by Jan Needle
He banged the table.
‘Make no mistake,’ he said. ‘The prison system I’ve inherited is a mess, a parlous mess. A certain softness has been allowed to creep in, a sort of cancer. But I can promise you this, ladies and gentlemen. Things will be better very soon. That is why I was entrusted with this job. And you have my word on it!’
In a small way, it was a sensation. A minister of state admitting there was something wrong – a cancer, even! – and putting his money where his mouth was. An undercurrent of rare excitement was discernible as Sinclair went on, rapidly, to outline the bare bones of a strategy. A fact-finding mission round the prisons, an ‘open door and listening ear’ policy to the people at the sharp end, the governors, the officers, yes – even the prisoners themselves. Then, perhaps, a tour of foreign systems, many of which, he readily admitted, made Britain’s way look very out of date.
‘At the moment,’ he concluded, ‘I’m in the early stages, I’m at the bottom rung. But I’m not afraid to tell you that something bold and forceful must be done. The failings in the prisons must be tackled, as must be the prisoners themselves. Too many get away with murder, so to speak, too many get sentences that seem truly laughable. Already, as I’m sure you will agree, there are straws in the wind. Ladies and gentlemen, I intend that wind to grow into a gale.’
‘These straws in the wind, minister?’ yelled one of the smarter ones. ‘Is that a reference to the Michael Masters case? He’s gone to Bowscar, hasn’t he? We thought he’d get slapped on the wrist. Were you behind it, minister?’
There was a hubbub of questioning. Sinclair waved his hand for silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I was not, of course, referring to a specific case. That would be most improper, and irregular. But I do think perhaps I may have…well, I solved Buckie, yes, I will accept some credit there. And the climate may be changing. Those are the straws in the wind.’
Afterwards, he drank a cold beer in Fortyne’s office. The civil servant, still cool, still detached, saluted him with his glass.
‘You weren’t at public school, were you?’ asked the Old Etonian. ‘Extraordinary.’
‘Why? Wasn’t I all right?’
‘One thing,’ said Fortyne. ‘You shouldn’t have kept calling them ladies and gentlemen. You weren’t talking to them, remember. You were talking to the cameras. To the world.’
‘Oh. Good point. But on the whole ... well, I was pretty pleased, weren’t you?’
The civil servant put his glass of Beck’s down on the green leather desk-top and removed his spectacles. He scratched his nose, then replaced them. His face cracked in a grin.
‘If you’re not careful,’ he said, ‘you’ll end up as Prime Minister. You were bloody brilliant!’
*
Kingsborough Gardens. Rosanna.
It was late when Rosanna Nixon steered off the M8 into Glasgow and headed for Hyndland. She was so tired the streetlights flashed before her eyes, and when the traffic lights on Hillhead Road turned green she did not move until a man behind her tooted angrily. Outside her flat in Kingsborough Gardens she parked the Renault with one wheel on the pavement, and fumbled clumsily for seconds before the key turned in her front door lock. She slammed the door behind her and switched the light on. Silence and the smell of home. She wanted to go to bed.
As she made herself a drink and picked through her correspondence, Rosanna pondered on her failure as an investigative reporter. She had alienated her news editor and friend, she had blown a day of leave, she had driven hundreds of miles, she had got nowhere. As Maurice Campbell had said the evening before, when she’d insisted on driving back to Buckie even if it meant him sacking her, ‘I had hopes for you, despite the daft degree. Don’t show me up to be a prat, eh hen?’ She knew now what he’d meant, she thought. She’d made herself a prat, and in Maurice’s eyes that made him one as well. It was the game.
The flat was in a basement, and the bedroom, at the front, was huge and empty. The bed – a mattress on the floor with a quiet brown counterpane – looked like a lonely island on the polished boards. Beside it were a book, a box of tissues, a telephone and an alarm clock. The overhead light was operated by a pull-cord, dangling between the pillows. Rosanna pulled her clothes off briskly, leaving her tee-shirt on. In bed, with her feet getting warmer, she undid her bra and worked it out through one sleeve. She lay on her back, and balanced the hot milk in front of her chin, and watched the steam curling to the ceiiing.
