by Martina Cole
No one would take into account that Eros should have been in Broadmoor, that Brunos and the black man laBrett were intelligent and manipulative, that the men were bored out of their skulls with nothing to do and too much time to do it in. That the cons in here were basically the top echelon of the criminal world, looked up to by everyone in prison as real villains, blaggers and the like. That the men here were doing sentences longer than most marriages lasted and should in reality be treated with respect and asked to help in the running of the Wing, instead of being treated like animals with no privacy whatsoever - even the act of opening their bowels done in a toilet devoid of doors and while reading a paper, to give them a semblance of privacy. That they were sexually active and the only way open to them was with one another, which led to self-hatred, disease and deviance. That wives left them, divorced them, and stopped bringing their children in to visit. That the drugs which were growing more and more rife were their only escape from the boredom of the day, and their way of coping in a system which locked them up and threw away the key.
Rapists had their own prisons where people tried to help them; young offenders were helped. These men were just left. A whole sub-class of society left to rot away and gradually grow more bitter and more explosive as time went on.
No, no one would think of that aspect.
They locked them up, left them to stew and this was the upshot.
Hanningfield walked towards the men, brave now it seemed that everything was under control. And as he opened his mouth to speak, Georgio walked through the crush of men and threw the contents of the bucket into his face.
Hanningfield smelt the stench before he tasted the contents of the shit-bucket. His stomach seemed to rise up inside him as it rebelled against what he knew was inside his mouth, in his eyes, and covering his good suit.
All he could hear was the roar of mocking laughter as the men called out in jeering voices:
‘Shit up the Governor!’
‘Shit up the Governor!’
Over and over again.
Davey and Paddy walked into the lock-up and were amazed to see the two women kneeling on the floor.
‘What the fuck’s going on here?’
Paddy’s voice was loud in the empty garage and both Donna and Carol nearly passed out with fright.
The men walked over to where the two women knelt looking down at a red blanket.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Paddy’s voice was low, incredulous. ‘Did that little lot come out of there?’ He pointed to the hole before him.
Donna nodded and her eyes strayed to the bundles of money before her.
‘The dirty bastard, the filthy bastard! Did you know about this, Jackson?’ Paddy turned on Davey who was staring at the bundles of money in shock.
‘How the fuck would I know about this little lot? Do you think it would still have been here if I had?’
Carol said testily, ‘Where’s it come from, that’s what I’d like to know?’
Davey laughed softly. ‘I wondered what Georgio had done with Lewis’s blag money. He had to have taken it nearby, because he couldn’t have gone too far away. See, he didn’t have the time.’
‘The broken concrete was covered by the boxes. It was only as we moved them out that we saw it.’
Paddy was fuming. ‘We always moved the merchandise by night, he knew that. We never chanced moving it during the day. Georgio was going to come back for this, wasn’t he? And we’d none of us have been any the wiser.’
He shook his head in temper and with a sneaking respect for the man who had tucked him up in more ways than one.
‘When’s he due out, Donna? I really need to know the answer, right?’
She nodded, all the fight and the fear gone now because it was only money, nothing but money, under the concrete floor.
‘Today, Paddy. The jump’s today.’ She saw both Davey’s and Paddy’s look of shock and laughed loudly. ‘You realise what’s going to happen, don’t you? Georgio is going to leave the lot of us high and dry. He’s laughing up his sleeve at the lot of us.’
She roared with mirth, big tears rolling down her face at the stunned expression on their faces.
‘He has had the lot of us over, you as well as me. I wonder when he would have come for his money, eh? Knowing Georgio like I do, he wouldn’t have left this here for long. Maybe he was going to send his darling girlfriend Vida over, eh? Maybe that was the plan.’ She was laughing so hard, it was hurting her.
Carol placed an arm around her shoulders and helped her to her feet.
‘Come on, Donna, give over, will you?’
Paddy nodded. ‘Get her away from here, Carol. Me and Davey will sort this lot out.’
Carol sniggered hysterically. ‘You fools. We phoned the Old Bill - we thought this was a body. They’ll be here any second now!’
Donna started to laugh again, too. She was in stitches at the sight of the two men’s consternation.
Paddy and Davey were stunned.
‘You’re joking!’
Donna stopped laughing long enough to say, ‘Afraid not. I wish I was, Paddy. I wish to Christ I was.’
Paddy and Davey walked slowly away from the two women as if they were mad, then hearing the sounds of police sirens, ran from the lock-up leaving the two women there alone.
Donna and Carol heard the men’s car pull away. Looking at one another, they stepped closer together and, placing dirty hands around each other’s waists, hugged each other as if they were dancing.
Chapter Forty-Four
Dessie Brooks was bored; he was bored with looking at the women, and he was bored with sitting still. Every few minutes he fingered the small mobile phone in his pocket.
A woman walked past him, and he smiled at her. She ignored him as Dessie had expected, but it didn’t deter him from trying it on with every woman who took his fancy. That covered over eighty percent of the female population. Dessie smiled at them, from fifteen to fifty-five. He was a great believer in safety in numbers and the old adage: You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re stoking the fire. Dessie liked them married if possible, then you always had an out. Married women were less likely to complain if he was a bit rough with them, because they shouldn’t have been out with him in the first place.
