Heaven

by Jeffrey Archer

  I fall asleep, but only because I haven’t slept for thirty-nine hours.

  DAY 436

  FRIDAY 27 SEPTEMBER 2002

  I wake to the words, ‘Fuck all screws,’ echoing through the air from the floor above.

  I haven’t eaten for two days, and force down a slice of bread and an out-of-date lemon sorbet.

  When they let me out of the cell (forty-five minutes a day), I phone Mary. An inmate from the landing above spits on me, and then bursts out laughing.

  Despite the fact that the officers are friendly and sympathetic, I have never been more depressed in my life. I know that if I had a twenty-five-year sentence I would kill myself. There have been three attempted suicides at Lincoln this week. One succeeded – a lad of twenty-two, not yet sentenced.

  Jason tells me that he’s heard I am to be moved to C wing. He says that it’s cleaner and each cell has a television but, and there’s always a ‘but’ in prison, I’ll have to work in the kitchen. If that’s the case, I’ll be stuck on A wing for however long I’m left in here. Jason passes over his newspaper. The Mirror gives a fair report of my lunch with Gillian and Tom Shephard; no one suggests I drank any alcohol. The Times adds that Martin Narey has said it will not be long before I’m moved. It cheers me up – a little, and then I recall the reality of ‘not long’ in prison. The press in general consider I’ve been hard done by, and the Daily Mail is in no doubt that the Home Secretary’s fingerprints are all over the decision to take revenge on me. I lie on my bed for hour after hour, wondering if I will ever be free.

  DAY 437

  SATURDAY 28 September 2002

  12 noon

  I’m standing in line for lunch wondering if anything will be edible. I spot an apple. I must remember to write to Wendy and congratulate her on the standard of the food at North Sea Camp. A prisoner, three ahead of me in the queue, gruffly asks for some rice. The server slams a ladle-full down on his tin tray.

  ‘Is that all I fuckin’ get?’ asks the inmate, to which the server replies, ‘Move along, you fuckin’ muppet.’ The prisoner drops his tray on the floor, charges round to the back of the counter and punches the server on the nose. In the ensuing fight, the server crashes his heavy ladle over the other prisoner’s head and blood spurts across the food. The rest of the queue form a ring around the two combatants. Prisoners never join in someone else’s quarrel, only too aware of the consequences, but it doesn’t stop them jeering and cheering, some even taking bets. The fight continues for over a minute before an alarm goes off, bringing officers running from every direction.

  By the time the officers arrive, there’s blood everywhere. It takes five of them to drag the two men apart. The two combatants are then frogmarched off to segregation.37

  5.00 pm

  I’m not eating the prison food. Once again, I have to rely on chocolate biscuits and blackcurrant juice. And once again I have a supply problem, which was taken care of at Belmarsh by ‘Del Boy’. I quickly discover Lincoln’s equivalent, Devon.

  Devon is the spur’s senior cleaner. He tells me with considerable pride that he is forty-one, has five children by three different women and already has five grandchildren. I tell him my needs. He smiles; the smile of a man who can deliver.

  Within the hour, I have a second pillow, a blanket, two bottles of water, a KitKat and a copy of yesterday’s Times. By the way, like Del Boy, Devon is West Indian. As Devon is on remand, he’s allowed far longer out of his cell than a convicted prisoner. He’s been charged with attacking a rival drug dealer with a machete (GBH). He cut off the man’s right arm, so he’s not all that optimistic about the outcome of his forthcoming trial. ‘After all,’ he says, flashing a smile, ‘they’ve still got his arm, haven’t they.’ He pauses. ‘I only wish it had been his head.’ I return to my cell, feeling sick.

  6.00 pm

  I find it difficult to adjust to being banged up again for twenty-two hours a day, but imagine my surprise when, during association – that forty-five-minute break when you are allowed out of your cell I bump into Clive. Do you remember Clive? He used to come to the hospital in the evening at North Sea Camp and play backgammon with me, and he nearly always won. Well, he’s back on remand, this time charged with money laundering. As we walk around the yard, he tells me what’s been happening in his life since we last met.

  It seems that after being released from NSC, Clive formed a company that sold mobile phones to the Arabs, who paid for them with cash. He then distributed the cash to different banks right around the globe, while keeping 10 per cent for himself.

  ‘Why’s that illegal?’ I ask.

  ‘There never were any phones in the first place,’ he admits.

  Clive seems confident that they won’t be able to prove money laundering, but may get him for failure to pay VAT.38

  During association, I phone Mary. While she’s briefing me on Narey’s attempts on radio and television to defend his decision to send me to Lincoln, another fight breaks out. I watch as two more prisoners are dragged away. Mary goes on to tell me that Narey is backtracking as fast as he can, and the Home Office is nowhere to be seen. The commentators seem convinced that I will be transferred back to a D-cat fairly quickly. It can’t be too soon, I tell her, this place is full of violent, drug-addicted thugs. I can only admire the way the officers keep the lid on such a boiling cauldron.39

  While I roam around association with Jason, he points at three Lithuanians who are standing alone in the far corner.