A failure. A hundred people spoken to (or dozens, anyway), more and ever more embarrassing visits to the police, attempts to speak to warders at the gates. Rosanna had buttonholed women she thought had been among the silent watchers on the pavement during the siege, and been rebuffed. She had questioned hotel staff about their guest lists and been warned off. She had checked the nearest hospital, and the Sheriff’s office, even the cemetery. And she had hung about the bar frequented by off-duty prison officers until she had been barred by the licensee with quite crude frankness. Everybody, it seemed, knew who she was and that she was snooping after something. In a small way, she became a laughing stock.
As Rosanna drifted into sleep, the telephone rang. She picked the receiver up half-bemused. It was a man’s voice. An English voice. Harsh, low and urgent.
‘Is that Rosanna Nixon?’
‘Yes. Who is that?’
‘You don’t need to know. Let’s say I’m one of the Mighty Shit Upon, shall we? The Army of the Damned.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Rosanna sat up, with a jerk. ‘Are you a soldier?’
‘Shut your mouth and listen. I’ve got a name for you, right? Jimmy McGregor. James Malcolm. Mean anything?’
‘No. Should it?’
‘Hah! Some of us here would like it to. Some of us think we’ve been shit on once too often. Medals? You must be bloody joking! We heard you might be interested.’
‘I am, I am!’ she said. ‘Is it ... was it Buckie?’
‘James Malcolm McGregor,’ said the voice. The tone had changed, to satisfaction. ‘You ask ’em if he’s still alive. You ask ’em who fell off the roof. You make ’em have it.’
‘McGregor,’ repeated Rosanna. She was beside herself. ‘Look, please, who are you? Can we meet? Did you say—’
The phone went down at the other end, and she shook her head, frustratedly. She slammed her own receiver down and jumped out of bed. She picked her clothes up, then dropped the dress and tights. She pulled her pants on, then a pair of jeans, from across the back of a chair. But she had nowhere to go.
‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck!’ she said, aloud. ‘I don’t know what to do! Oh fuck!’
She picked the phone up and began to dial Maurice Campbell’s number. Then she put it down. She went for her contacts book, to ring the Home Office, London, a number she ought damn well to remember but she couldn’t. Then she slung the notebook on the bed. She dragged her hand through her thick, short hair.
‘What should I bloody do?’ she said. ‘James Malcolm McGregor. What should I do?’
She dropped onto her bed, banging her bottom hard through the mattress with the impact. She hugged her knees to her chest and rocked.
*
Bowscar Prison, Governor and daughter.
Eileen Pendlebury sat in her car and watched her father emerge through the wicket gate and walk towards her along the narrow service road. It was almost midnight, but the road was blindingly lighted, for security. In the orange glare Richard Pendlebury, her father and the prison’s governor, looked smaller than his five feet ten, and stooped, and tired, and old.
Behind him, the prison wall was huge and surrealistic, stretching off interminably in its odd orange cocoon. The gates were so enormous that looking at them made Eileen shiver, despite the number of times she had waited for her father in front of them. They were old and black and solid, in a turreted mock-gothic gatehouse straight out of a nineteenth-century fantasy. Her father said they symbolised the prison service that he worked in, and p
erhaps, the British character. He was not exactly happy in his work.
Eileen leaned across and opened the passenger door as Pendlebury arrived. He bent and smiled at her, his eyes dark with fatigue.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t face the drive myself. I knew you wouldn’t mind.’
Eileen smiled, and started up the engine without speaking. It was not all that far to home – twelve miles – and her father had set out for the jail at six that morning. The job had been ever more crucifying of late, and he came home when he could, to keep his sanity, he said. Very frequently these days, he was staying in his suite in Bowscar. He hated it.
Had her father wanted not to talk, she would have kept her silence. In fact, they had driven through the former mining village and out into the open countryside before either of them spoke. Then Pendlebury sighed.
‘Eileen,’ he said. ‘If you go into government, I’ll cut you off without a penny. If you go into the Home Office, I’ll personally have you shot.’
