He was in his late sixties but was still a formidable figure; short, broad and muscular. His head was bald but for a white tonsure of hair. His face was round and in the middle of it he wore a small white moustache. His steady grey eyes – eyes which had turned a thousand bowels to water as their owners stood in the dock waiting for him to open the case against them – peered out over half glasses.
He began to serve up. There were two fried eggs each for Anne and Hilly, a mound of bacon, a pork sausage, fried tomatoes and fried bread. It was, Anne thought, as though Watch had joined the household.
‘That’s what Tiggers like best,’ he said, shovelling a mound of food onto Hilly’s plate.
‘Just eat what you can, darling,’ Anne said hastily when she saw the expression on her daughter’s face.
She turned to her father. ‘This is far too much. We never have more than cereal and toast.’
‘Nonsense. You can’t do a day’s work—’
‘Father!’
‘—without a cooked breakfast.’
Anne stared hard at her father. Her father stared hard at her. Hilly looked back and forth from one to the other.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You know best.’ It was said in a way which gave it precisely the opposite meaning.
On the way to school Hilly said, ‘Best about what?’
‘Things.’
‘Are you and Grandpa having a row?’
‘No, darling.’
Not yet, she thought, but it was getting closer. And the whole business momentarily depressed her. But it was only momentarily, for she was essentially an optimist and now she said out loud, ‘Sufficient unto the day . . .’
‘What day? What is sufficient unto?’
‘It has to do with your grandfather.’
‘Oh.’
One of the ‘things’ that had to do with Henry was shopping.
‘If I’m going to be – what do they call it, a housemother? – then of course I must do the shopping,’ he had said.
‘But—’
‘Don’t be silly. I’ve shopped before.’
She had often helped Watch push a trolley round an African supermarket but could never recall her father being there. His shopping had been the occasional selection of a new shell briar pipe at Alfred Dunhill or a visit to his shirtmakers when he was in London on home leave. She simply could not visualise him buying toilet paper and lavatory cleaner.
‘How d’you think I managed when I retired?’ he said.
She gave him a list and he looked at it as though it were a statement from an unreliable witness.
‘You’ve got two sorts of washing powder down here,’ he said. ‘If we’re trying to save money then—’
‘They’re for different sorts of washing.’
‘I don’t see why—’
‘Father, please, if you’re going to help then don’t argue.’
Now, as she drew up at Hilly’s infant school, the shopping list was wiped from her mind. Hilly was being brave and clingy at the same time. ‘Look, there are lots of other little girls like you.’
Hilly didn’t seem to find this much of an argument.
The teacher was sympathetic. ‘Come along, Hilary. We’re building a bird-table. You’ll like that.’ Then to Anne. ‘She’ll be fine. Don’t you worry.’
‘Her grandfather will fetch her,’ Anne said. ‘He’s—’ For a moment she thought of describing her father and then abandoned the idea.
As she drove away she briefly felt she had committed a criminal act by leaving Hilly, but Kingstown was in the throes of the morning rush hour and she had to concentrate on the unfamiliar streets.
The prison was on the same slope as the castle but a mile further west. First there was a screen of cypress trees, then the grim Victorian walls with razor wire on the top. For a moment her nerve failed her. She drew up and sat with her hands on the wheel. She wanted to turn round, pick up Hilly and go back to London, but there was no way back.
She drove up to the barrier. A prison officer dressed in black looked at his clipboard and then at the number plate of the car.
‘Dr Vernon?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s your parking area over there. Don’t forget to lock your car. Then go to the main door and knock.’
‘Knock?’
‘That’s it, doctor, just knock.’
Chapter Three
The door was huge and arched. At shoulder height she saw a small black circular doorknocker which might have been found on any door in Kingstown. She took a deep breath and gave two firm knocks.
The results were appalling.
The knocks turned out to be crashing blows and instantly a small door, cut into the larger, snapped open and a uniformed officer said, ‘Gently, miss, or you’ll have the whole place down.’