  ‘They’re on remand awaiting trial for murder,’ he tells me. ‘Even the officers are fearful of them.’ Devon joins us, and adds that they are hit men for the Russian mafia and were sent to England to carry out an execution. They have been charged with killing three of their countrymen, chopping them up into little pieces, putting them through a mincer and then feeding them to dogs.

  DAY 438

  SUNDAY 20 SEPTEMBER 2002

  11.00 am

  The cell door is opened and an officer escorts me to the chapel: anything to get out of my cell. After all, the chapel is the largest room in the prison. The service is Holy Communion with the added pleasure of singing by choristers from Lincoln Cathedral. They number seventeen, the congregation thirteen.

  I sit next to a man who has been on A block for the past ten weeks. He’s fifty-three years old, serving a two-year sentence. It’s his first offence, and he has no history of drugs or violence.

  The Home Secretary can have no idea of the damage he’s causing to such people by forcing them to mix in vile conditions with murderers, thugs and drug addicts. Such men should be sent to a D-cat the day they are sentenced.40

  12 noon

  I go to the library and select three books, the maximum allowed. I spend the next twenty hours in my cell, reading.

  10.00 pm

  I end the day with Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories To Be Read With The Doors Locked. Somewhat ironic. ,

  DAY 439

  MONDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 2002

  6.00 am

  Over the past few days I have been writing furiously, but I have just had my work confiscated by the deputy governor – so much for freedom of speech. He made it clear that his orders to prevent me from sending out any written material came from the Home Office direct. I rewrite my day, and have this copy smuggled out – not too difficult with nearly a hundred prisoners on remand who leave the prison to attend court every day.

  8.00 am

  After breakfast, I’m confined to my cell and the company of Jason for the next eight hours.

  6.00 pm

  Mr Marsh, a senior officer, who has a rare gift for keeping things under control, opens the cell door and tells me I have a meeting with the area manager.41 I am escorted to a private room, and introduced to Mr Spurr and Ms Stamp. Mr Spurr explains that he has been given the responsibility of investigating my case. As I have received some 600 letters during the past four days (every one of them retained), every one of them expressing outrage at the director-general’s judgment, thi
s doesn’t come as a great surprise.

  Mr Spurr’s intelligent questions lead me to believe that he is genuinely interested in putting right an injustice. I tell him and Ms Stamp exactly what happened.

  On Friday 27 September, the Prison Service announced that ‘further serious allegations’ had been made against me. It turned out these related to a lunch I had attended on Wednesday 25 September in Zucchini’s Restaurant, Lincoln (which is near the Theatre Royal) with Mr Paul Hocking, then a Senior Security Officer at North Sea Camp, and PC Karen Brooks of the Lincolnshire Constabulary.

  I explained to Mr Spurr that the sole purpose of the lunch as far as I was concerned was so that I could describe what I had seen of the drug culture permeating British prisons to PC Brooks, who had by then returned to work with the Lincolnshire Police Drug Squad. After all, I’d had several meetings with Hocking and or Brooks in the past on the subject of drugs. I did not know that prison officers are not supposed to eat meals with prisoners, nor is there any reason I should have known this. Moreover, when a senior officer asks a prisoner to attend a meeting, even in a social context, a wise prisoner does not query the officer’s right to do so.

  As for SO Hocking, I have been distressed to learn that he was summarily forced to resign from the Prison Service on 27 September under the threat of losing his pension if he did not do so42. PC Karen Brooks was more fortunate in her employers. Her role was investigated comprehensively by Chief Inspector Gossage and Sergeant Kent of the Lincolnshire Police, and she remains with the force. Chief Inspector Gossage and Sergeant Kent interviewed me during their later investigation of the same lunch, and made it very clear that they thought the Prison Service had acted hastily and disproportionately in transferring me to HMP Lincoln.

  As Mr Spurr leaves, he assures me that he will complete his report as quickly as possible, although he still has several other people to interview. He repeats that he is interested in seeing justice being done for any prisoner who has been unfairly treated.

  It was some time later that the Daily Mail reported that the Home Secretary had bullied Mr Narey into the decision to have me moved to HMP Lincoln.

  The sequence of events, so far as I am able to establish them, are as follows. The Sun newspaper telephoned Martin Narey’s office on the evening of Wednesday 25 September and the following day published a highly coloured account of the Gillian Shephard lunch. This provoked the Home Secretary to send an extraordinary fax (see overleaf) to Martin Narey demanding that the latter take ‘immediate and decisive disciplinary action’ against me. Narey, who had previously stood up against the press’s attempts to portray my treatment as privileged, buckled and instructed Mr Beaumont to transfer me forthwith to Lincoln. Narey also went on a number of TV and radio programmes to criticize me in highly personal terms in what the Independent on Sunday described as ‘an unprecedented attack on an individual prisoner’, especially in the light of later pious assertions that the Prison Service is ‘unable to discuss individual prisoners in detail with third parties’.

  Mr Beaumont found himself in even more difficulty: he had not asked me about the Zucchini lunch, so he could hardly make that the basis of an order to transfer me. In the event, the Notice of Transfer which he signed stated simply: ‘Following serious allegations reported in the media and confirmed by yourself that on 15 September 2002, you attended a dinner party rather than spend the day on a Community Visit in Cambridge with your wife, it is not appropriate for you to remain at HMP North Sea Camp any longer.’

