sharp. Before she could ask what case, I told her she had to pretend to be a regular taxi – prepaid and ordered by me – and to pick up Amy and drive her to Heathrow. She was not to reveal who she was or anything about her following me and Amy around the previous week, or to mention Haydn Rees or Keith Flowers. In fact, just talk normal taxi driver/passenger stuff. In fact, just pretend she was a real taxi driver.
‘It sounds as if you just want me to give her a lift to the airport,’ she moaned.
As if, I said. Didn’t she realise I needed a trained observer to check whether or not Amy was being followed? Not to do anything if she was, mind, just take notes and check in back with me later.
Was somebody following her? That was for her to find out, wasn’t it? After all, she was the detective.
By the time she hung up, she was quite enthusiastic about the whole thing, and I felt fairly pleased with myself as well.
I’d just saved 30 quid, with tip.
I actually parked at the end of the road just to check that Steffi turned up on time, but of course Miss Perfect Professional was 15 minutes early. Which was fine by me, as I was only slightly late getting over to St Chad’s to find Spider hopping from one foot to the other outside the hostel.
‘Cutting it a bit fine aren’t you?’ he growled as he piled in the back.
‘Can’t wait to get back inside, can you?’ I said, a tad cruelly.
‘The warden’s gone to the cash ‘n carry, but he’ll be back soon, and it don’t look good if he sees me getting into a cab, does it? I mean, he’ll begin to think I’ve got a source of income. And anyway, I’m not going inside – well, not today. You are.’
He sank down in the back so he couldn’t be seen clearly until we were well on to Eastern Avenue. Only as we were circling Romford did he move on to the rumble seat behind me and start chattering in my ear. I was tempted to slide the partition into place; not because of what he was saying but because of his breath, which stank as if he’d been stealing Fang’s dinner. I wished I had a cigarette to give him.
‘You got your VO?’
‘Yes.’
‘You got some photo ID?’
‘Yes.’
‘You got any drugs on you?’
‘No.’
‘You carried any hard drugs on you in the last week?’
‘No.’
‘You smoked any dope in the last 30 days?’
‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘Why 30 days?’
‘They reckon that’s how long it stays in your system. Or, least, that’s what they say when they do MDTs on you.’
‘In English, please,’ I said.
‘What?’ he snapped back.
‘What does MDT mean?’
‘Mandatory drugs testing – piss tests to you and me. It’s what they do inside. Your name comes up on their computer and you get to pee in the bottle. Ten to 14 days on your sentence for cannabis, 21 to 36 for opiates. You don’t take the test, they add on 36 days anyway. How much money you got on you?’
‘Five pounds 99p.’
‘Correct. But that’s just what you can take in. I hope you got some stashed away somewhere so you can buy me a pint on the way home.’
‘I thought this was your way home.’
He threw himself off the rumble and onto the back seat, snorting in disgust. ‘Easy thing for you to say, but you’ve got no poxy idea what it’s like inside. I can handle it, you couldn’t. They won’t need to do an MDT on you, you’ll piss yourself with fright in the visiting room.’
I supposed I deserved that. I just hoped he wasn’t right.
We joined the M25 off the Southend Arterial and, thanks to a clear run, we were on the Dartford Bridge within a few minutes. We were halfway across before Spider spoke again.
‘It’s the views you miss, you know.’
I checked him in the mirror. He was gazing out over the Thames at its widest, greyest and most industrial, a view rarely seen on postcards.
‘And it’s the views that do your head in as well. In Belmarsh, some of the local lags on remand can see their own flats over in Thamesmead West or Plumstead. “I live there, third balcony down,” they yell, just like big kids. Then there’s the City Airport just across the river, and you can see the planes come in and go out all bloody day and night. Fucking cruel it is sometimes.’
I knew about the Alcatraz syndrome, where the real punishment for the prisoners there came not from the incarceration itself so much as being able to look across the bay and see the waterfront lights of San Francisco and actually hear the music and sometimes the voices of the revellers on Fisherman’s Wharf. I’d never thought a view of a council tower block in Plumstead or a short take-off stumpy plane full of irritated businessmen or bored civil servants heading for yet another showdown in Brussels could match the delights of Frisco. But then, each to his own, especially when the alternative is 30-foot high redstone walls.
‘I thought you quite fancied the idea of going back inside,’ I said over my shoulder as I flipped coins into one of the automatic toll collectors.
‘I have to admit I do,’ said Spider mournfully.