‘I’m sorry, I had no idea—’
‘You a visitor? ’Cause it’s not time yet.’
‘I’m Dr Vernon. Dr Melville’s expecting me.’
‘Sorry, doctor, didn’t know who you were. Mind the step.’
She found herself in a narrow, gloomy entrance hall, at the far end of which was a steel barred gate. There were several uniformed men in the hall and a duty officer in a raised cubicle to her left which was cut into the old walls and protected by heavy glass. She was announced to him and he said, through a speaking slit, ‘I’ll let Dr Melville know.’
The hall was full of movement and the jangle and rattle of keys. Some bunches of keys were being handed in to the duty officer by staff going out, and some were being retrieved by staff coming in.
There was no human contact. A numbered tally was dropped into a slot in the wall, scooped up by the duty officer in the cubicle, who in turn dropped the matching bunch of keys into a return slot. It looked simple and foolproof. But she reminded herself that nothing was foolproof in here.
The rattle of these keys and the long chains by which they were attached to the waist, was constant, a kind of counterpoint to the clanging noise of the opening and closing of the barred gates that echoed through the building.
Bang! Bang!
Someone else had used the doorknocker. The noise in the stone-floored entrance hall was deafening. An elderly woman stood in the doorway.
‘I come to see Billy,’ she said. ‘Billy Sweete. I’m his grandmother.’
‘Visiting hours aren’t till this afternoon, love,’ said the same officer. ‘Unless he’s on remand.’
‘I come in the bus.’
‘Yeah, but is he on remand?’
She stared at him.
‘He burns things.’
‘Yeah, but has he been convicted?’
An officer came up to Anne. ‘Dr Melville’s on his way.’
‘Thank you. What does Special Black mean?’ She pointed to the words in large type on a notice board.
‘That means normal. It means—’
‘It means,’ a voice said behind her, ‘that we might have a quiet time for your first day.’
She turned and saw a tall man in a white coat. He was thin and angular with thick black hair in which there was an occasional silver glint. She estimated his age at late thirties.
As he spoke bits of him moved: hands, shoulders, feet. He never seemed to stand still but was like some charged particle, so filled with kinetic energy that only its partial release stopped him from fizzing away.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the nick.’
She followed him to the great barred gate. He opened it with a key in the bunch on his chain and she noticed that he did so in one fluid motion and wondered if she would ever reach a point where she would also do it like that, without thought, without registering the obvious symbolism. And then she realised she would have to or she might as well quit right now.
They walked down a long corridor, Melville slightly ahead of her. ‘This is really your induction week but since you’re staying on permanently at the end of it and I’m one short in the hospital, I’m afraid I may
have to throw you in at the deep end . . .
‘Oh . . . and by the way, if you’d like me to call you Dr Vernon I will or I can call you Anne . . . and you can call me Tom or Dr Melville whichever you like though I’d prefer it if you called me Tom. We don’t stand on ceremony; there are more important things to do.’
‘Please call me Anne.’
‘Right.’ He flung an arm at several doors. ‘This is all Admin. And over there is Reception.’ A thumb jerked. ‘Security in there. Don’t try to remember it all. It’ll come in its own time. So will the names and faces. So will the initials. We go in for lots and lots of initials . . . And you’ll see the Governor later, of course . . . And the Deputy Governor, except he isn’t called the Deputy Governor any more but the Head of Custody, or HOC . . . and then there’s the Head of Management Services, or HOMS . . . and the Head of Works, HOW . . . and the Head of Activities and Services, HOAS . . . and I’m no longer the Senior Medical Officer but the Head of Medical Services. Another HOMS, I suppose. Big changes in the service. But the more we change the more we stay the same.’
‘It all sounds a bit like Nancy Mitford.’
He stopped and turned and his thin face broke into a smile. ‘The Hons cupboard! Wasn’t that marvellous!’
