Kicking Off

by Jan Needle

  In seconds, it was over. By the time Forbes had joined the Customs men, both police cars had burst once more through the lines of traffic and were screaming towards the outer gates. Jackson and his fellow officers were wild with anger, sick with hate, devastated. Their target, the man they had been banking on for weeks and weary months, had been lifted from underneath their noses.

  Police or no police, crooked or straight, the long game was fucked up. Charles Lister had been disappeared.

  SIX

  Home Office. Sinclair, Sir Gerald, Fortyne.

  Donald Sinclair was required, by the protocol of government, to be the world’s greatest living expert on Britain’s prisons within the blinking of an eye – and had boned up on much of it while getting in position to topple his predecessors. Over one long night he caught up on all the things withheld from him before, and knew exactly the direction he must take. He was a master of the art of taking secret briefings, Christian Fortyne the master of giving them. For the moment, he did not mention Rosanna Nixon to his boss.

  Journalists, among their other mind-games, like to bombard new boys with queries, hoping to find them out. Fortyne, having no reason yet to drop his new man in the shit, made sure the answers were always there, and good, and hard to follow up with googlies. He kept Rosanna in his pocket, because for the moment he did not see her as a threat. Too young, too naïve, too trusting. But he had her in his mind.

  To Sir Gerald Turner, Fortyne was the soul of efficiency and tact. He sat in on the meetings at the top – that is, between the Minister and Sinclair – and guided both men without indicating he was doing it. Some men in his position, if they did not know something, made it up and caught up later. No need for Fortyne to do such things: he knew. He knew everything.

  And all three men agreed the whole prison system had reached critical mass, it was teetering on the brink. It was not Fortyne’s job to save it, it was the politicians’ – but they knew he was the vital element. Among other things, he could stop them destroying each other, and themselves.

  They were in Sir Gerald’s office on a furious command. He had just, belatedly, heard about McGregor’s death. He wanted to know, quite reasonably, why he had not been told before. He was prepared, he said, to ‘go off the fucking deep-end. To go mad!’

  Sinclair’s palms began to dampen. But he looked at Turner calmly.

  ‘It was a tragedy,’ he said. ‘An awful tragedy. But quite honestly, until I’d seen my way through it, I thought it better left unsaid. I’m afraid I took Fortyne’s advice on that. I’m not blaming him, I agreed with every word. I didn’t want to burden you with the details.’ He paused. ‘Did I do wrong?’

  After a moment, the Home Secretary shook his head. ‘I will say this,’ he said. ‘It’s not the way I would have handled it. But once the accident had happened, there was little choice, I suppose. You couldn’t risk the whole shebang. You should have told me, though.’

  Sinclair accepted the rebuke.

  ‘I’ve had the idiot responsible carpeted,’ he said. ‘A small thing, but mine own. And I’m learning all the time, I promise you. I really mean it, though, we’re sitting on a pile of high explosive. I’ve taken more pre-emptive measures today, and I’ve got another package for tomorrow.’ He smiled, tentatively. ‘I know how busy you are. Do you want the proposals all in writing?’

  ‘Give me an outline.’

  Sinclair ran quickly through the list. He’d held secret talks with the Prison Officers Association, and surprised them with a little money – nothing publicised, nothing acknowledged – which should iron out some running sores and ensure better co-operation. He’d examined the military cover available for all the top-security jails, and meetings would be taking place as a matter of extreme urgency with senior personnel from the Army and the Royal Air Force. Mobile task forces, with agreed response plans, would be in position soonest. Coupled with the high-profile action to give known big-time criminals tougher sentences, which had proved so popular in the case of Michael Masters, there was to be a serious and sustained effort to cut sentences for petty and non-violent crimes, to free up space.

  ‘It may not be popular with the hang ’em and flog ’em nutters in the gutter tabloids, but I think that might be the least of all our problems. You’re the leading expert in the field, sir. I just hope you agree.’

  Sir Gerald smiled. He recognised attempted flattery from a mile off, but he actually did agree with Sinclair’s assessment. Unlike many of his fellows, he believed that the prisons needed emptying, and fast. The pressure had to come off, the boil needed lancing.