‘And why’s that?’
‘My age? My circumstances? Trust me, it’s more of a
prison on the outside.’
I put my foot down and zipped Armstrong into the correct lane for Dartford and the strangely-named Erith, cutting up a couple of trucks and several families of holidaymakers on their way to Dover and the continent. No-one minded. Even returning Belgian motorists knew better than to honk a London taxi.
It was only when we were on Bronze Age Way, which is in fact a brand new dual carriageway, that Spider spoke again.
‘You know, this was all marshes once,’ he said wistfully. ‘Erith Marshes and Thamesmead Marshes.’
‘I’ll believe you,’ I said, though the modern road had been cut and banked so there wasn’t a view; which was probably a good thing, as I knew that a huge sewage works lay between us and the river.
‘It’s true. That’s why Belmarsh is technically a floating prison, ‘cos it’s built on marshland. Funny really, as back in Dickens’ day they used to moor their prison hulks here. You know, similar to them in Great Expectations. Funny how nothing much changes, innit?’
‘Makes it a sod to tunnel out of, I guess.’
‘Don’t think anybody’s tried that. Wouldn’t go over the wall either, if I was you,’ he said like he was giving me good advice.
‘I was planning on using the front door,’ I said. ‘Both ways. In and out.’
‘I was speaking figuratively in a metaphor,’ he said grandly. ‘What I meant was, the top stones and the cornice of the wall aren’t cemented in, they’re just loose, lying there. So if you put a grappling hook or a rope ladder up there, fucking great lumps of stuff come down and land on your head. Nobody’ll try that. Again.’
‘Shouldn’t we be nearly there?’ I asked him, uneasy because I hadn’t seen any signs to or sign of a prison, just trees along the roadside and the occasional slip road into light industrial trading estates.
‘They don’t believe in advertising much,’ said Spider. ‘They call it London’s best kept secret. Keep going down here, then just before the roundabout there’s a sharp left turn down to the Magistrates’ Court. Take that and follow the signs for Visitor Centre; it don’t go anywhere else.’
Belmarsh is three things: a court, a jail and a high security prison. The high security prison is separate but within the prison confines, though the first thing you see, off to your right between the trees, is a side road to the court block with a lifting barrier and its own security men. The court works as both a Magistrates’ Court and a Crown Court, and most everyone knows there is a tunnel from there into the jail. I say most everyone, but perhaps that should be everyone who ever drank in a pub in Plumstead or Woolwich when they were building the place back in the ‘80s, where disgruntled contractors and builders would try to flog you a set of the plans for 20 quid. It still catches out the younger, embarrassingly keen press photographers and TV cameramen who wait vainly for the shot of a well-known accused being put in the Black Maria or driven off to prison. If they’re up before the beak in Belmarsh, they disappear down the tunnel without a grand exit. Never have the words ‘take him down’ been used so literally in a courtroom.
I followed the signs saying Visitor Centre as the one-way road curved round to the left and away from the Court building. There were single-storey buildings here in among the trees and, suddenly, a large car park. The whole scene was reminiscent of the entrance to, say, a national park in America, and I almost expected to see camper vans and backpackers pulling on hiking boots.
But there was nowhere to hike to, because the eyeline was irresistibly pulled towards the large stone wall that seemed to run east-west forever, so suddenly did you see it that it just didn’t seem real. It was almost as if it was a façade; a prop for a movie set near the Great Wall of China, or maybe a reworking of Gormenghast. For some reason, the walls didn’t look real. Somehow they just weren’t in the right place. It was almost as if they were a long way away in the distance and only seemed to be here and up close. The scale of things was deceiving, and there was probably a local legend that no matter how hard you threw, you could never get a stone or a cricket ball to reach them.
And once I’d parked and killed Armstrong’s engine, it was so quiet it was unnerving. Somewhere on the other side of that wall were – on a bad day – maybe a thousand prisoners plus several hundred staff, secured by hundreds if not thousands of doors and thousands if not millions of keys.
‘You coming or what?’
Spider rapped on Armstrong’s window with his knuckles and then opened the door for me.
I got out, patting my jacket pockets to make sure I had everything I needed and didn’t have anything forbidden.
‘Don’t forget to lock the cab,’ said Spider. ‘There’s some dishonest folk about these days.’
Chapter Thirteen
Nice doggy, keep moving. There’s a good dog. Don’t sit here. Please don’t sit here.
