HMP Wormwood Scrubs was built by convicts.
Designed by Edmund Du Cane as a monument to prison reform after the abolition of overseas penal transportation, it was erected on a patch of west London that was, as the name suggests, nothing more than open scrubland. Construction began in 1874, with trusted convicts working out of a small prison of corrugated iron alongside a simple shed for the warders. Bricks were manufactured on site, and the permanent prison was finished almost two decades later in 1891.
Du Cane’s vision was a triumph and the Scrubs became a pioneering model for jails across the world. Its initial success, however, did not stand the test of time.
‘Did you know that Ian Brady and Peter Sutcliffe played chess here?’ Zara asked as I fed change into a meter down the road outside the prison.
‘The Moors Murderer versus the Yorkshire Ripper?’ I shook my head. ‘No, I’ve never heard about that.’
‘Sutcliffe found Brady chilling, or so the story goes. Can you believe that?’
I returned to my beaten old Jaguar with the ticket and placed it face up in the windscreen. ‘I wonder who won.’
Because of my impromptu walk to work, we’d been forced to take the Tube back to mine to pick up the car before coming west across the city. There was no public parking within the prison grounds, and when we walked through the outer gates we were momentarily held up at a booth where a rather old man was watching over the entrance and exit barriers. I hadn’t visited the Scrubs in a couple of years, but approaching the prison still reminded me of its cameo scene in The Italian Job. Nothing much had changed since Michael Caine famously walked out of those gates at the beginning of the movie. At the far end of a short driveway, symmetrical octagonal towers of red brick and Portland stone flanked the arched gateway, complete with moulded plinths, bands, arcades and cornices. It maintained the impression of a medieval castle, a fortress: a power to be reckoned with. Each tower boasted a huge bust of a celebrated prison reformer in a stone rondel – Elizabeth Fry to the left and John Howard to the right – to further emphasise the prison’s original dedication to changing a broken system.
Before the Scrubs, those convicts that hadn’t been hanged, flogged or sent to the colonies for their crimes were typically reformed using the silent treatment. As its social namesake still suggests, the silent treatment was based around depersonalisation through the allocation of a number and being forced to do physical labour in absolute silence. Du Cane believed that faith in God was a more practical route to rehabilitation. He had a chapel large enough to hold every inmate constructed within the grounds, and designed the wings to run parallel in rows from north to south so that each cell would see sunlight. These days there were cameras everywhere, perched soundlessly like monstrous crows.
‘Keith Richards was imprisoned here in 1967,’ I told Zara as we made our way through a series of gates. ‘The guitarist from the Rolling Stones.’
‘I know who Keith Richards is,’ she bit. ‘Pete Doherty was sent here as well.’
‘Doherty …’ I stroked my chin. ‘He’s one of those Antarctic Monkeys, right?’
She gave me a look; it was the sort I’d received more and more since slipping into the hopeless age of uncle jokes. ‘The worst thing is I don’t even know if you’re messing.’
I was deliberately trying to ease the tension that I could sense gathering around her like bad weather. I didn’t know how to bring the subject up, but she did it herself shortly after we’d been checked into the prison’s electronic system.
‘You can mention him, you know. Hazeem.’
We were sitting in an empty holding room awaiting a guard to lead us further into the building. There weren’t enough staff members to go around, it seemed, especially now that one had found her way onto my schedule. We’d dumped all of our belongings into lockers except for the standard: Zara’s loose case papers, plain paper for writing and two pens. Above us, there were two more cameras. Only one still had its lens.
Zara had mentioned her cousin Hazeem to me only once before, not long after we’d met, but I remembered the details well enough. An argument between teenagers had turned into a fight, and the fight had ended in a fatal stabbing. A case of mistaken identity led to Zara’s cousin being picked up for conspiracy to murder. His counsel talked him into entering a plea for a reduced sentence. It was a poor, idle defence and Hazeem ended up in the Scrubs.
‘Your cousin,’ I said. ‘He was sent here, but didn’t he live in … where was it again? Birmingham?’
‘He was studying medicine at UCL.’
‘Ah. How long was he in here …?’
‘Before he killed himself?’ She was staring blankly at the locked door ahead. ‘Five months. He pleaded guilty to a crime he didn’t commit on his shitty counsel’s shittier advice and died a drug addict in this shithole five months later.’
