Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons

by Terry Daniels

  Chapter 13

  A SENSE OF DÉJÀ VU

  'Don't move! Keep your hands where we can see them. Stay exactly where you are.'

  It was eleven in the morning and I was still in bed. I had spent the last few days immersed in an amphetamine-induced haze and had no idea what was going on. Who were these rude, aggressive people and what were they doing in my room? I hoped it wasn't the UDA. What if they had spent the last few years tracking me down? The intruders were all in police uniform so I should have known straightaway that they were coppers, but your brain doesn't always work the way it should do when you're on a comedown. I wished that I had stayed out partying another day. Sobriety was scary.

  'We're here to conduct a thorough search of your property. We have reason to believe you're in possession of a large amount of cocaine.'

  It was the Old Bill. They weren't exactly my favourite people but at least they were unlikely to take me out the back and blow my kneecaps off. I remember feeling relieved but at the same time wondering what was going on. It was like the airport in Tenerife all over again.

  'If you do find any coke it's nothing to do with me,' I said. 'I'm out on High Court bail and my mum's boyfriend's put up ten grand. Filling my house with drugs is the last thing I'd do.'

  'If you're in so much trouble anyway then why would you even give a shit?' the officer-in-charge sneered back at me. 'You're up to your neck in it as it is and you're still breaking the law. Sad really, ain't it?'

  Who did this bloke think he was? I honestly didn't have a single gram of cocaine in the house. He was going to be extremely disappointed when he did the search.

  The coppers carried out the most half-arsed drug bust that you could possibly imagine. Some of my dodgier friends from the rave scene had been raided before and told me that the Old Bill tore the place apart. Something definitely wasn't right. The officers didn't even use sniffer dogs and hardly moved a thing. Stranger still, they made me stay upstairs the whole time they were there, which is against police procedure. The drug squad are supposed to let you keep an eye on them so that they can't set you up.

  When I was finally allowed downstairs, I saw a strange man with a briefcase furtively leaving the house. Where did he fit into all of this? And what on earth was in the case? He had either brought something in or smuggled something out. Was the raid a ruse to plant some kind of listening device? When I thought about everything that had gone on, it actually seemed quite plausible.

  The Old Bill found a pair of weighing scales in my room and tried to make out it was proof that I was selling drugs. The scales weren't used for portioning out mountains of cocaine though; they were for weighing jewellery. I just wanted to know whether I was being ripped off or not when I was buying gold. When I told them this, the coppers looked dejected. I think that they were hoping I was Aylesbury's answer to Pablo Escobar.

  'You got lucky this time,' snarled a disgruntled officer.

  The drug squad had demolished my front door and broken part of the wall whilst forcing their way in so I asked them if they were going to pay for the damage.

  'We don't have to pay a thing,' came the predictable reply. 'We had intelligence from a reliable source that you were stashing drugs.'

  This meant that an informant had given them my address. For somebody as paranoid as me, it was an absolute nightmare. I found it hard enough to trust my mates as it was and now I had good reason to be suspicious because it looked as if one of them was trying hard to get me nicked.

  It was unlikely that I was the target of the raid because the police had sent an all-male drug squad and they normally send a policewoman to bust female suspects. I had an inkling that they might have been after one of my dodgy raving friends who occasionally visited. The mysterious man with the briefcase had been doing something in the front hall. Maybe he had hidden a bug in there in the hope of finding out who came and went.

  I removed everything that was in contact with the hallway wall and sure enough, there was a tiny hole behind one of the pictures. It looked as if it had been made with a drill. I began to panic. I had somehow become embroiled in another epic piece of dodginess. How did this keep happening?

  Word travels fast in Aylesbury. It's the type of town where everybody likes to gossip. My mates were no exception and by four o'clock that afternoon, a group of ravers had arrived at my house, looking to find out what the deal was.

  'I've been bugged,' I told them, still visibly shaken up. 'Somebody's put something in my wall.'

  Most people would have passed this off as paranoia but my friends were a little more clued-up. They knew full well that the Old Bill would go to any lengths to catch somebody who they thought was dealing large amounts of coke. Having my hallway bugged seemed a bit far-fetched but when you're hanging about with addicts, anything is possible. Rather than telling me that I was going mad, my mates were quick to offer advice. They said they knew somebody who had a bug detector and asked me if I wanted to borrow it.

  This was living proof that you can get hold of anything at a moment's notice if you know the right people. To your average, law-abiding citizen, a bug detector might sound like something out of a James Bond film, but it didn't come as much of a surprise to me that to me that somebody had one of these devices – there were a lot of dealers in Aylesbury at the time. I wouldn't say that it had any more of a drug problem than your average town; everywhere has its users and its dealers. If you're part of that scene, you could probably get your hands on a similar thing anywhere in the country.