She changed gear to negotiate a crossroads. Out on the trunk road, she opened up the engine. She did not bother to reply.
‘I’ve spoken to a man today,’ he said, ‘who I would guess is as intelligent as you or I. He is serving thirty five years for murder, and he rejoices in the nickname of the Animal.’
‘I’ve heard of him,’ said Eileen. ‘A Glaswegian, isn’t he? A sort of racial stereotype.’
‘A sort of unexploded bomb,’ rejoined her father. ‘When I say I’ve spoken to him, I tell a lie. I’m being overoptimistic. I spoke to him, I tried to speak to him, he’d just arrived. He ignored me. His lips were black and blue. I could hardly see his eyes.’
‘God,’ said Eileen.
For many minutes, Pendlebury did not speak again. He did not tell her that the man had been injected with Largactil, that he had been hardly capable of standing up, or that the receiving officers had tried to prevent the governor from seeing him.
McGregor, according to his papers, had come from Long Lartin, and before that, Hull and Frankland. Since crossing into England, he had been constantly on the move. Pendlebury felt ashamed to be a part of it.
‘Do you know what I’ve done with him?’ he said, at last. ‘On orders from on high? He’s in a strip cell. A cell with padded walls. To speak to no one, under any circumstances. He’s cut off from the world.’
Eileen shot a glance at him, then put her eyes back on the road. She reached across and touched his leg, a gesture of sympathy. Pendlebury had a vision of a big log fire quietly dying for the night, and a gigantic whisky.
Eileen, he knew, would have arranged it.
‘It’s just another coffin nail,’ he said. ‘It’s an unexploded bomb.’
*
Alice Grogan, Charles.
Alice Grogan was thinking how secure she was when Charles Lister came to call. She had moved apartments yet again, she had teed up Andrew Forbes, and she was safe. The only people who knew where to find her tonight were—
The window broke with a burst of glass and a splintering crash as the frame was pushed inwards. Alice almost screamed, then gave up. No one would hear her, no one would come. Alice had been around.
She knew it was Charles Lister, although he wore a mask. A balaclava helmet, only more so, with two small eyeholes and a mouth. He looked like a rapist from a nasty magazine. It was Charlie.
‘Hi, Chuck,’ she said. ‘I guess you just dropped by to kill me.’
She was sitting up in bed, naked, and she got out of it to stand and face him. She was very fine to look at, slim and muscular and full-breasted, with a landing-strip Brazilian. She was panting, which added to her beauty.
But maybe it was a rapist, she thought wildly. Just a common rapist, oh please God. Anything, just so long it wasn’t Lister.
But the man was not there for sex. He was there to kill. He pushed her violently back against the wall, beside the bed-head, and slid a long, thin-bladed knife up under her ribcage and deep into her heart. Alice felt it as a red-hot wire, followed by an electric shock. As he stepped backwards she fell onto her knees, then onto her face. She was moaning, gently.
‘Oh Chuck,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ She twitched, one time or two, then was still. It had all been over in two minutes.
FIVE
Chorlton Street Coach Station. Peter.
The young man in the cheap dark trousers and the nylon anorak lifted his damp feet alternately, and wished the coach would come. He’d been at Chorlton Street for forty minutes, and he was cold. Behind him, through the misted window of the cafeteria, he could see people drinking tea. When it came, he’d have one. Then get off home to Withington, and his basement. He had a lot more machining to do if he was to keep up to his schedule.
When the bus did arrive, he watched the people getting off with little interest. He’d been at the game so long that he could tell the ones who’d been visiting the prison. They were women, they were poor, they had children, usually screaming. Today seven got off, their hair and clothes still damp despite the coach being so late. So it was pissing down at Bowscar, too.
The woman Peter Smith was waiting for was last off. Ahead of her she pushed two toddlers, and she was carrying a sleeping baby over her shoulder. Like her, the baby was ill-dressed, fat and pale. One of the toddlers was bawling, and the other had a runny nose. The driver, with as much sympathy as he could summon, tried to get them down the steps without disaster, then pulled the buggy off behind him. He had no children of his own, but he unfolded it in three quick movements. He’d been on the prison run for eighteen months.