  ‘I’ll back you, Donald, all the way,’ he said. ‘The prison cauldron’s been simmering for years, and you seem to have sorted Scotland out in record time. I’ve told the PM that you’re the right man for the job.’

  ‘I’m planning to do a tour,’ said Sinclair, casually. Strike while the iron is hot, he thought. ‘Everyone is suffering at the moment, the jails are in turmoil here there and everywhere. We can’t follow the Russian picture, but other countries do it quite well. America’s prison population, pro rata, makes ours look anorexic, but they keep the lid on. I want to see it, talk to their leaders, pick their brains.’

  He thought he might be stepping out of line, getting too far ahead of the game. But Sir Gerald was quite sanguine.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Their pressure is ten times worse than ours, but they keep the lid screwed down extremely well. Give me a briefing paper when you can. We’ll show the country – and the press – that we’re tackling this head on. More iron first than velvet glove, as well. That’s the way to keep them sweet, believe me.’

  Smiles and nods all round. But when Sinclair got up to leave, the minister restrained him with a hand. He spoke like a headmaster.

  ‘One thing, my boy, one most important thing. When you do talk to the military, don’t expect them to do exactly what they agree to, will you?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ He shared a glance with Christian Fortyne, who merely smiled.

  ‘It was the SAS’, Sir Gerald said. ‘On the roof at Buckie. They denied it, I expect, and you wanted Major Edwards’ bollocks on a plate. Do understand you’re not going to get them, laddie, won’t you? It is really most unlikely.’

  He dropped his arm and turned away, allowing no further conversation. Sinclair was stunned for a moment, but knew he had to swallow it. So when did you know that, he asked himself, when did you know that they were lying to me? Whose game is this, anyway?

  *

  Bowscar. Richard Pendlebury.

  Richard Pendlebury, governor of HM Prison Bowscar, sat at his broad mahogany desk staring at the papers spread across his blotter. He touched one with a pen, then pushed it aside to reveal another. But he was not seeing them. He was waiting for the knock, for the union representative to arrive. For the next round in the gruelling fight to start.

  Pendlebury had been governor at Bowscar for four years, four years in which it seemed to him the struggle to maintain anything remotely resembling humanity and human dignity was being lost. The last twelve months had been the worst, no question, and the last few days the heaviest of all. This morning he had been forced to receive, against all protests and all logic, a man who had arrived in a condition that would have shocked a keeper in a bankrupt zoo. A man called Angus John McGregor.

  If he forced himself, the governor could remember the courage and determination he had been able to summon up the day he had first stood outside the iron-studded gates, hoping that despite the damp, the cockroaches and the sanitation, he could do some good. He firmly believed that the official line – that his job was to contain people, not brutalise or torture them – was in fact the truth. Unfortunately there was a faction among his officers who believed the opposite.

  As the years dragged by, other factors were thrown into the cement mixer that was concreting the grave of Pendlebury’s hopes. Bowscar Prison, built in 1872 for seven hundred men, held eight hundred and eleven when he came to it.
As the law and order clarions sounded ever louder, as the measures of repression grew, the numbers climbed inexorably. Now suddenly, according to a memo on his desk, the Prison Officers Association had mysteriously withdrawn a ban on numbers they had fought tooth and nail to keep – which meant his total would shoot up again, immediately. He already had sixty three one-man cells that actually housed four. God save us all, he thought.

  Unbidden, his mind turned to his wife, who had died two years ago through terror that the stress was killing him. A brisk knock at the door jerked him, mercifully, back to the present. The two officers, tight-faced and formal, had come on union business. Three of their members had reported that Pendlebury had undermined their dignity during a hearing in the matter of Prisoner 651304 Hughes, Alan, who had brought a complaint alleging assault in the D-floor sluice. The case had been a straightforward one, which the Board of Visitors had dismissed out of hand. Prisoner 651304 Hughes had been given three months loss of remission, plus the removal of televisual privileges for six weeks.

  Pendlebury listened to the staccato institution-speak with distaste. The officer delivering it, Christopher Abbey, was a man he particularly disliked. He was the mouthpiece for every grievance ever aired or known.