Dessie liked this job, but it was boring. Even watching women became boring after a while.
Five minutes later Dessie struck pure gold. A woman of indeterminate age, wearing a black leather coat and high heels, sat beside him and actually smiled at him.
Their conversation took the usual course.
‘Never seen you here before.’
Dessie hadn’t sat near the ferry terminal before, not out of choice anyway, and never in the open. He usually travelled in the back of a meat wagon to prisons.
‘I’m here visiting the prison actually. A friend is in Albany.’
Dessie smiled widely. The friend was in fact her old man and they both knew it.
‘Too bad, love. What’s he in for?’
The woman pursed her lips and looked into Dessie’s face before answering, ‘He’s doing seven years for malicious wounding. But it wasn’t his fault.’
Dessie nodded.
‘The ferry should be in soon.’
As she spoke Dessie saw the sweatbox come into the ferry terminal and, turning to the woman, he said heartily, ‘Fancy a drink in the pub? The ferry won’t go for a while yet.’
The woman nodded. ‘My name’s Cathy, what’s yours?’
Dessie put his arm around her and walked her over to the pub. ‘My name’s Eugene, Eugene O’Doughall.’
The woman exclaimed loudly, ‘That’s a bleedin’ mouthful!’
Dessie, always hopeful, said, ‘We’ll see about that later, eh? Now you sit yourself down and order a drink while I go for a Jimmy Riddle.’
Dessie slipped outside the pub and made the call he was getting five hundred pounds to make. He dialled Eric’s mobile and said, ‘The box is in place. It’s five past one.’
Eric grunted and Dessie shut off the phone and went back to the lovely Cathy and the Sporting Life.
All in all, it hadn’t been a bad day.
Eric began the laborious drive to Devil’s Bridge in the skip lorry. He drove in the slow lane, allowing plenty of room for people to overtake him, even going so far as to wave them past as a good plant-driver was apt to do. His balaclava was rolled up like a bobble hat and pulled down over his brow and he was wearing the dark overalls.
He felt under the front seat for the Armalite and smiled to himself. He loved jumps best of all. He enjoyed the snatching of children being brought up by arsehole foreigners in arsehole countries, but it came a poor second.
It was excitement he craved, he adored. It was like being in the Falklands again or the Gulf. Not that he was in the Gulf with the British Army, or not officially anyway. A mercenary was called on by all sorts and the British government were not averse to a bit of a tickle now and again themselves. It was a habit they’d got from the Yanks. Something he had learned in Korea, something that had stood him in good stead and filled his pockets for over thirty years.
Behind him drove Jonnie H. and the McAnultys. The bikes were primed and ready to go, the weaponry all accounted for and within arm’s reach.
All they had to do now was arrive at the destination and wait.
And the waiting was the hard part.
The police were aware that a top security prisoner was on his way, and as usual in these cases they sat at roundabouts and crossroads along the route. The vehicle was not to stop at any time. On the sweatbox’s arrival at Portsmouth, it was allowed off the ferry and watched closely by a large traffic vehicle which followed the sweatbox to the next destination where it was handed over to a small Panda car.
From there the sweatbox picked up speed as it hit the A1 and the panda car followed at a distance of three vehicles. Unless you were in the know it looked like a normal police vehicle that could have been carrying C-grade prisoners to an open jail.
Only the police and the prison service knew who it was carrying. The two policemen in the Panda car were enjoying the drive and speculating on different things, matters that had nothing to do with the sweatbox before them.
Wives and kids, DIY and rugby were the talk for the two PCs, who were unaware that the sweatbox was to be jumped in less than thirty minutes.
Parking the skip lorry in the small slip road, Eric lit a cigar and sat back reading the Guardian, every so often looking into the mirror beside him to gauge the traffic. Jonnie H. had parked the Mercedes twenty yards away behind the bushes on a grass verge. It was practically invisible from the road.
They waited, the tension in the Mercedes mounting and the men getting jump sweat in their thick boilersuits and knitted hats.
Harry Hutchins and Freddie Carver sat in an L-reg Cosworth by the footbridge two miles down from Devil’s Bridge. Both were calm, not to say bored. Harry was to drive the Cosworth and Freddie was to drive the Granada. Both were experienced drivers, both had their creds and both were used to the pressure.
Harry was one of the best drivers in the business; he was also a good friend of Eric’s so consequently had worked all over the world on snatches, from Turkey and Egypt to Dubai. He had taken weeks driving the different roads around this area to find the route he wanted. To the casual eye he looked nondescript; with his sandy hair and eyebrows, and regular features, he looked like everyone’s dad or brother.
Freddie was small and dark. Like Harry he was a good driver and didn’t panic easily. And like Harry, he took the job seriously and was well-prepared for it; even though it was only his task to remove the McAnultys, not Georgio, he had arranged for them to pick up their car within five miles of the jump. The police wouldn’t know what had hit them.
