Anderson’s cell was in B Wing. There were five wings at Wendover, A to E. They were ageing, red-brick structures, following the usual prison pattern of cells built on several floors, three high at Wendover, around a central, netted well. The net would catch anyone who jumped, fell or was pushed from one of the galleries, before they hit the ground.
Anderson hadn’t been inside for a while, but it all came flooding back quickly enough. Nothing had changed. The echoing acoustics of prison were what he noticed first. Everything was metal, stone or brick, with the qualities of a claustrophobic swimming pool. Any sound was instantly magnified, from the slam of a door to a barked command. From a whisper to a shout. Then there was the smell of prison. Canteen cooking and men’s bodies, and air that was never quite fresh enough, overlaid with pungent disinfectant. The noise was constant. It was multilayered. The jangle of the screws’ keys on their belt and the squeak of their shoes on the flooring, the shouting, even the quietest of conversations, added to the hubbub. Just about all sound was amplified in here. And he’d forgotten too, the colours of prison, the yellow paint. Prisons always seemed to favour yellow. Anderson guessed some study must have claimed it soothed people — either that, or it was cheap — and then there were the blue denim uniforms of the prisoners and the dark ones of the warders, the grey of the ubiquitous metalwork. Finally, there was the durability of everything: iron staircases, iron bars, iron doors, stone walls, reinforced glass. Everything was designed, unlike normal places with comfort or style in mind, so it couldn’t break or be broken, or smashed or used as a weapon. There was nothing soft in prison, nothing soft except flesh.
B Wing was controlled by a mass murderer. To be classified as such, you had to have killed at least four people and he just qualified for this. He had killed them without any ‘cooling down’ time and so was not deemed a serial killer. He was an old-timer called Andy Howe, who had butchered his father, his stepmother and two other people in one blood-drenched, murderous evening. He had used a machete. Andy was never going to be released. He’d been sentenced to a whole life tariff which meant he would never be freed unless by order of the Home Secretary. Nobody, Andy included, believed this would ever happen. This gave him a certain cachet in the small world in which he lived. He had quasi-celebrity status. Both guards and inmates were wary of Andy. In the fifteen years he had been inside, he had occasionally been challenged by other prisoners. It had been a mistake on their part.
He knew of Anderson by reputation and had gone out of his way to be helpful. Anderson was offered cigarettes, grass, home-made booze, porn, various drugs. His father’s illness had put Anderson off smoking anything, but he accepted alcohol and some Temazepam to help him sleep. Prison at night could be annoyingly noisy; sounds carried. Someone coughing could keep half the wing awake. He also accepted a very desirable job, cleaning the educational block. This job cost him another five thousand pounds to arrange. He could use his phone in there without being disturbed.
The educational facility was a brick-built building which stood alone in the prison grounds, unlike the other wings which were interconnected. It reminded Anderson of a village hall, if you pretended not to notice the bars on the windows or the metal door and the building’s unusually stout construction. It consisted of two rooms joined together by an arch, with a small kitchen and toilet and storage facilities in the mid-section. The walls of the educational block were decorated with prisoners’ art and motivational quotations from things they’d written.
‘Reform starts from within’ read one.
‘Rage = Despair!’ read another.
That kind of thing.
Anderson was able to use his time in the block to keep in touch with Terry, his brother, via his illegal mobile and generally relax, although he did do a certain amount of cleaning, just for form’s sake. He could, after all, be in for a very long time, but like all experienced prisoners Anderson lived in the moment. You never serve a ten-year stretch, it’s just one day. That’s all you need to get through. One day at a time. And if you can’t, do one day, do half a day, or do five minutes. That’s the length of your sentence. It’s a permanent ‘now’. If you started thinking of the future, it would be intolerable. It’s how you do a prison sentence. Anderson lived one day at a time. It was OK.