  'Yeah that sounds like just what I'm after,' I said. 'I want to get to the bottom of all this. Drill marks don't just appear in walls. Something is definitely going on.'

  'Leave it with me,' my friend told me. 'I'll bring it round in a couple of days and we can find your bug.'

  By the time my mates came back with the machine, I couldn't wait to use it. It was a small, black, square box that resembled a Scalextric controller and was designed to beep when it passed over an electrical device that could potentially be a bug. I didn't know how to use it so I got my friend to do the honours and no sooner had she turned it on than it started going off. It was beeping right next to the drill hole, which meant the Old Bill really had been messing about with my wall. I felt a little panic-stricken but also strangely reassured. I could now take steps to remove the bug and make sure that my private conversations weren't the talk of the police station. I guess being paranoid isn't all that bad when people are actually listening in on you.

  I carried on hovering the detector over anything and everything and soon uncovered another bug, this time in my mobile. This was great; I wasn't even safe to speak to people over the phone. The police clearly didn't want to miss a single word I said. I wondered how many more devices I was going to find. My life had now transformed from an episode of Banged Up Abroad into a scene from Mission Impossible. I just wanted it to go back to the way it was before I ever got involved with drugs.

  I discovered the third and final bug in Mickey's car, which was parked outside the house. The police had obviously thought that it was mine and wanted to listen in on me whilst I was driving. They would be disappointed when they realised they had bugged a car belonging to someone who had never broken a law in his life. Maybe it would teach them to do their homework a bit better the next time they decided to play at being spies.

  I knew the bugs weren't aimed at exposing any criminality on my part because I hadn't done anything wrong apart from taking drugs. They couldn't have been targeted at my housemates either; they weren't even overly concerned by what had happened because they had nothing to hide. I wasn't about to let the coppers eavesdrop on my friends though, so I immediately rang up everybody that I knew and told them to stay away. The bug in the hall was easy enough to remedy. I just turned the TV up to full volume so that the coppers couldn't hear a thing. Now all I had to do was get rid of my phone and the Old Bill's attempt to intrude on my life would be a wasted effort.

  Even after I had rendered t
he bugs useless, I couldn't help but feel as if the police were somehow monitoring my every move, and also wondered whether they would up the stakes and do something else when they discovered that I was onto them. I propped a clothes horse and a coat stand up against the front door and curled up on the couch that night because I was paranoid that they were going to burst into my room to do another raid. This became my nightly routine. Sanity was slowly slipping through my fingertips. I found it impossible to relax and didn't trust a soul. All of the sunshine gradually ebbed out of my life until my world became pitch black.

  My fragile mental state grew even more delicate when I realised that an unmarked police car was posted outside my house. It was blindingly obvious that it was full of Old Bill because it was there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. My local pub was just around the corner from where I lived so I was always staggering about the streets in the small hours and whenever I returned home, the car was there, regardless of what time it was. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that I was being watched.

  I had no reason to worry because the only illegal thing that I was doing was taking base. If the police were hoping somebody was going to drop a kilo of cocaine off at the house then they were barking up the wrong tree. I might have had some dodgy people knocking on my door but I never got involved in their business. I should have felt reassured that there was nothing the cops could pin on me but they were making me feel guilty even though I hadn't done a thing.

  The coppers weren't the only people who were convinced of my guilt either. When Jack's mum found out that I had been raided, she went mental and pressurised him into stopping seeing me. Things had been fizzling out for a while but I was still gutted because he was a decent lad. It seemed as if everybody in the local area was talking about me and discussing my downfall.

  The only place that I could relax was work because I was able to throw myself into it and forget that I was Aylesbury's most wanted. I loved to clean. There is something about transforming a dust-ridden mess into a surface that could pass for a mirror that is infinitely rewarding. Whilst I was working I was no longer Terry Daniels, international fugitive; I was just a regular cleaning girl. It was the only small semblance of normality in my life and I didn't know what I would have done without it.

  Everything was going well at work until the day I was asked to clean an old folks' home in the nearby town of Princes Risborough. I remember thinking it was strange that I had been sent there on my own because the number one rule for cleaning places like that is that you always go in pairs so that nobody can steal things from the old people and try to blame it on the cleaner. I should have insisted on going with somebody else, but had a lot on my mind and wasn't thinking straight. This turned out to be a big mistake. I have an uncanny knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and this was certainly no exception.

  Chapter 14

  ARRESTED AGAIN

  The old folks' home was filthy. I don't know who was supposed to have cleaned it before me and what their excuse was, but all the walls were covered in a thick layer of grime. The place was in a state, but I was confident that I could leave it looking spotless, so I donned my rubber gloves, picked up the cleaning material and went to work straightaway.

  I worked my fingers to the bone to get the filth off the walls and did a really thorough job. It was another pay cheque in my pocket, which would allow me to drown my sorrows with speed and Malibu. I had fuelled my addiction to cleanliness; now it was time for me to feed my more destructive urges.