I looked down at my shoes. I didn’t want to be sitting here any more. I felt guilty for coming in the first place. Zara believed I was here to help, as if I possessed some mystical talent for gauging strangers that might earn her client bail or provide a winning defence by the end of our meeting. I hadn’t told her about the smuggling case because I hadn’t wanted her to feel used when I’d abruptly agreed to join her this afternoon. After a long pause, I spoke. ‘This client of yours … I trust you didn’t go out of your way to represent him as a way of, I don’t know, perhaps –’
‘He deserves the best defence I can give,’ she replied tightly, ‘same as anybody else. That’s all there is to it.’
Her voice was neither reproachful nor hurt. Just oddly flat, in a way I’d rarely heard in her before.
‘Good, because that’s all you can do, remember? Your best.’
I dropped a hand briefly onto her shoulder. It was supposed to be something warm and paternal, but without having had much experience of such things it landed heavier than I would have hoped, like a slab of meat dropped onto hard bone. Still, I saw a murmur of gratitude lighten her features, and that was about all I could’ve hoped for.
It was another ten minutes before we were led deeper into the prison. That’s where the cracks began to show. What was originally built to be the best prison in the world was now widely considered the worst in the country. We passed walls engraved with graffiti ranging from coarse doodles and slapdash gang signs to outright death threats. The floors felt grimy beneath my shoes and many of the lamps were dead in their fittings. Shattered windows were held together by wire-mesh innards, with broken shards available for exploiting.
Zara’s client wasn’t faring much better by the time we found him hunched over a table in one of the prison’s small conference rooms.
His face was buried in his arms and it took me a moment to realise that he was, in fact, fast asleep when we entered. Only when the door was shut behind us did he jump to attention, snapping upright in a kind of cautious terror.
‘Miss …’ He sighed, easing at the sight of her. ‘Wasn’t sure you was still coming.’ His face revealed the colourful leftovers of a fairly recent hiding. His left eye was swollen to a blackened slit and his dark skin blushed in nuances of yellow, green and purple across his cheekbones.
‘Andre!’ Zara gasped. ‘What happened now?’
‘What, this?’ The young man shrugged it off coolly as if he’d hardly noticed taking a good kicking. ‘Nothing. You know how it is.’
Zara dropped the papers to clasp a hand over her mouth, and leaned closer across the table to inspect the damage. ‘Tell me you’ve reported this!’
‘Oh, yeah.’ He managed a pained smile. ‘They’ve got some crack team coming down tomorrow. Bringing Sky News, cameramen, newspapers and shit … What do you think?’
‘Was it because of the case? Those other men who were –’
‘No,’ he interrupted sharply. His gaze turned onto me.
I was standing silently in front of the closed door with my arms folded, watching their repartee closely. He was obviously very happy to see her, and I couldn’t blame him for that. There is value in a familiar face that you don’t realise until you’re deprived of them completely. That was something I learned during my own time locked up.
Where Charli Meadows might have challenged society’s archetype of the inner-city drug dealer, Andre Israel had the unfortunate look – as far as any jury might be concerned – of a young man who had been rolled right out of a statistician’s paperwork: he was black, twenty-one years old, born and raised in Newham, east London, with a gold canine tooth in the left side of his mouth, a patchy, juvenile goatee and hair that might once have been stylishly faded, which had now grown out to a standard jailhouse fuzz. His plain T-shirt hung off his chest and shoulders as if he’d recently embarked on a crash diet or fallen gravely ill. His knuckles were clean; he’d had no chance to fight back.
‘Oh, sorry.’ Zara twisted round in her chair. ‘Andre Israel, this is Elliot Rook.’
He started a little but held on to whatever nonchalance was his standard setting. ‘The silk man from that serial killer madness?’
I arched my eyebrows disapprovingly at Zara. She’d already looked away, but I could see a flush warming her ears.
‘You working my case?’ he asked hopefully.
I cleared my throat as I took the empty seat opposite him, alongside Zara. ‘Officially: no. Miss Barnes is an excellent barrister. You’re in superb hands, I assure you. I’m here today as more of an adviser regarding any second chance you might have in applying for bail.’