Spider was as good as his word, and he steered me through the process in the Visitor Centre, where I presented the visiting order and my ID, had a photograph of my face taken with a Polaroid camera and a print of my right hand geometry taken with a machine that looked straight out of a science fiction movie.
I didn’t need Spider to tell me that all this was to ensure that it was me who walked in and me who walked out again – the same principle behind the fact that I was told to leave all my ID in one of the lockers available. But it was useful to get the odd survival tip, such as to leave my car keys and any other metal in the locker as well. ‘Anything that shows up suspicious on an X-ray or triggers off the metal detectors,’ as Spider had said. ‘Think what you have to go through at airports, then treble it.’
The most important piece of advice, though, I didn’t fully appreciate at first. ‘Do not, repeat not, start chatting up any of the other visitors. Keep your eyes on the ground. No smiling, no eye contact. Don’t talk to the women or the kids. Specially not the women.’ I had assumed this was to avoid confrontations of the You looking at my bird/wife/kids? kind once inside, and it seemed like good advice, so I followed it. After all, there were potentially a thousand very frustrated husbands the other side of that wall, which was a pretty scary thought.
Over two-thirds of the other visitors were women, and a few had small children with them whom they clutched like security blankets whilst answering with sullen monosyllables the questions of the prison officers registering their visits. None was very old, and two seemingly travelling together, one white, one black, wore PVC micro skirts, denim jackets with the sleeves cut off, day-glo yellow scrunchy hairbands around their wrists, and ankle boots with spiky heels. They laughed loudly at just about anything, swore profusely and screeched when they answered questions, adding ‘fuck’ to emphasise just a-fucking-bout every fucking word.
‘Diversion,’ Spider had whispered in my ear. ‘The two tarts will make a scene and get hauled off for a strip search and the Vaseline digit treatment.’
I had read, probably in some dubious ‘men’s magazine’, that the record for a woman visiting a prison was 27 wraps of heroin smuggled ‘internally’. I winced as I remembered that.
‘They’ll distract the POs while the carrier goes in,’ Spider confided. ‘The stuff’ll be on one of the quiet ones. Or one of the kids.’
I tried to resist scanning the faces of the other women, remembering what Spider had said about eye contact. Apart from the two garishly-dressed girl decoys, most had dulled, vacant expressions that gave nothing away except the fact that they had all been here before.
‘Some of them get two hours a month visiting,’ my tour guide hissed out of the corner of his mouth. ‘And it’s an hour and a half too much.’
And then it was time to leave Spider in the Visitor Centre and walk towards the main gates of steel and glass behind a bomb-proof outer door, and there were white-shirted prison officers, male and female, and we were told to form a line and have our VOs checked. While we waited in line, we all had plenty of time to read the big
notice that warned us not to try and smuggle drugs into the prison and how there would be an amnesty for anyone who dumped their stash in one of the bins provided before we got inside.
The first door was an airlock system, allowing two or three of us in there at a time, one door hissing closed behind us. Only when there were officers enough to deal with us on the other side did the second door open and men were directed one way and women another.
The search area was similar to the set up at an airport, in that there was a large metal-detecting portal in the middle of the room, which you obviously had to walk through, and an x-ray machine like they have for hand luggage; but the actual procedure was a tad more thorough. After going through it, I could understand why nobody had ever hi-jacked a prison.
I was told to take off my jacket and put it, along with anything from my trouser pockets, in a plastic tray to be slid through the x-ray. Then I was told to add my belt to the tray, which I hadn’t expected, and a ‘first-timer’ expression appeared on the faces of all the prison officers in the room.
Then I had to step through the detector door, tensing myself – as you do – for the inevitable buzzing sound as the nail file or the keys you’d forgotten about set it off. There was no buzz, although they made me stay in the detector frame whilst a burly male PO positioned himself about four feet in front of me and planted his feet apart, almost like an American football player waiting for a tackle. He signalled me forward with small ‘come on’ movements of his fingers and then asked me to spread my legs and stretch out my arms.
I think the proper expression is a ‘fingertip’ search, but I’m sure there were a couple of knuckles in there somewhere as he patted me down then asked me to turn round so he could do the same from behind. The hands didn’t linger on my crotch, but they made sure there was nothing in there that shouldn’t have been.
Then they asked me to stand over by the wall and take my shoes off. While the male officer who had patted me examined my best pair of Russell Bromley brogues (my only pair, actually), bending the soles, tugging at the laces, twisting the heels, a blonde female officer approached me, stretching on a pair of thin surgical gloves.