  After spending the night getting horribly drunk and high as usual, I dragged myself out of my pit and made my way to work. I had enjoyed the challenge of the previous day's cleaning session and hoped my boss would send me somewhere similar. As I approached the office, I caught sight of a young, jumped-up looking policeman standing at the entrance. Panic immediately set in. I knew that he was there for me and felt my knees go weak. Maybe the twenty-four hour surveillance that I was under had uncovered some minor act of wrongdoing. I wanted to turn around and run but knew full well I had to face up to whatever it was I was supposed to have done.

  'Are you Teresa Daniels?' the officer asked as I approached the door, a stern look on his face as if to say, 'You're for it now young lady'.

  He was quite attractive for a copper but had a rude demeanour to him.

  'Yeah, why? What's going on?'

  'I'm arresting you on suspicion of theft. Several credit cards have gone missing from an old people's home in Princes Risborough and I have reason to believe that you might be responsible. You don't have to say anything but anything that you do say can and will be used in evidence against you.'

  This was even more of a shock to me than the drug bust had been. I might have been a whiz addict and an alcoholic, but one thing I would never do is steal from the elderly. I couldn't even believe somebody would think that I could do a thing like that. It sickened me to the core.

  As the copper escorted me into the back of his car, I thought, 'Is this how my life is going to go on? Am I going to spend the whole time being ferried back and forth from police stations?' I was at the end of my tether. Every other week I was accused of something else. Somebody mistaking me for a drug smuggler was one thing, but getting nicked for thieving from an old folks' home was an entirely different matter. It was the type of crime that only somebody with no morals whatsoever would commit. Did the police honestly believe that I would stoop that low? It was difficult to take in.

  I was taken to High Wycombe Police Station and locked up in a dirty little cell with a toilet in the corner. By this stage I was in the depths of despair. The police were going to raid my house again. They wouldn't find anything but it was unfair on my housemates. They were caught up in my never-ending cycle of arrests, raids and interrogations. First I was a cocaine smuggler, then a terrorist, then a drug dealer and now the coppers were accusing me of robbing people's grannies. It was all too much to take.

  It sounds bizarre but one of the things that really got to me was the fact that I had cleaned the old folks' home so well. I had really put my heart and soul into my work and here I was getting nicked for supposedly fleecing the place. I felt angry that I was taking the rap for something that someone else had done. I was as much of a victim as the owners of the credit cards because somebody had set me up and I was paying for their dishonesty.

  'Who else was about at the time?' I asked myself, trying hard to work out who the real culprit was. I was usually very aware of my surroundings, which was probably a result of being both highly paranoid and wide-awake due to whiz. The fact that I was unable to recall anybody else being in the area made me doubt myself. I started thinking, 'Did I do it? Did I put something in my pocket by mistake?' It was ridiculous because I knew full well that I would never steal from an old folks' home but I was in a state of extreme anxiety and felt guilty even though I hadn't taken a thing.

  The police phoned up my mum and told her I had been arrested.

  'What's she done?' she asked, shocked that I was in trouble yet again.

  The copper read the charges out.

  'Oh, whatever. She hasn't done that,' scoffed Mum.

  If I had been accused of something else then it's possible she might have thought that I was guilty, but she knew full well that I would never steal from old people. At least somebody could be sure of my innocence. I was caught up in a whirlwind of self-doubt. Had I started stealing things without even realising what I was doing? My brain went into overdrive, attempting to figure out who else could have snuck in and taken the credit cards.

  Fortunately the law firm that was dealing with my extradition provided a solicitor, who was able to remind me how preposterous the allegations were. He had to travel down from London and wasn't best pleased with the police. As far as he was concerned, it was all a massive waste of time. He knew enough about me from what his colleagues had told him to know that I wasn't the type of person who would steal from the elderly. Now it was just a matter of co
nvincing the Old Bill.

  My interview was fairly one-sided because I was unable to answer the majority of the questions.

  'Who else was nearby at the time? Which other members of staff were present? Did you see anybody suspicious hanging around?'

  I had been far too immersed in my job to take in anything else. When you're cleaning a room, you don't usually scan the building for potential thieves whilst doing it. You tend to concentrate upon the task at hand. To be honest, somebody wearing a black and white striped jumper and carrying a bag labelled 'swag' could have strolled into the home and I would have carried on obliviously scrubbing away.

  'We didn't find anything in your house. You must have hid it pretty well', the copper told me, as if the lack of evidence was somehow proof of what a professional thief I was.

  My solicitor wasn't too chuffed at this. He looked as if he was going to explode. His face went bright red and the vein in his head seemed on the verge of bursting.

  'Shut up now,' he snapped. 'You've got nothing on her. Let the poor girl go.'