A week later and I had attained an altogether new level of apoplexy. All other matters were thrown to the wind as I upped the ante to fifty grand and a brand new five series Beemer.
Both Martin and Spencer told me to drop it but that just made me more determined to track the painter down. I set about it with a vengeance pulling in favours that should have been left owing. I dedicated 24/7 to the hunt and left Martin and Spencer to run the business.
A month later I woke up to find the red lettering was back only this time it was more specific.
‘The End. One week.’
I checked the CCTV cameras that had been installed but all I got was a grainy black and white picture of someone on the lawn at three in the morning. I had the fit to end all fits and threw everything I had at tracking the painter down.
A week sped away and seven days later I was sitting in the office when I heard a commotion down stairs. I stood up, just in time to greet an industrial quantity of police officers as they flooded into the room.
I was handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car and taken to Paddington Green police station. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the most heavy-handed. I asked for my lawyer as soon as I could and was left in a holding cell until he arrived. I told him to get me out and he duly vanished to do my bidding. When, after an hour, he hadn’t returned I hammered on the cell door demanding to see him again.
Twenty more minutes of sitting in the cell and he reappeared — the look on his face was not positive.
I can still remember his opening words in glorious Technicolor:
‘Someone has dropped you in it. I mean SERIOUSLY dropped you in it.’
Sixteen months later I was sentenced to twenty years. The charges were as deep and wide as the Clyde. The last five years of my life were paraded in front of the court like an open book. Accounts, photographs, witness statements, copies of correspondence — you name it — it was thrown at me. It was as if someone had recorded my every thought and gesture over the last five years.
My lawyer told me that only someone on the inside could have done this. I thanked him for that particular pearl of wisdom with a smack round the head. I had figured that out ten minutes after they started the questioning.
When Martin took the witness box, under immunity from prosecution, I stood up in the court and told him he was dead. The judge held me in contempt but I was going down big style and didn’t give a fuck.
Martin poured out damning evidence like a fresh torrent and by the time he finished I was so screwed my lawyer told me to try and cut a deal. I refused. It would have meant grassing up on my colleagues and even under threat of a life sentence I wasn’t going to roll on people.
I entered prison on the fourth of November nineteen ninety three. I served fourteen years across five prisons and was released one year and three days ago.
By then I had lost everything. Dupree — I had by now discovered his name — moved into the patch and Martin and Spencer vanished. Some of my colleagues stayed on but most left or met messy ends.
I had only one visitor in fourteen years.
It was two years from the end of my stretch. With no one returning calls, no one visiting or no one answering letters, I had been well and truly cut off years ago.
My status in the prison was worth shit and I had received a regular stream of kickings — mainly from people I had crapped on as I had risen up the scum pond. You would think that it would have stopped as the years rolled by but there was always someone new that recognised me and took delight in reminding me of what I had done to them.
Visiting time had long since stopped being a hope and, with freedom on the horizon, I should have been in a better place but I was so depressed that I was almost revelling in my pain. When the guard told me I had a visitor I laughed at him. I hadn’t had a visitor since day one. When Rachel Score walked into the visiting room I laughed again. I could fathom no reason for the visit.
She sat opposite me in a dress that was three sizes too small with five-inch stilettos that she struggled to walk in. Her face was a cake of make up and her hair a badly cropped mush. I could still see what Martin saw in her, but only just.
She never said a word. She reached into her purse and took out a battered envelope and handed it to me. Then she was gone. I rammed the envelope into my pocket before a guard could see it and, back in my cell, took it out.
I opened it and inside there was a single sheet of typed paper.
‘Hi Riko,
I bet you didn’t expect to hear from me. I’m sorry I had to do what I had to do but things are not quite as they seem. I’ve no doubt that you are planning some sort of revenge on Dupree and I don’t blame you but, if I were you, I would leave it. Dupree is an evil fucker and fourteen years in prison is small change to what he could do to you if he wanted.
When you get out why don’t you have a pint for old times sake. I’ve left one behind the bar of our old haunt. If the pub is gone by the time you get out I’ve asked Stevie to take care of things.
Stay safe.
Martin’
The letter is in the diary next to you.
Look at the time eleven fifty eight and forty seconds. Time to go. While I’m away, read the diary. It might help explain some things. I won’t be long.
See you soon.
Chapter 21
Diary 2008
Dear Reader
Somehow Dear Reader sounds a bit naff but it will do. What follows is a diary — of sorts. I have worked from the digital recordings that I was given. As such the following is a transcription of conversations, monologue and other assorted meanderings. It wasn’t the easiest task I have ever performed and, at times some of the text may take a little license — all in the interest of keeping the whole thing lucid.
I’ve marked it all up in diary fashion, as the recordings frequently referred to the dates. As such it seemed logical to display it in this form.
You are probably reading this and wondering what I am gibbering on about but, hopefully, it will all make sense when you read the ‘diary’.
Enjoy.
Giles Taylor
Gordon Brown
59 Minutes
Tuesday January 1 ^st 2008
I don’t know why I’m using this thing. It has taken me a week just to work out how it operates. It’s a digital recorder and I’ve never used one before but, after fourteen years in prison, the world is a scary place and I need some order in my life.
It’s a tiny object and I’ve already discovered that I can keep it in my top pocket and record conversations without anybody knowing. I’m intending to keep an ‘aural’ record of the next few months — if I can work the bloody thing.
I was given it on Christmas day by the hostel and told it might help if I use it to note down my thoughts. It had been left by a well wisher and, as the new boy, I was trusted to use it and not hock it for drink money. I think the idea is a pile of crap but in a world of iPods, broadband, HD TV and SEO I’m like a polar bear in the Sahara — wrong place and lost.
I have a hangover — my first New Year hangover in nearly a decade and a half. A couple of the lads at the hostel managed to blag a few bottles of Buckfast and a half bottle of Glen’s, and we celebrated the birth of 2008.
I’m stunned at how little I have in the world. That bastard Dupree took everything. He owns my homes; he raided my bank accounts and even emptied my offshore account. When I stepped out of the prison gates I had the clothes I stood in and one hundred and eight quid in my pocket (the money I had on me when I was arrested).
I was given a bed in a hostel near Hammersmith for two weeks. Two weeks that I spent trying to get back on the ladder that I had fallen from — but it would seem that Dupree has ensured that the first rung is so out of sight that I may as well try and climb Mount Everest in a pair of slippers.