Angel on the Inside (25 page)

It was only when we were on Bronze Age Way, which is in fact a brand new dual carriageway, that Spider spoke again.

‘You know, this was all marshes once,' he said wistfully. ‘Erith Marshes and Thamesmead Marshes.'

‘I'll believe you,' I said, though the modern road had been cut and banked so there wasn't a view; which was probably a good thing, as I knew that a huge sewage works lay between us and the river.

‘It's true. That's why Belmarsh is technically a floating prison, ‘cos it's built on marshland. Funny really, as back in Dickens' day they used to moor their prison hulks here. You know, similar to them in
Great Expectations
. Funny how nothing much changes, innit?'

‘Makes it a sod to tunnel out of, I guess.'

‘Don't think anybody's tried that. Wouldn't go over the wall either, if I was you,' he said like he was giving me good advice.

‘I was planning on using the front door,' I said. ‘Both ways. In
and
out.'

‘I was speaking figuratively in a metaphor,' he said grandly. ‘What I meant was, the top stones and the cornice of the wall aren't cemented in, they're just loose, lying there. So if you put a grappling hook or a rope ladder up there, fucking great lumps of stuff come down and land on your head. Nobody'll try that. Again.'

‘Shouldn't we be nearly there?' I asked him, uneasy because I hadn't seen any signs to or sign of a prison, just trees along the roadside and the occasional slip road into light industrial trading estates.

‘They don't believe in advertising much,' said Spider. ‘They call it London's best kept secret. Keep going down here, then just before the roundabout there's a sharp left turn down to the Magistrates' Court. Take that and follow the signs for Visitor Centre; it don't go anywhere else.'

Belmarsh is three things: a court, a jail and a high security prison. The high security prison is separate but within the prison confines, though the first thing you see, off to your right between the trees, is a side road to the court block with a lifting barrier and its own security men. The court works as both a Magistrates' Court and a Crown Court, and most everyone knows there is a tunnel from there into the jail. I say most everyone, but perhaps that should be everyone who ever drank in a pub in Plumstead or Woolwich when they were building the place back in the ‘80s, where disgruntled contractors and builders would try to flog you a set of the plans for 20 quid. It still catches out the younger, embarrassingly keen press photographers and TV cameramen who wait vainly for the shot of a well-known accused being put in the Black Maria or driven off to prison. If they're up before the beak in Belmarsh, they disappear down the tunnel without a grand exit. Never have the words ‘take him down' been used so literally in a courtroom.

I followed the signs saying Visitor Centre as the one-way road curved round to the left and away from the Court building. There were single-storey buildings here in among the trees and, suddenly, a large car park. The whole scene was reminiscent of the entrance to, say, a national park in America, and I almost expected to see camper vans and backpackers pulling on hiking boots.

But there was nowhere to hike to, because the eyeline was irresistibly pulled towards the large stone wall that seemed to run east-west forever, so suddenly did you see it that it just didn't seem real. It was almost as if it was a façade; a prop for a movie set near the Great Wall of China, or maybe a reworking of
Gormenghast.
For some reason, the walls didn't look real. Somehow they just weren't in the right place. It was almost as if they were a long way away in the distance and only seemed to be here and up close. The scale of things was deceiving, and there was probably a local legend that no matter how hard you threw, you could never get a stone or a cricket ball to reach them.

And once I'd parked and killed Armstrong's engine, it was so quiet it was unnerving. Somewhere on the other side of that wall were – on a bad day – maybe a thousand prisoners plus several hundred staff, secured by hundreds if not thousands of doors and thousands if not millions of keys.

‘You coming or what?'

Spider rapped on Armstrong's window with his knuckles and then opened the door for me.

I got out, patting my jacket pockets to make sure I had everything I needed and didn't have anything forbidden.

‘Don't forget to lock the cab,' said Spider. ‘There's some dishonest folk about these days.'

 

 

 

 

 

Nice doggy, keep moving. There's a good dog. Don't sit here. Please don't sit here.

 

Spider was as good as his word, and he steered me through the process in the Visitor Centre, where I presented the visiting order and my ID, had a photograph of my face taken with a Polaroid camera and a print of my right hand geometry taken with a machine that looked straight out of a science fiction movie.

I didn't need Spider to tell me that all this was to ensure that it was me who walked in and me who walked out again – the same principle behind the fact that I was told to leave all my ID in one of the lockers available. But it was useful to get the odd survival tip, such as to leave my car keys and any other metal in the locker as well. ‘Anything that shows up suspicious on an X-ray or triggers off the metal detectors,' as Spider had said. ‘Think what you have to go through at airports, then treble it.'

The most important piece of advice, though, I didn't fully appreciate at first. ‘Do not, repeat not, start chatting up any of the other visitors. Keep your eyes on the ground. No smiling, no eye contact. Don't talk to the women or the kids. Specially not the women.' I had assumed this was to avoid confrontations of the
You looking at my bird/wife/kids?
kind once inside, and it seemed like good advice, so I followed it. After all, there were potentially a thousand very frustrated husbands the other side of that wall, which was a pretty scary thought.