Then he was off again, long striding, coat flapping. ‘Here we are.’ He unlocked a gate. ‘This is what it’s all about.’ He locked the gate behind her. ‘This is the nick. This is where it happens.’
*
It was the first gaol Anne had ever been in. There had been a few times in Africa when she had accompanied her father to police cells to bail out a servant who had been drunk the night before, but she had never been inside one of England’s classic Victorian houses of correction. She had seen interiors often enough on tv and what surprised her was how much like tv it seemed, with its cream-painted brick walls and the anti-suicide nets on each landing and the iron walkways.
But somehow she had not bargained for its busy-ness. She had imagined it as a place where the demarcations were neatly drawn; the prisoners locked away in their cells, the prison officers – she must remember not to call them screws – in the freedom of the wings.
It wasn’t like that at all. It was more of an ants’ nest with people moving in all directions and officers chatting with prisoners, and prisoners cutting other prisoners’ hair, and vacuum cleaners humming, and everyone seeming to be on the move. And she saw others, men in civilian dress who waved casually to Tom Melville and who were identified as a HOW or a HOAS or some other member of the ‘management team’. This was also something she had read in the bumf that had been arriving in the post for weeks. Man management, business management, financial management, health management: it all sounded very different from ‘slopping out’ and ‘doing your bird’.
Were the prisoners ‘clients’ now? Where was the danger, she wondered? Where were the shivs and the knives she’d seen so often at the movies? And a voice inside her head said: They’re here. They’re invisible, but they’re here.
As they moved through the wing Melville was constantly greeted by prisoners with, ‘Watcher, doc!’ and ‘Hi, boss! Got any drugs today?’ And there were muttered colloquies about headaches and valium.
‘Well?’ he said, coming to a stop at last.
‘It’s not . . . I thought . . . well, that the prisoners would be locked up and . . .’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just not what I imagined.’
‘We mix as much as possible. From the Governor down. We try to be visible. It lowers the level of stress. It’s called dynamic security.’
They had stopped where the four wings met; the very centre.
‘It’s one of D.S. Hill’s prisons,’ he said, waving his hands at the interior. ‘He also designed Lewes Gaol. Built in the 1850s.’ He stabbed the air. ‘Four wings: A, B, C and D. Built in the shape of a cross. Can’t you just see the Victorian ecclesiastical mind at work? The image of the Cross? Redemption through punishment?’
He turned. ‘This is A wing. Young offenders wing.’ He pointed to a dark, shut-off area. ‘Closed while they put in sanitation. And thank God for that. YOs are a terrible nuisance, they disrupt everybody in the prison.’
‘B wing.’ He flung out an arm. ‘Convicted men. Same as C Wing. You know where you are with them. Not like those over there in D wing: remand prisoners.’
Unlike those in B and C wings who were dressed in light blue prison clothing, the men on D wing wore their own clothes. Melville led her past them. Some were watching tv, others playing pool or table tennis. He said, ‘Aggressive, edgy, macho, yet inside they’re probably terrified of what’s happening to them and what’s going to happen. Watch yourself in D wing. They’ve got a lot to prove.’
As if to underline what Melville was saying, an unidentified voice from a group of young men said, ‘Fucking quack! Quack! Quack!’ Melville ignored the voice and let Anne out into the prison yard.
‘Does that sort of thing bother you?’ he asked. Before she could reply he went on, ‘If it does you’d better think twice before joining the service.’
‘I’m a big girl now.’
‘Right. Fine.’
They walked past the exercise yard with its high chain-link fencing. He pointed to several wires which were tautly stretched above the yard.
‘In case of helicopters,’ he said.
‘Helicopters?’
‘For lifting an escapee.’
‘Oh.’
‘There’s a good reason for everything in here. Prison’s a state of mind. It’ll come. Here we are. That’s us.’
He was pointing at a small red-brick building two storeys high and dwarfed by the immensity of the prison wings.
‘A world within a world.’
