Hell Read online

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

  4.00 pm

  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.

  6.00 pm

  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.

  7.00 pm

  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 six-month-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 eighteen-year 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 middle-class 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.’

  Tony is being considered for parole at the present time, but doesn’t get on well with his probation officer. He claims she doesn’t appreciate his sense of humour. He warns me to make sure I treat whoever they allocate to my case with respect, because this single individual can be the deciding factor as to whether you should be released or remain locked up in prison.

  ‘So what will you do once you are released?’ I ask.

  He smiles and extracts a file secreted at the back of his cupboard. ‘I’m going to sell agricultural equipment to the Senegalese.’ He produces sheet after sheet of financial forecasts on Senegal’s agricultural requirements, along with grants the British government will advance to help subsidize that particular industry.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you make a fourth fortune,’ I tell him after studying the papers.

  ‘Only women will stop me,’ he says. ‘I do love them so.’

  ‘Lock-up,’ is bellowed from the ground floor. I thank Tony for his company, leave his office, and return to my cell.