Heaven Read online

  12 noon

  Major Willis comes to SMU to hand back his red induction folder. He tells me that he’s sixty-four, first offence, GBH, sentence one year, and that he’ll be released in March. He was a major in the army, and after retiring, fell in love with a young Nigerian girl (a prostitute), whom he later married. She soon began to bully him, and to spend what little money he had. One day he could take no more, blew his top and stuck a kitchen knife in her. She reported him to the police. He will end up doing ten months (if he gets his tag), six of them at NSC.

  He’s puzzled as to why I got four years.

  2.30 pm

  A quiet afternoon. A fleeting visit from Mr Berlyn to check that I’m wearing a prison shirt as the press keep reporting that mine isn’t regulation issue. He checks the blue and white HMP label, and leaves, satisfied.

  9.00 pm

  Fall asleep in front of the TV. Doug says I snore. I’m writing five hours a day, on top of a thirty-four-hour week, and I’m not even going to the gym.

  DAY 108

  SATURDAY 3 NOVEMBER 2001

  I’ve written several times about the boredom of weekends, but something takes place today that turns the normal torpor into frantic activity.

  8.50 am

  The photographers have returned. They either missed getting a good shot yesterday, or work for the Sundays who want a ‘today pic’. I agree with the deputy governor, Mr Berlyn, to do another walk on, walk off, in order to get rid of them once and for all. He seems grateful.

  2.00 pm

  I’m expecting a visit from my son James. When I enter the visitors’ room I can’t see him, but then spot someone waving at me. It turns out to be my son. He’s grown a beard. I hate it, and tell him so, which is a bit rough, as he’s just travelled 120 miles to see me.

  James tells me that my legal team are concentrating their efforts on my appeal. Mr and Mrs Barker have confirmed that they heard the judge discussing me at a dinner party over a year before I was arrested. This could change my appeal.

  5.00 pm

  Doug and I are having tea in the hospital when Clive strolls in to announce that he’s moving to another room..

  ‘Why?’ I ask, when he has the largest space in the prison.

  ‘Because they’re fitting electrics into all the other rooms.’ I can’t believe he’d give up his large abode in exchange for a TV. ‘If you want to move in, Jeffrey, you’d better come over to the south block now.’ We all go off in search of the duty officer, who approves the move. I spend the next two hours, assisted by Alan (selling stolen goods), transferring all my possessions from the north block to the south, while Clive moves into a little single room at the other end of the corridor.

  I am now lodged in a room twenty-one by sixteen feet. Most prisoners assume I’ve paid Clive some vast sum of money to move out and make way for me, whereas the truth is that Clive wanted out. There is only one disadvantage. There always has to be a disadvantage. My new abode is next to the TV room, but as that’s turned off at eleven each night, and I rarely leave Doug in the hospital before 10.30 pm, I don’t think it will be a real problem.

  I now have an interesting job, a better room, edible food and £8.50 a week. What more could a man ask for?

  DAY 109

  SUNDAY 4 NOVEMBER 2001

  6.19 am

  Write for two hours before I join Doug at the hospital. We watch David Frost, whose guests include Northern Ireland’s Chief Constable of the Police Service Sir Ronnie Flanagan. While discussing the morning papers, Sir Ronnie says that it’s an infringement of my privacy that the tabloid press are taking pictures of me while I’m in jail. The pictures are fine, but the articles border on the farcical.

  A security officer later points out that two tabloids have by-lines attributed to women, and there hasn’t been a female journalist or photographer seen by anyone at NSC during the past three weeks.

  12 noon

  Over lunch I sit opposite an inmate called Andy, who is a rare phenomenon in any jail as he previously served ten years — as a prison officer. He is now doing a seven-year sentence, having pleaded guilty to smuggling drugs into prison for an inmate. Andy tells me that the only reason he did so was because the inmate in question was threatening to have his daughter beaten up. She was married to an ex-prisoner.

  ‘Did you fall for that one, Jeffrey?’ I hear you ask. Yes, I did.

  The police presented irrefutable evidence to the jury showing that Andy’s daughter had been threatened, and asked the judge to take this into consideration when he passed sentence. Although Andy claims he didn’t know what was in the packages, the final one he smuggled in, a box of Cadbury’s Quality Street, contained four grams of pure heroin.

  Had it been cannabis, he might have been sentenced to a year or eighteen months. If he hadn’t confessed, he might have got away with a suspension. He tells me that he knew he would eventually be caught, and once he was called in for questioning, he wanted to get the whole thing off his chest.

  Andy was initially sent to HMP Gartree (B-cat), with a new identity and a different offence on his charge sheet. He had to be moved the moment he was recognized by an old lag. From there he went to Swalesdale, where he lasted twenty-four hours. He was then moved on to Elmsley, a sex offenders’ prison, where he lived on the same landing as Roy Whiting, who was convicted of the murder of Sarah Payne. Once he’d earned his D-cat, Andy came to NSC, where he’ll complete his sentence.

  The only other comment he makes, which I’ve heard repeated again and again and therefore consider worthy of mention, is, ‘sex offenders live in far better conditions than any other prisoners.’

  DAY 110

  MONDAY 5 NOVEMBER 2001

  8.28 am

  When I was an MP I often heard the sentiment expressed that life should mean life. I am reminded of this because we have a lifers’ board meeting at SMU today.

  There are nine lifers at NSC and you can be fairly confident that if they’ve reached a D-cat, they won’t consider absconding. In truth, they’re all fairly harmless. Two of them go out each day to work in an old people’s home, one in a library in Boston and another for the local Oxfam shop.

  Linda, their probation officer, joins us for coffee during the morning break. She adds to the research I’ve pieced together over the past three months. I began my prison life at Belmarsh on a spur with twenty-three murderers. Lifers range from cold-blooded killers like Denis Nielsen, who pleaded guilty to murdering thirteen victims, down to Chris, who killed his wife in a fit of rage after finding her in bed with another man; he’s already spent fourteen years regretting his loss of temper. Nielsen began his sentence, and will end it, in the highest security A-category facility. He is currently locked up in a SSU (a special security unit), a sort of prison within a prison. When he moves anywhere within the prison, he is always accompanied by at least two officers and a dog, and he is searched every time he leaves his cell or returns to it. At night, he places all his clothes outside the cell door, and an officer hands them back to him the following morning. Nielsen told PO New on several occasions that it would have been better for everyone if they’d hanged him.

  Now that the IRA terrorists are no longer locked up on the mainland, of the 1,800 murderers in custody, there are currently only seven SSU inmates.

  Now Chris, who killed his wife, is at the other end of the scale. He’s reached D-cat status after eleven years, and works in the kitchens. He therefore has access to several instruments with which he could kill or maim. Only yesterday, I watched him chopping up some meat — rather efficiently. He hopes that the parole board will agree to release him in eighteen months’ time. During the past eleven years, he has moved from A-cat to D-cat via seventeen jails, three of them in one weekend when he was driven to Preston, Swalesdale and Whitemoor, only to find each time that they didn’t have a cell for him.

  All nine lifers at NSC will be interviewed today, so further reports can be sent to the Home Office to help decide if they are ready to return