  My licence did not restrict me to my home in Grantchester while on release. But, an e-mail was circulated within the Home Office which stated: ‘The prison [HMP North Sea Camp] had granted JA home leave but his licence conditions stipulated that he should not go anywhere else but home. In light of this, he has breached his licence conditions, and will face adjudication.’ At that time, the copy of my master passbook (a record retained by the prison which records all a prisoner’s releases on temporary licence) contained no such stipulation, nor did I ever face adjudication in respect of any breach of such a stipulation.

  Mr Spurr later said in a letter he was ‘unable to locate’ my master passbook when he conducted his investigation into my transfer, a fact which he acknowledged as ‘regrettable’. One has to wonder why and how this passbook disappeared. However, Mr Narey told me to stop writing to him on the subject as the matter was closed.

  DAY 440

  TUESDAY 1 OCTOBER 2002

  6.00 am

  A frequent complaint among prison officers and inmates – with which I have some sympathy – is that paedophiles and sex offenders are treated more leniently, and live in far more palatable surroundings, than the rest of us.

  On arriving at Lincoln you are immediately placed on A wing, described quite rightly by the tabloids as a Victorian hellhole. But if you are a convicted sex offender, you go straight to E wing, a modern accommodation block of smart, single cells, each with its own television. E wing also has table tennis and pool tables and a bowling green.

  During the past few days, I have been subjected to segregation, transferred to Lincoln, placed in A block with murderers, violent criminals and drug dealers, in a cell any self-respecting rat would desert, offered food I am unable to eat and I have to share my cell with a man who thrashed someone to within an inch of their life. All this for having lunch with the Rt Hon Gillian Shephard in the company of my wife when on my way back to NSC from Grantchester.

  Sex offenders can survive in an open prison because the other inmates are on ‘trust’ and don’t want to risk being sent back to a B-cat or have their sentences extended. However, these rules do not apply in a closed prison. An officer recently reported to me the worst case he had come across during his thirty years in the Prison Service. If you are at all squeamish, turn to the next page, because I confess I found this very difficult to write.

  The prisoner concerned was charged and convicted of having sex with his five-year-old daughter. During the trial, it was revealed that not only did the defendant rape her, but in order for penetration to take place he had to cut his daughter’s vagina with a razor blade.

  I know I couldn’t have killed the man, but I suspect I would have turned a blind eye while someone else did.

  10.34 am

  I have a visit from a Portuguese prisoner called Juan. He warns me that some inmates were seen in my cell during association while I was on the phone. It seems that they were hoping to get their hands on some personal memento to sell to the press.

  English is Juan’s second language, and I have not come across a prisoner with a better command of our native tongue; and I doubt if there is another inmate on A block who has a neater hand – myself included. He is, incidentally, quietly spoken and well mannered. He wrote me a thank you letter for giving him a glass of blackcurrant juice. I must try and find out why he is in prison.

  11.17 am

  An officer (Mr Brighten) unlocks my door and tells me that he needs a form filled in so that I can work in the kitchen. To begin with, I assume it’s a joke, and then become painfully aware that he’s serious. Surely the staff can’t have missed that I’ve hardly eaten a thing since the day I arrived, and now they want to put me where the food is prepared? I tell him politely, but firmly, that I have no desire to work in the kitchen.

  3.11 pm

  I look up at my little window, inches from the ceiling, and think of Oscar Wilde. This must be the nearest I’ve been to living in conditions described so vividly by the great playwright while he was serving a two-year sentence in Reading jail.

  I never saw a man who looked

  With such a wistful eye

  Upon that little tent of blue

  Which prisoners call the sky.

  5.15 pm

  Mr Brighten returns to tell me that I will be placed on report if I refuse to work in the kitchen. I agree to work in the kitchen.

  DAY 443

  FRIDAY 4 OCTOBER 2002

  The end of the second longest week in
my life.

  Jason (GBH) has received a movement order to transfer him to HMP Stocken in Rutland (C-cat) later this morning. He’s ‘gutted’ as he hoped to be sent directly to a D-cat. However, a conviction for violence will have prevented this. By the way, he and his wife did agree to get back together, and she will now visit him every Saturday.

  10.00 am

  An officer unlocks my cell door and bellows, ‘Gym.’ Twenty or thirty of us form a line by the barred gate at the far end of the brick-walled, windowless room. A few minutes later we are escorted down long, bleak, echoing corridors, with much unlocking and locking of several heavy gates as we make our slow progress to the gym situated on the other side of the prison.

  We are taken to a changing room, where I put on a singlet and shorts. Clive (money laundering) and I enter the spacious gym. We warm up with a game of paddle tennis, and he sees me off in a few minutes. I move on to do a thousand metres on the rowing machine in five minutes, and end up with a little light weight training. When an officer bellows, ‘Five more minutes,’ I check my weight. Twelve stone twelve pounds. I’ve lost six pounds in six days. I join my fellow inmates in the shower room and have my first press-button shower for a year, bringing back more unpleasant memories of Belmarsh.