‘I’m sorry I’ve not managed more often,’ I said lamely.
‘Don’t worry about it, love,’ Debbie said. ‘If I didn’t have to go, you wouldn’t catch me within a hundred miles of the place.’
I refrained from pointing out she lived only half a dozen miles from the red-brick prison walls; I like Debbie too much. ‘How’s he doing?’
‘Not so bad now. You know how he is about drugs? Well, they’ve just opened this drug-free unit where you can get away from all the junkies and the dealers and he’s got on it. The deal is if you stay away from drugs you get unlimited access to the gym. And if you work out daily, you get extra rations. So he’s spending a lot of time on the weights. Plus the other blokes on this drug-free wing are mostly older like him, so it’s not like being stuck on a wing with a load of drugged-up idiots.’ Debbie sighed. ‘He just hates being banged up. You know he can’t be doing with anybody keeping tabs on him.’
I knew only too well. It was one of the things that united the two of us, superficially so different, but underneath disturbingly similar. ‘And time passes a lot faster on the outside than it does behind those walls,’ I said, half to myself.
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Debbie said bitterly.
In silence, I navigated my way through the city centre, catching every red light on Deansgate before we passed the new Nynex arena. It’s an impressive sight, towering over the substantial nineteenth-century edifice of Victoria Station. Unfortunately but predictably, it opened to a chorus of problems, the main one being that the seats are so steeply raked that people sitting in the top tiers have had to leave because they were suffering from vertigo.
I swung into the visitors’ car park and stared up at another impressive sight — the new round-topped wall containing Her Majesty’s Prison. The prisoners who destroyed half of Strangeways in a spectacular riot a few years ago ended up doing their successors a major favour. Instead of the horrors of the old Victorian prison — three men to a cramped cell without plumbing — they now have comfortable cells with latrines and basins. For once, the authorities listened to the people who have to run prisons, who explained that the hardest prisoners to deal with are the ones on relatively short sentences. A lifer knows he’s in there for a long time, and he wants to make sure that one day he sees the outside again. A man who’s got a ten-year sentence knows he’ll only serve five years if he keeps his nose clean, so he’s got a real incentive to stay out of trouble. But to some toerag who’s been handed down eighteen months, it’s not the end of the world to lose remission and serve the whole sentence. The short-term prisoners also tend to be the younger lads, who don’t have the maturity to get their heads down and get through it. They’re angry because they’re inside, and they don’t know how to control their anger. When cell blocks explode into anarchy and violence, nine times out of ten, it’s the short-term men who are behind it.
So Strangeways has got a gym, satellite TV and a variety of other distractions. It’s the kind of regime that has the rabid right-wingers foaming at the mouth about holiday camps for villains. Me, I’ve never been on a holiday where they lock you in your room at night, don’t let you see your friends and family whenever you want to and never let you go shopping. Whatever else Strangeways is, a holiday camp it ain’t. Most of the loudmouths who complain would be screaming for their mothers within twenty-four hours of being banged up in there. Just visiting is more than enough for me, even though one of the benefits of the rebuilding programme is the Visitors’ Centre. In the bad old days, visitors were treated so atrociously they felt like they were criminals too. It’s no wonder that a lot of men told their wives not to bring the kids to visit. It was easier to deal with the pain of missing them than to put them through the experience.
Now, they actually treat visitors like members of the human race. Debbie and I arrived with ten minutes to spare, and there wasn’t even a queue to check in. We found a couple of seats among the other visitors, mostly women and children. These days, a Visiting Order covers up to three adults, and small children don’t count. With every prisoner entitled to a weekly visit, it doesn’t take long for a crowd to build up. Nevertheless, we didn’t have to hang around for long. Five minutes before our visit time, we were escorted into the prison proper, our bags were searched by a strapping blonde woman prison officer who looked like a Valkyrie on her day off from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Then we were led through anonymous corridors and upstairs to the Visitors’ Hall, a large, clean room with views across the city from its long windows. With its off-white walls, vending machines, no-smoking rule, tables laid out across the room and tense atmosphere, it was like a church hall ready for a whist tournament.
We found Dennis sitting back in his chair, legs stretched in front of him. As we sat down, he smiled. ‘Great to see you both,’ he said. ‘Business must be slack for you to take the afternoon off, Kate.’
‘Christie’s got a cross-country trial,’ Debbie said. ‘Kate didn’t want me coming in here on my own.’ There was less bitterness in her voice than there would have been in mine in the same circumstances.
‘I’m sorry, doll,’ Dennis said, shifting in his seat and leaning forward, elbows on the table, eyes fixed on Debbie with all the appeal of a puppy dog. But Debbie knew only too well what that cute pup had grown into, and she wasn’t melting.
‘Sorry doesn’t make it to parents’ night, does it?’ Debbie said.
Dennis looked away. ‘No. But you’re better off than most of this lot,’ he added, gesturing round the room with his thumb. ‘Look at them. Scruffy kids, market-stall wardrobes, you know they’re living in shitholes. Half of them are on the game or on drugs. At least I leave you with money in the bank.’
Debbie shook her head, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘Haven’t you got it through your thick head yet that me and the kids wouldn’t mind going without as long as we’d got you in the house?’
Time for me not to be here. I stood up and took the orders for the vending machines. There were enough kids milling around for it to take me a good ten minutes to collect coffees and chocolate bars, more than long enough for Dennis and Debbie to rehash their grievances and move on. By the time I got back, they were discussing what A levels Christie was planning on taking. ‘She should be sticking with her sciences,’ Dennis insisted forcefully. ‘She wants to get herself qualified as a doctor or a vet or a dentist. People and animals are always going to get sick, that’s the only thing that’s guaranteed.’
‘But she wants to keep up with her sport,’ Debbie said. ‘Three science A levels is a lot of homework. It doesn’t leave her a lot of time for herself. She could be a PE teacher no bother.’
Dennis snorted. ‘A teacher? You’ve got to be joking! Have you seen the way other people’s kids are today? You only go into teaching these days if you can’t get anybody else to give you a job!’
‘What does Christie want to do?’ I cut in mildly as I dumped the coffees in front of us.
Dennis grinned. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He was only half joking. ‘Anyway, never mind all this bollocks. No point us talking to each other when we’ve got entertainment on tap, is there, Debs? Tell us what you’ve been up to, Kate.’
Debbie sighed. She’d been married to Dennis too long to be bothered arguing, but it was clear that Christie’s future was occupying all of her spare synapses. As Dennis turned the headlamp glare of his sparkling eyes on me, I could sense her going off the air and retreating into herself. Suited me, heartless bastard that I am. I didn’t mind that Debbie was out of the conversation. That way I could get to the point without having to explain every second sentence. So I gave Dennis a blow-by-blow account of my aborted attempt to nail the gravestone scammers as a warm-up to asking for his help.