The woman’s face was moonish and exhausted. She had made an attempt at make-up many hours ago, when she’d set out on the monthly pilgrimage to see her man and keep their marriage and their hope alive, but the black around her eyes had run onto her cheeks from tears or rain. She was short-sighted. She gazed at Peter Smith for seconds before recognising him. She did not try to smile.
‘Want a brew?’ he said. And to one of the toddlers:
‘You. Get in there before I smack your face, right?’ The child, who knew Peter Smith and did not like him, went on playing with the rainwater sliding down a concrete pillar from the roof.
Inside, the woman sat at a red plastic table, spreading like a Buddha. The toddlers, unlooked-at, spread further to poke at people’s bags, touch sandwiches, and stare. Peter Smith brought two cups of tea and, shivering, wrapped both hands around his own. He brought nothing for the children.
‘Go all right?’ he asked. ‘No problems?’
‘Mam!’ screeched one of the toddlers. ‘I want a drink! I want a drink, Mam!’
The woman reached down and smacked the child’s legs, hard. A few people at tables nearby looked on, some rather shocked, but the place was filling up, as a coach from Birmingham had just disgorged. The child moved off, bubbling, and messed around the legs of travellers.
‘Is it drugs?’ she said, unexpectedly. Peter Smith looked at her, his eyes narrowing in fear and anger.
‘Shut your mouth!’ he hissed. ‘Do you want the cash or don’t you?’
The fat, moonish face flinched. She nodded. She sipped her tea.
‘Yeah,’ she said, very quietly. ‘I give it him. It cut me mouth, it were sharp. What were it?’
‘Right!’ said Peter Smith. ‘That’s it! You’ve had it, you have! That’s the last bloody time!’
‘No!’ she said.
‘Yes! And no cash, neither. You’ve bloody blown it now, you big fat fucking cow.’
He began to stand, watching her reaction. She was terrified. He continued the movement until her mouth began to open. In a second she would bellow, which he did not want. At the last moment, he threw his weight forward onto both hands on the table top. He glared into her eyes.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Get this straight. One more question, one more whinge, ever, and that’s the lot. I told you at the start. It’s not drugs, it’s nothing bad. Your bloody husband sent you out a note, did
n’t he? I read it out to you, didn’t I? It’s all right what you’re doing, it’s helping him. Don’t you want to help him?’
At the closest tables, people had looked at the couple, slightly curious. But the noise inside the cafe was phenomenal. Nobody could hear a word they said. Slowly, Peter Smith lowered himself into his seat. The woman sniffed. She drank her tea. When she next looked up, there was a brown envelope on the table between the man’s hands. With a stubby, oil-stained finger, he pushed it across towards her.
‘Thirty quid a go,’ he said, almost kindly. ‘It’s a lot of cash for bugger all, in’t it? Just do yourself a favour and keep your bloody nose out of what don’t concern you. I told you at the start-off, right? No questions, and you get the cash. Cause trouble, and you’re in the shit, you’ll wish you’d never been born. There’s a lot of nasty accidents can happen in a prison, aren’t there? And outside.’
The fat woman’s toddlers were coming back together, down an aisle. One of them was holding what appeared to be half a Danish pastry that had been trodden on. The other’s face was smeared with dirt. Peter Smith stood up.
‘Just keep your bloody mouth shut, right? I’ll be in touch.’
He turned and walked out. The Manchester rain was almost pleasant for a moment or two, almost a relief. But by the time he’d walked to Piccadilly to catch his bus, his hair, neck and shoulders were soaked through. Back at his big, empty house, there would be nothing welcoming, no woman, no hot meal, no central heating. Just the basement, with his lathe and other tools.
But he had to do the barrel next, which would be a laugh, at least. How could she get that in? In a cigar tube, up her fanny? He chuckled to himself. Size of her, she could bangle in a howitzer, no problem.
After he had paid his fare, Peter Smith began to think. What if he machined it in two sections, that screwed into each other? It would mean an extra trip to Bowscar, but there were three women on the job. Shit, why had that fat cow started asking questions? Peter Smith did not like that. Maybe her next go had better be her last.