It was like a cottage hospital but with major differences. There was a ward with five beds, seventeen single rooms with tables, chairs and hospital beds, and three unfurnished rooms with suicide-proof windows.
‘Just the opposite to the NHS,’ she said. ‘You’ve got more private rooms than ward beds.’
‘That’s because most of my patients can’t get on with each other. I suppose eighty per cent that come in here are psychotic.’
There was an X-ray unit, a laboratory, a dispensary, and an administrative block.
‘We try to keep things simple,’ Melville said. ‘Anything complicated goes to Kingstown General. This is your room.’
The hospital had recently been refurbished with a new sanitation system and paint job. Her room was small, but light and got the morning sun. It contained a desk, two chairs, an examination couch, a washbasin, bookshelves and a metal cabinet.
‘Basic, but it’s all you can expect from the Home Office. Do you like the colour scheme? I chose it.’
It was pale green and white.
‘Yes, I do, very much.’
‘I suppose you had to say that. Anyway it’ll look less bleak when you get your things in.’ He paused and then said, ‘You’ll have to make allowances for us. We’ve never had a woman doctor in this prison. There are some female prison officers but you’re a first for us. Come and meet—’
A middle-aged man in black trousers and a dark blue regulation jersey with two pips on his shoulder-tabs came into the room.
‘Hello, Jeff, I was just coming to see you. This is Dr Vernon. Anne, this is Jeffrey Jenks. The Head of Nursing Services. Used to be called Hospital Principal Officer and I still call him my PO.’
They shook hands and she found herself looking into a pair of cold blue eyes. He was thin-faced with iron grey hair parted in the middle.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, but the words lacked warmth.
‘I was just telling Dr Vernon that we haven’t had a woman doctor here before and it’s all new to us.’
‘That’s right,’ Jenks said. ‘Very new.’
‘Jeff’s something of a misogynist, aren’t you Jeff?’
‘That’s right.’
It was said lightly but Jenks’s smile was as cold as his eyes.
He turned away from Anne and spoke directly to Melville. ‘We’ve got someone for you.’ She felt as though he had closed a door in her face. ‘Les says he’s worried about one of last night’s receptions. Claims he was beaten up by the police. Dr Symes recorded his injuries.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Over in D Wing.’
‘I’ll have a look at him in the medical room.’ Melville started to walk away, remembered Anne and said, ‘I’d like you to be in on this.’
She followed him across the yard to the main prison where an officer, a few years younger than Jenks and with only one pip on his shoulder, met them.
‘This is Les Foley,’ Tom said, introducing her once more. ‘Mr Jenks’s number two and my left hand. Isn’t that so, Les?’
Les smiled. This smile was warm, dimpled, almost motherly. He was plump and his hair had been lightened. His hand was soft and moist.
‘What’s it all about, Les?’
‘Don’t like the look of him, doc. He’s been in the thick of it with the police. Apparently he went berserk in the station and they had to restrain him.’
‘I love that phrase,’ Tom said, dryly.
‘I know. Probably went over the top. His face looks like it was trodden on. The police sent in their usual warning. Lots of boxes ticked off and Dr Symes two-ed him up.’
Tom saw the look of incomprehension on Anne’s face and said, ‘Prison-speak for the police sending in a form detailing his violent behaviour – which gets them off the hook for any injuries – and the fact that Jack Symes put him in a cell with another prisoner for his own safety. Go on, Les.’
‘He’s very down. I’m thinking suicide risk.’
‘What’s the charge?’
‘Attempted rape.’
‘Okay, I’ll see him in here.’
Anne followed Tom into the medical room. ‘This is where the daily sick parade happens,’ he said. ‘This is the real world. Don’t let the hospital fool you.’
The last time she had seen such a room used for medical purposes had been at an African clinic in Lesotho. There was a scarred grey lino-block floor, a stained washbasin, a metal table which served as a desk, and an examination couch.
Burn Out (Dr. Anne Vernon Book 1) Page 2