Peter Reynolds was not an experienced prisoner and he was being kept in conditions that would not be allowed in a UK prison. True, his cell was clean and he was reasonably fed and he had the dog, Tito, for company, but he was in total isolation. That would be regarded in the prison system as wrong, both from a practical point of view, because it tended to reinforce antisocial behaviour, and from an ethical point of view. His mood had changed from terror and incomprehension, to fear, to worry, but what he was feeling now, on this Sunday, was mainly excruciating boredom. The fear and the worry were still there, but they were like an ocean current below the surface.
He had scratched another two marks on his wall, which by his reckoning made today a Sunday and the current time, the afternoon. Incomprehension was another major part of what he was feeling. Peter was unable to think of a good reason for any of this. He had decided someone must be keeping him here for some sort of ransom, but probably not money. He knew they weren’t poor but he knew his mum didn’t have enough wealth to warrant this kind of attention. It had to be for some kind of unspecified favour or service. It must be something to do with her work. He only had a hazy idea what she did, other than travel a lot, but PFK Plastics made plastic things that went into machines. Maybe ‘they’, his kidnappers, wanted her to sabotage something or maybe ‘they’ wanted her to steal some plans. Maybe she didn’t really work for PFK but was a spy? It had to be something like that. It seemed implausible, but what other answer made any kind of sense? Nobody would kidnap him for himself.
Salvation for Peter came later that day when two books that had been in his schoolbag were put through the hatch, together with a snack. He now had Animal Farm to read and a book on European history. He never thought the time would come when he would want to read George Orwell, he preferred Artemis Fowl or the Cherub books, but now he opened the dystopian novel with real joy. Anything to take his mind off the situation he was in. He worried about Tito too; the dog must be going mad with the confinement. He certainly was. He hoped his mum would do whatever they wanted her to do quickly. He had a physics textbook too in his bag. He knew that if the day came when he was looking forward to reading that, then he was definitely in trouble.
He stroked Tito’s thick fur gently and the dog rolled on his back and stretched. ‘Poor love,’ said Peter. He scratched its stomach with his fingertips and the dog groaned in ecstasy. Tito must be craving exercise, he thought. Oh, Mum, please come. Please God, let her come soon.
It was the worst and longest Sunday of Kathy’s life. At least when Dan was dying she had Peter, she had friends, she even had Dan, although he was slipping away from her. She could at least touch him as he lay in a morphine haze, to try and keep the pain at bay. This day she was in limbo. She couldn’t think, she didn’t want to do anything. There was nothing to do. She sat on the sofa in jeans and a sweatshirt, trainers on her feet, just in case they found Peter, so she’d be ready. A WPC, she’d forgotten her name, another support officer, fielded any telephone calls on her landline. She monitored her mobile and her email. This wasn’t living. It was a living death.
Hanlon had run ten miles that morning, really pushing her body to extremes, relishing the pain and the tiredness, feeling it cleanse her spiritually. As she ran through the London streets and parks, she thought about the events of the day before. In Hanlon’s mind it was a question of personalities as much as of events and as her legs rhythmically moved and her feet bounded along the streets of London, traffic very quiet on the Sunday morning, she thought of them like a deck of cards, fanned out in her mind’s eye. Hanlon had a very visual memory. Whiteside, the handsome, bearded Jack of Clubs. The Knave of Hearts, Rabbit Bingham; Corrigan, the King of Diamonds; Ludgate, the Jack of Diamonds; the shadowy Queen of Spades, the woman responsible for abducting Baby Ali, her face veiled from sight, obscured by shadow. I’ll get you, you bitch, thought Hanlon. She was sure it was the same woman who had shot Whiteside. She did not believe he would have invited a man he didn’t know into his flat. There was another card too, the Joker, face down so she couldn’t see his face, Conquest’s man, or possibly woman, hiding their true colours behind a Met uniform, one of her colleagues. And behind them all, the Dealer, Conquest himself, with his deck of souls, supplier of children. Every step she took hardened her resolve; every beat of her heart strengthened her will. I will triumph, Conquest, and you will lose. It was as simple as that.