  ‘I take it,’ said Pendlebury, when Abbey had concluded, ‘that your members object to the opinion I expressed to the Board of Visitors when the evidence had been heard. Is that right?’

  The rigid, humourless mouth opened woodenly. ‘Prisoner 651304 Hughes is a well-known troublemaker. The case was a straightforward clash of evidential statements. Either the prisoner was lying, or our members were. Your comment, in our respectful opinion, cast doubt on their veracity.’

  The governor put the tips of his fingers together as if deep in thought. His statement had indeed cast doubt on the officers’ veracity, as it had been intended to. The officers, after all, were lying.

  ‘Alan Hughes,’ he said, ‘claimed that one of them, Senior Officer Burnett, had been racially abusing a coloured prisoner.’

  ‘Not true!’

  ‘Hughes further said that the officer was wearing a tie-pin representing a black man hanging from a tree. I told the Board of Visitors that I had seen the pin myself, six months ago.’

  Abbey’s handsome face flushed with anger.

  ‘It was not a black man,’ he said. ‘It was a monkey. Senior Officer Burnett comes from Hartlepool. Apparently, it’s a local symbol. Hughes is a troublemaker, and you backed him up. My membership is furious.’

  If it had not been so serious, it might have been funny, Pendlebury thought. These grown men expected him to listen to this tripe. He had expressly condemned the wearing of the badge on the first occasion it had emerged. A year before it had been golliwogs the officers had affected, enamel brooches worn on the inside of lapels. Outside the building many of them were quite open in their racism. But that, he was not expected to have noticed.

  ‘Senior Officer Burnett,’ said Christopher Abbey, ‘agrees with us that he has been professionally slighted. We have therefore been mandated to seek an apology. On this occasion, it has been agreed a verbal will be acceptable. Unless you would prefer to write it down.’

  Pendlebury stood. He was a tall man, but thin now, painfully thin. He overcame his stoop to stare contemptuously at the officers.

  ‘Alan Hughes is a strange man,’ he said. ‘But when he appears before me with a black eye and a broken tooth, accused of assaulting an officer, I tend to feel a small suspicion in my breast. However so, the Board of Visitors backed your Mr Burnett, despite my desperately insulting and wholly indefensible remark. They chose to decide that the prisoner was lying, and if that is not enough for you, Mr Abbey, I despair. But you can tell your colleague this: if I ever see him or any other officer wearing badges which are deliberately designed to insult again, I will move heaven and earth to have that officer sacked, or failing that removed. Do I make myself clear?’

  Pendlebury was trembling, inside and out. He was not afraid of men like Abbey, he was sick of them. He looked him in the face for a few seconds more, then sat.

  ‘I am a busy man,’ he said. ‘With me, this will go no further. I suggest you tell Mr Burnett and his friends to forget the whole thing. If there is nothing else, you may go. I am very busy.’

  Somewhat to his surprise, the two men left. No doubt, he thought, to report that the governor had apologetically admitted that his words had been ‘insulting and wholly indefensible’. So what did it matter? By tonight, perhaps tomorrow, he would have a thousand and twenty seven men inside. Inside this dustbin that the authorities were pleased to call a prison.

  He had murderers, addicts, sex offenders, yardies and islamists. He had a coterie of case-hardened professionals who thought the sun shone from their arseholes by God-given right. He had the feckless, reckless and the half insane.

  He had Angus John McGregor, too, the man they called the Animal. Why was McGregor here? Why to be held in total isolation? How much further could the fabric stretch before it snapped?

  It was not yet lunchtime, and the day wound out before him like a long, unfriendly road. There was a knot of tension in his stomach, and a sour taste around his tongue. Richard Pendlebury feared that the mood in Bowscar was becoming fissile. He had told the Home Office, had warned them many times, and the sum effect, he imagined, had been to confirm his image as a troublemaker and a pain. Perhaps the new man – Donald Sinclair, was it? – perhaps he meant the platitudes reported from his press conference, the promises to listen and to learn. Perhaps Pendlebury would try again, just one more time.