All the men would disappear off the face of the earth.
The drivers included.
Peter Jones was singing as he drove the sweatbox along the A1. Even though it was against regulations, he always brought a small cassette-player with him and sang his heart out to country and western music, ignoring the shouts from the back of the van and the banging on the wall behind him.
‘Fuck ’em’ was his attitude. He was the main man in these cases. He knew it and the screws knew it.
He locked them in and he let them out. He was the Big Cheese and he loved every second of it.
Dolly Parton was next, singing I Will Always Love You. It was one of his favourites so he turned it up even louder, distorting Dolly’s voice to drown out the shouts from the box behind him.
Contemplating Dolly’s three biggest assets, one of them her voice, he sang his little heart out.
The three wardens and the prisoner all groaned as the first waves of music wafted through the grille.
Jones was still singing at the top of his voice when he saw the skip lorry crossing the road ahead of him and put his foot instinctively on the brakes. The skip lorry was parked across both lanes of the road, stopping all traffic.
He was too late to see the Mercedes van skid across the road behind him.
Closing his eyes, he realised he was caught up in a jump. Opening the grille behind him, he shouted through to the warders: ‘Keep your cool, we’re being jumped.’
He heard three voices shout out: ‘Turn that fucking cassette off!’
Jonnie H. was on the Panda car before they could call in. Thrusting the sawn-off shotgun in through the window, he shouted, ‘Out! Fucking out! Out!’
The constant shouting frightened the police officers. Getting out of the car, they watched as Eric ripped out their radio. He then removed their walkie-talkie radios and told them to follow him to the sweatbox.
A woman wearing a fur coat and driving a Mercedes Sports handed her keys over to Jonnie H. with the plea, ‘Please give them back to me. I really have to be home for the children.’
Jonnie laughed outright and threw the keys into the field beside them.
No one refused their car keys and everyone was quiet, watching the excitement around them.
In the sweatbox Peter Jones was feeling frightened but protected. He knew that the windscreen was bullet-proof and he sat with his arms folded, waiting for the jumpers’ next move.
His face soon took on a different expression when Eric walked towards him with the Armalite.
The three wardens in the back of the van heard the sound of the shot as it hit the windscreen, closely followed by two more. They were terrified.
Peter Jones pushed himself down in the driver’s seat, and the shots whistled past his head. He stayed down there, praying that the men would just go away and leave him alone. Suddenly, he smelt the petrol. Sitting bolt upright, he saw it being poured inside the hole in the windscreen, its fumes making him gag.
The wardens smelt it through the metal grille and one of them blurted out: ‘It’s fucking petrol! They’re going to burn us out!’
David Harker, the oldest and most intelligent there, said, ‘Then they burn him out as well, don’t they?’
The wardens looked over at the prisoner, who was laughing at them. Once more pandemonium ensued.
Eric was standing on the wheel arch of the sweatbox now and he had lit a piece of rag. He shouted out as loud as he could, his face screwed up in hatred behind the balaclava: ‘Get out of the van, or I’ll burn you where you fucking sit! I’ll burn you alive! Now GET THE FUCK OUT!’
Peter Jones opened the door of the van in double quick time. Dragging him out, Eric was now all reassurance and friendliness, the screaming hatred gone from his voice.
‘You just open the back of the van, mate, and you’ll be home tonight eating your dinner with the wife and kids, all right? Now take it easy, just do what we ask, OK?’
Fumbling with the keys, Jones began to open the back of the van. His hands were stiff with fright and he was having trouble remembering the combination of movements that opened the doors.
‘It’s a combi lock, mate. I have to remember the combination, the movement
s that open the lock, otherwise it’ll just jam.’
Eric, expecting this, said gently in his ear, ‘Just relax, mate, and open the door. No one will get hurt, all right? I give you my word.’
While Eric was handling the driver, the McAnultys had finished taking the car keys and were getting out the bikes ready for the off.
All they kept repeating, over and over, was: ‘Come on, come on,’ under their breath like a mantra.
The two policemen were lying on the ground by the sweatbox, their arms cuffed behind their backs. Listening out with all their might for names, accents, anything that might be of help.
Jonnie H. spotted a man getting out of his car. He was parked behind the Mercedes van and trying to see what was going on. He had a mobile phone in his hand. Walking over to him, Jonnie H. slammed the butt of the shotgun into his face. The man crumpled and Jonnie stood looking at the line of cars, daring anyone else to get out and have a look. The woman in the Mercedes Sports was crying.
Jonnie H. turned away and went back to the bikes, saying in an incredulous voice, ‘You always fucking get one, don’t you? Can’t people keep their fucking noses out of nothing?’
The man dragged himself back to his car, his face bleeding profusely.
The lock popped and the double doors sprang open. Inside the dimness of the sweatbox four faces were looking out.
Eric shook his head in amazement. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
Big Ricky, grinning widely, said, ‘Who the fuck are you? Come on, man, gimme a break. Let me out of here.’