Over two-thirds of the other visitors were women, and a few had small children with them whom they clutched like security blankets whilst answering with sullen monosyllables the questions of the prison officers registering their visits. None was very old, and two seemingly travelling together, one white, one black, wore PVC micro skirts, denim jackets with the sleeves cut off, day-glo yellow scrunchy hairbands around their wrists, and ankle boots with spiky heels. They laughed loudly at just about anything, swore profusely and screeched when they answered questions, adding ‘fuck' to emphasise just a-fucking-bout every fucking word.

‘Diversion,' Spider had whispered in my ear. ‘The two tarts will make a scene and get hauled off for a strip search and the Vaseline digit treatment.'

I had read, probably in some dubious ‘men's magazine', that the record for a woman visiting a prison was 27 wraps of heroin smuggled ‘internally'. I winced as I remembered that.

‘They'll distract the POs while the carrier goes in,' Spider confided. ‘The stuff'll be on one of the quiet ones. Or one of the kids.'

I tried to resist scanning the faces of the other women, remembering what Spider had said about eye contact. Apart from the two garishly-dressed girl decoys, most had dulled, vacant expressions that gave nothing away except the fact that they had all been here before.

‘Some of them get two hours a month visiting,' my tour guide hissed out of the corner of his mouth. ‘And it's an hour and a half too much.'

And then it was time to leave Spider in the Visitor Centre and walk towards the main gates of steel and glass behind a bomb-proof outer door, and there were white-shirted prison officers, male and female, and we were told to form a line and have our VOs checked. While we waited in line, we all had plenty of time to read the big notice that warned us not to try and smuggle drugs into the prison and how there would be an amnesty for anyone who dumped their stash in one of the bins provided before we got inside.

The first door was an airlock system, allowing two or three of us in there at a time, one door hissing closed behind us. Only when there were officers enough to deal with us on the other side did the second door open and men were directed one way and women another.

The search area was similar to the set up at an airport, in that there was a large metal-detecting portal in the middle of the room, which you obviously had to walk through, and an x-ray machine like they have for hand luggage; but the actual procedure was a tad more thorough. After going through it, I could understand why nobody had ever hi-jacked a prison.

I was told to take off my jacket and put it, along with anything from my trouser pockets, in a plastic tray to be slid through the x-ray. Then I was told to add my belt to the tray, which I hadn't expected, and a ‘first-timer' expression appeared on the faces of all the prison officers in the room.

Then I had to step through the detector door, tensing myself – as you do – for the inevitable buzzing sound as the nail file or the keys you'd forgotten about set it off. There was no buzz, although they made me stay in the detector frame whilst a burly male PO positioned himself about four feet in front of me and planted his feet apart, almost like an American football player waiting for a tackle. He signalled me forward with small ‘come on' movements of his fingers and then asked me to spread my legs and stretch out my arms.

I think the proper expression is a ‘fingertip' search, but I'm sure there were a couple of knuckles in there somewhere as he patted me down then asked me to turn round so he could do the same from behind. The hands didn't linger on my crotch, but they made sure there was nothing in there that shouldn't have been.

Then they asked me to stand over by the wall and take my shoes off. While the male officer who had patted me examined my best pair of Russell Bromley brogues (my only pair, actually), bending the soles, tugging at the laces, twisting the heels, a blonde female officer approached me, stretching on a pair of thin surgical gloves.

‘Would you open your mouth for me, please?' she asked in a soft Scottish accent.

I was so relieved I almost made a witty remark, but remembered where I was just in time and did as I was told.

Her rubber fingers ran over my teeth and probed the roof of my mouth and down the sides of my tongue, then squeaked down the sides of my back teeth.

Her clear blue eyes met mine as she withdrew her hand and I thought for a moment she was going to compliment me on my teeth, which I do take care of, but she just said I could get my things and move into the waiting area.

Six of us congregated in a corridor while an officer locked one door behind us and then unlocked another with keys from a bunch chained to his belt. Through that door we were in an enclosed courtyard in the corner of which stood two more officers each holding Alsatian dogs on tight leads.

We were lead diagonally across the courtyard and were able to catch a glimpse of the upper floors of the cell wings and, beyond, the roof of the high security prison-within-a-prison. We could also see the outer walls from the inside and the ‘skyhawk' cameras on tall posts, which offered somebody somewhere pinpoint closed-circuit television pictures of us as we headed for another door bearing a sign saying ‘Visitors'.

The waiting area reminded me of a cinema foyer, though I couldn't think of a cinema I knew that had large signs asking customers to dump their drugs in the bins provided or announcements that the toilets were about to be locked. Being British, we formed an orderly queue leading to the double doors at the end. They had even painted a yellow line on the floor to show us where to stand, and everyone was behaving themselves; even the two micro-skirted foulmouthed girls had reduced the number of ‘fuckings' in their conversation by about a third.

It therefore seemed totally unfair when they set the dogs on us.

 

Keep moving, there's a good doggy. Move along, little doggy, move along. Just don't sit here ...

