Hell (24 page)

When I leave my
cell, plastic tray and plastic plate in hand, I join a queue of six prisoners
at the hotplate. The next six inmates are not allowed to join the queue until
the previous six have been served. This is to avoid a long queue and fighting
breaking out over the food. At the right-hand end of the hotplate sits Paul
(murder) who checks your name and announces
Fossett
,
C., Pugh, B.,

Clarke, B., etc.
When he ticks my name off, the six men
behind the counter, who are all dressed in long white coats, white headgear and
wear thin rubber gloves for handling the potatoes or bread, go into a huddle
because they know by now there’s a fifty-fifty chance I won’t want anything and
will return to my cell empty-handed.

Tony (marijuana
only, escaped to Paris) has recently got into the habit of selecting my meal
for me. Today he suggests the steak and kidney pie, slightly underdone, the
cauliflower au gratin with duchesse potatoes, or, ‘My Lord, you could settle for
the creamy vegetable pie.’ The server’s
humour
has
reached the stage of cutting one potato in quarters and placing a diced carrot
on top and then depositing it in the
centre
of my
plastic plate. Mind you, if there’s chocolate ice-cream or a lollipop, Del Boy
always makes sure I end up with two. I never ate puddings before I went to
prison.

But today, Tony
tells me, there’s a special on the menu: shepherd’s pie. Now I am a world
expert on shepherd’s pie, as it has, for the past twenty years, been the main
dish at my Christmas party. I’ve eaten shepherd’s pie at the Ivy, the Savoy and
even Club 21 in New York, but I have never seen anything like
Belmarsh’s
version of that particular dish. The meat, if it
is meat, is glued to the potato, and then deposited on your plastic plate in
one large blob, resembling a Turner Prize entry. If submitted, I feel confident
it would be shortlisted.

Tony adds, ‘I
do apologize, my Lord, but we’re out of Krug. However,
Belmarsh
has a rare vintage tap water 2001, with added bromide.’ I settle for creamy
vegetable pie, an unripe apple and a glass of Highland Spring (49p).

An officer
comes to pick me up and escort me to the Deputy Governor’s office. Once again,
I feel like an errant schoolboy who is off to visit the headmaster. Once again
the headmaster is half my age.

Mr
Leader introduces himself and tells me he has some good
news and some bad news.

He begins by
explaining that, because Emma Nicholson wrote to Scotland Yard demanding an
inquiry into the collecting and distribution of funds
raised
for the Kurds, I will have to remain a C-cat prisoner, and will not be
reinstated as a D-cat until the police have completed their investigation. On
the word of one vengeful woman, I have to suffer further injustice.

The good news,
he tells me, is that I will not be going to
Camphill
on the Isle of Wight, but will be sent to Elmer in Kent, and as soon as my
D-cat has been reinstated, I will move on to Springhill. I complain bitterly
about the first decision, but quickly come to realize that
Mr
Leader isn’t going to budge. He even accuses me of ‘having an attitude’ when I
attempt to enter a debate on the subject. He wouldn’t last very long in the
House of Commons.

‘It wasn’t my
fault,’ he claims. ‘It was the police’s decision to instigate an inquiry.’

Association.
David (life imprisonment, possession of a gun)
is the only person watching the cricket on television. I pull up a chair and
join him. It’s raining, so they’re showing the highlights of the first two
innings. I almost forget my worries, despite the fact that if I was ‘on the
out’, I wouldn’t be watching the replay, I would be at the ground, sitting
under an umbrella.

I skip supper
and continue writing, which causes a riot, or near riot. I didn’t realize that
Paul has to tick off every name from the four spurs, and if the ticks don’t
tally with the number of prisoners, the authorities assume someone has escaped.
The truth is that I’ve only tried to escape supper.

Mr
Weedon
arrives outside my
cell. I look up from my desk and put down my pen.

‘You haven’t
had any supper, Archer,’ he says.

‘No, I just
couldn’t face it.’

‘That’s a
reportable offence.’

‘What, not
eating?’ I ask in disbelief.

‘Yes, the
Governor will want to know if you’re on hunger strike.’

‘I never
thought of that,’ I said. ‘Will it get me out of here?’

‘No, it will
get you back on the hospital wing.’

‘Anything but that.
What do I have to do?’

‘Eat
something.’

I pick up my
plastic plate and go downstairs. Paul and the whole hotplate team are waiting,
and greet me with a round of applause with added cries of, ‘Good evening, my
Lord, your usual table.’ I select one boiled potato, have my name ticked off,
and return to my cell. The system feels safe again. The rebel has conformed.