  His daughter Eileen wanted desperately for him to stop. To retire early, or just give up, before it was too late.

  Sometimes he thought that time was almost here.

  *

  Camberwell Green. Forbes and Jackson.

  Now that Andrew’s house in Stoke Newington was wide open, the two men moved their main operation to Peter Jackson’s flat for the night, at least. Where the widower’s lifestyle had embraced the seedy, the Customs man – who had divorced five years ago – had gone the other way.

  The place was tiny, a tiny bedroom, kitchenette and bathroom, but it was almost antiseptically clean. Jackson, unlike Forbes, had little interest in women any more. His eight years of marriage had been savagely unpleasant and had driven him (as he saw it) deeper and deeper into work. When his wife had gone, he had watched her take the house, the car, the money, everything. Luckily, they’d had no children.

  As an undercover investigator of total dedication, Jackson sometimes wondered how he’d ever teamed up with Forbes, let alone become a kind of friend. He spent his life in tortuous research, detailed detective work, hundreds of hours of surveillance, with occasional bursts of energetic pursuit and awful terror.

  In his head he carried details of shipping patterns, lines of international criminal communication, airline schedules. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of drugs in every state, from seedlings in the High Andes to the latest refinements designer-made for the West Coast millionaire. He spoke three languages fluently, and had intimate contacts in the police forces and Customs departments of Holland, France, America and Hong Kong. Andrew Forbes, on the other hand, was a slob.

  He knew his job, however, and – peculiar though it struck Jackson as a way to earn a living – clove to it with a half-amused mild passion. He was in a kind of limbo, neither a journalist nor an academic seeker after arcane truths. He did write articles, true, he did write books and provide background information to television documentary teams, but his driving force was neither money nor fame. He was interested, merely, in criminals and criminal corruption, with the British secret state his speciality. He was an amateur and a slob, and Peter Jackson liked him. They had met in a dockside pub in Portsmouth three years ago, and apart from drinking, the only thing they had in common was that neither wore a gun. Jackson’s job did not allow it. Forbes just thought they stank.

  In the hours after Lister had been lifted from the fe
rry dock at Purfleet, both men had worked frantically to find out who and why. The fact that police cars had been used did not necessarily mean the police had been responsible, but as they worked through their contacts to extract the vital pieces of the jigsaw it appeared most likely that they had. The cars were London-based, and both assigned to special uses or departments. Given the labyrinthine organisation of the Met, it was impossible to be more accurate than that.

  By the early hours both men were pale with exhaustion, coffee and alcohol. Jackson’s formica kitchen table was smeared with spilled ash, milk and beer, and the kettle had just boiled for the umpteenth time. Forbes was making instant coffee with a hand that trembled slightly, while Jackson sat licking at his teeth, which tasted rank.

  ‘So what we got?’ he said, as the coffee mug appeared before him. ‘What have we got, and where can we go from here, and is it time for bed, mother?’

  Forbes pulled his hand vertically down his face, rasping the stubble on his chin. He had stomach ache and a headache. He filled his mouth with coffee, wincing at its heat. Jackson continued, answering his own questions.

  ‘What we’ve got is this. He’s been lifted by the Mets, and they’re hardly likely to have done it to save us trouble, are they? What’s more, nobody – if they know where he is – is letting on. He’ll be jammed in a police cell somewhere on a holding charge, and shunted round a bit before he mysteriously escapes. That’ll be the scam, Andrew. Bet on it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Forbes. ‘Brilliant as ever, maestro. But why?’

  ‘You’re knackered aren’t you, chum? Brain’s gone. Your lovely black bit already told us why, didn’t she? There’s a ship out on the pond that Lister’s got to meet, OK? Alice put us onto Lister, but somebody told him she’d blown his cover. So Lister talks to someone else, and they whip him, by appointment, from underneath our noses when he lands in Purfleet after a trip to Europe somewhere. So now he can still meet the ship out on the ocean, can’t he, because we failed to lift him but some other buggers did. Next thing we’ll know is when he’s back in Florida, which we’ll get told by de Sallis.’