So it wasn't exactly a slobbering, growling, flesh-ripping hound. In fact, I was tempted to say ‘Frankly, Mr Baskerville, we expected something larger,' but I kept my lip buttoned and hoped the damned dog would as well. In any other set of circumstances, I would have been tempted to bend down and stroke him or pat his head, or find somewhere to hide him if Springsteen was in the vicinity. I've always had a soft spot for spaniels, though I was prepared to make an exception in this case.

Spider had warned me about the active and the passive sniffer dogs the prison used, tossing in at no extra charge that Belmarsh had the largest population of working dogs of any prison, bar one in Northern Ireland, as if that was a comfort. The active sniffers, an unholy alliance of Labradors and spaniels, were known as the Dogs From Hell, being bouncy, unstoppably enthusiastic and totally dedicated to finding hidden, abandoned or buried dumps of drugs. But it was the passive sniffers you had to wary of. They were mostly spaniels, trained from pups to sniff out drugs on a person. They didn't bark or slobber or whine or drag their handlers as if they were saying ‘Come on, get a move on, it's over here ...' The passives, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, just wandered casually in and out of people's legs so you wouldn't know they were there, until they found the scent they were sniffing for. Then they did an awful thing. They sat there and stared up at you with their big, brown spaniel eyes. They sat there, and no matter how hard you tried to send them a telepathic message to piss off, they just wouldn't move.

Come on, Fido, give us a break. Move along. Please. For God's sake, don't start getting comfortable.

The dog had been let off the lead by the door and had trotted along the length of the yellow line behind which we all stood, backs against a wall. Then the damned animal about-turned, trotted back about halfway down the line to where I was and sat down, his front paws up against the other side of the yellow line, like a sprinter on the blocks.

I glanced to my left as surreptitiously as I could. Next in line was a young black guy, his shaven head pressed right back into the wall, his eyes staring straight out front, his face expressionless. He had totally ignored the dog's presence, and wasn't that a sheen of sweat on his head?

Now he looked guilty, or at least more guilty than me. I could see that; why couldn't the bloody dog? Why did it have to park its bum right in front of me?

But looking down, resisting the twin urges to say ‘good doggy' and to kick the thing into touch, I thought that maybe the sniffing spaniel
wasn't
right in front of me. Actually, he was halfway between me and the person to my right.

To avoid any sudden guilty moves, I turned my head slowly as if my shoulders had been nailed to the wall, and eyeballed the woman in front of me in the queue.

I honestly hadn't noticed her before. She was a short, overweight White woman, maybe 35, which made her and me among the oldest there, and was wearing a crumpled and in parts threadbare grey pinstripe two-piece. She had large, black-framed glasses, wore no make-up, had her hair scraped back in a stubby bun held by a pair of garish yellow hairbands (the only splash of colour on her) and she clutched a dog-eared paperback Bible to her chest.

Surely not?

Then, down the line, I saw the two micro-skirted girls looking up the line towards me and the dog. Looking very anxiously.

‘Come with us, please,' said a voice.

Two officers, one male, one female, stood in front of me. Or were they in front of the woman next to me? My mouth was dry and I couldn't think of a way to phrase the question. The damned dog wasn't helping, just gazing balefully upwards and actually wagging its tail whilst still sitting there, making a swishing sound on the polished floor.

I knew there was something to say, but I couldn't think what or how to say it. I couldn't think at all.

‘Yes, you, madam,' said the male officer. ‘This way, please.'

I must have exhaled loudly or perhaps even giggled. I certainly felt as if I was in control of my bladder once more, and however boorish my response to the misfortune of others, it was nothing to the reaction of the Bible-holding woman next in line.

‘I've got my period!' she screamed. ‘That's what your fucking dog can smell!'

‘Please, madam –'

‘Don't you fucking touch me, you twat!'

‘Just come with us, my dear,' tried the female officer.

‘I'll have you for assault, you fucking dyke cunt!'

They each grabbed an arm and pulled the woman between them down the line and towards the doors we had come in through. She tried a half-hearted kick at the dog as it watched her, mildly amused, as she was hauled away.

I winked at the dog.

‘Good boy,' I said softly.

Down the line, Spider's two tart-decoys were staring openly now, their jaws sagging. The black one raised her arm and gave the finger to the backs of the officers, and the white girl joined in and did the same.

‘Let go of me, you twatting fucks!' the woman shouted, and naturally we all turned to watch.

Almost at the door, the woman wrenched herself free from the two officers (who had shown remarkable patience in not slugging her so far) and then, like a frisbee, she flung the Bible she had been clutching towards the big metal bin reserved for those who wanted to opt for the drugs amnesty.

Whilst the officers' attention was diverted and before they had a chance to get hold of her again, she had managed to put a hand up behind her head and flip off the two day-glow yellow scrunchy hairbands she had been wearing. The officers holding her didn't seem to notice what had happened, nor did anyone else in the queue, and once they had a fresh hold on the woman – who was still screaming and spitting in their faces – they began a determined march towards the doors.