I have a visit
from Tony (marijuana only, escaped to France) and he asks if I’d like to join
him in his cell on the second floor, as if he were inviting a colleague to pop
into his office for a chat about the latest sales figures.

When you enter
a prisoner’s cell, you immediately gain an impression of the type of person
they are. Fletch has books and pamphlets strewn all over the place that will
assist new prisoners to get through their first few days. Del Boy has tobacco,
phonecards
and food, and only he knows what else under the
bed, as he’s the spur’s ‘insider dealer’.

Billy’s shelves
are packed with academic books and files relating to his degree course.

Paul has a wall
covered in nude pictures, mostly Chinese, and Michael only has photos of his
family, mainly of his wife and
sixmonth
-old child.

Tony is a
mature man, fifty-four, and his shelves are littered with books on quantum
mechanics, a lifelong hobby. On his bed is a copy of today’s
Times
, which, when he has read it, will
be passed on to Billy; reading a paper a day late when you have an
eighteenyear
sentence is somehow not that important. In a
corner of the room is a large stack of old copies of the
Financial Times
. I already have a feeling Tony’s story is going to
be a little different.

He tells me
that he comes from a middleclass family, had a good upbringing, and a happy
childhood. His father was a senior manager with a top life-assurance fund, and
his mother a housewife. He attended the local grammar school, where he obtained
twelve O-levels, four
A-
levels and an S-level, and was
offered a place at London University, but his father wanted him to be an
actuary.

Within a year
of qualifying he knew that wasn’t how he wanted to spend his life, and decided
to open a butcher’s shop with an old school friend. He married his friend’s
sister, and they have two children (a daughter who recently took a first-class
honours
degree at Bristol, and a son who is sixteen and, as
I write, boarding at a well-known public school).

By the age of
thirty, Tony had become fed up with the hours a butcher has to endure; at the
slaughterhouse by three every morning, and then not closing the shop until six
at night. He sold out at the age of thirty-five and, having more than enough
money, decided to retire. Within weeks he was bored, so he invested in a Jaguar
dealership, and proceeded to make a second fortune during the Thatcher years.
Once again, he sold out, once again determined to retire, because he was seeing
so little of his family, and his wife was threatening to leave him. But it
wasn’t too long before he needed to find something to occupy his time, so he
bought a rundown pub in the East End. Tony thought this would be a distracting
hobby until he ended up with fourteen pubs, and a wife whom he hardly saw.

He sold out once
more. Having parted from his wife, he found himself a new partner, a woman of
thirty-seven who ran her own family business. Tony was forty-five at the time.
He moved in with her and quickly discovered that the family business was drugs.
The family concentrated on marijuana and wouldn’t touch anything hard. There’s
more than a large enough market out there not to bother with hard drugs, he
assures me. Tony made it clear from the start that he had no interest in drugs,
and was wealthy enough not to have anything to do with the family business.

The problem of
living with this lady, he explained, was that he quickly discovered how
incompetently the family firm was being run, so he began to pass on to his
partner some simple business maxims. As the months went by he found that he was
becoming more and more embroiled, until he ended up as titular MD. The
following year they tripled their profits.

‘Meat, cars,
pubs, Jeffrey,’ he said, ‘marijuana is no different. For me it was just another
business that needed to be run properly. I shouldn’t have become involved,’ he
admits, ‘but I was bored, and annoyed by how incompetent her and her family
were and to be fair, she was good in bed.’

Now here is the
real rub. Tony was sentenced to twelve years for a crime he didn’t commit. But
he does admit quite openly that they could have nailed him for a similar crime
several times over. He was apparently visiting a house he owned to collect the
rent from a tenant who had failed to pay a penny for the past six months when
the police burst in. They found a fifty-kilo package of marijuana hidden in a
cupboard under the stairs, and charged him with being a supplier. He actually
knew nothing about that particular stash, and was innocent of the charges laid
against him, but guilty of several other similar offences. So he doesn’t
complain, and accepts his punishment.
Very British.

After Tony had
served three and a half years, they moved him to Ford Open, a D-cat prison,
from where he visited Paris, as already recorded in this diary. He then moved
on to
Mijas
in Spain, and found a job as an engineer,
but a friend shafted him – a sort of Ted Francis, he says – ‘so I was arrested
and spent sixteen months in a Spanish jail, while my extradition papers were
being sorted out. They finally sent me back to
Belmarsh
,
where I will remain until I’ve completed my sentence.’ He reminds me that no
one has ever escaped from
Belmarsh
.

‘But what
happened to the girl?’ I ask.

‘She got the
house, all my money and has never been charged with any offence.’ He smiles,
and doesn’t appear to be bitter about it. ‘I can always make money again,’ he
says.

‘That won’t be
a problem, and I feel sure there will be other women.’