‘Mr Rook is sort of like my informal mentor,’ Zara added. ‘He has a great mind for this and I was hoping, Andre, that you might be able to go through the night of your arrest once more with him. See if anything jumps out this time.’
He leaned forward, dumping his chin onto his fist, looking disappointed and exhausted. ‘So, you’re not here to get me out of this? I’m not going home?’
‘Not today,’ I said regretfully. ‘Let’s hear what happened to you first.’
‘I’m only here cos of a bad resolution.’
I blinked between him and Zara. ‘A what?’
‘New Year, man,’ he explained. ‘All I wanted was to shift some timber.’ He patted one hand across his shrunken, boyish gut. ‘Careful what you wish for, innit?’ He laughed hollowly at that, flashing the gold tooth, but winced when the ripple effect of movement came to his swollen eye. ‘New Year’s Day I started running. Couldn’t last ten minutes at first, but a couple of days in I was pushing it to, like, half an hour every morning and night. I ain’t no Mo Farah, but it was all right. Headphones in, beats on. Started round Upton Park, few blocks either way, then down to Central Park after that. Four days it lasted. Some resolution.’
‘Beats any of mine,’ I said, weighing my gut with both hands.
He half grinned. ‘Thursday night I was thinking of going up West Ham Park, but when I stepped outside there was bare fog coming in. Couldn’t see shit for shit by seven o’clock. I should’ve gone back inside, stuck to the PlayStation, but man don’t quit like that. So, I went down Barking Road way, sticking to the lights on the pavement, taking it slow towards Canning Town. But the cold, all that damp in the air, it … does something to me, you get me?’
‘I’m not entirely sure that I do.’
He hesitated, glancing towards Zara. ‘I had to take a piss, man.’
‘Ah.’ I swallowed back an inappropriate smile. ‘Well, when you’ve got to go.’
‘Straight up,’ he muttered. ‘So, I was on, like, the last stretch of Barking where it’s all takeaways, Turkish barbers and shit, looking for somewhere to stop. Alleyway or something … That’s when I noticed something booky coming at me through the fog.’
‘Booky?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘like, suspect, you know?’
‘Suspicious,’ Zara clarified. ‘A car.’
‘That’s it!’ He snapped his fingers at her appreciatively. ‘Feds creeping at me, eyes locked all the way. Then another car, this one full of undies. Undercovers, I mean. They was moving like one of them convoys or something. Lurking. Couldn’t have been going more than five, maybe ten miles an hour. That got me nervous.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What did you have to be anxious about?’
He frowned as if I’d just asked the most ridiculous question in history. ‘Black youth like me, running streets in the dark with his hood up. What d’you think?’
‘They stopped you?’
‘Nah, man. They just doubled back and passed me by again.’ With one sweeping hand, he mimed the slow, almost leisurely passing of the cars to his right. ‘By then I was busting, but there was no way I was stopping to slash with them around. That’s when I saw this pub at the traffic lights ahead, sign all lit up through the fog. Princess Alexandria. The Alex. Just stuck there on the corner, nothing special about it, but all bars got to have facilities, right?’ He stopped for a moment, closed his eyes and shook his head introspectively, contemplating his own misfortune. ‘Swear down,’ he said, ‘it sounds like bullshit, I know, but that is all I went in there for.’
‘What happened at the pub?’ But I could already guess.
He sighed, tipping his head back, illuminating the colourful blotches in his flesh. ‘Straight away, I knew something was badly wrong in there. It was just, like …’ He fumbled for the word, rapping his fingers across his half of the table.
‘Booky?’ I said.
Another half-smile. ‘No doubt. That place was quiet, man. I ain’t never seen no roomful of n— uhh, people so silent. There was these boys in there. Cold-looking, edgy, heads down. But as soon as I walked in they looked about ready to bounce up out of them seats. I’m telling you, they were waiting for something.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Do? I was about to piss into my Nikes, man. I just sprinted for the toilet. Soon as I was done, that’s when it happened. I was standing there at the sink, thinking I’d wait more than a minute for them feds to move on, when the door goes blam!’ He thrust his palm forward to demonstrate the impact. ‘Truthfully, I thought this was it. You hear about it every day. Man walks into the wrong place and gets himself merked. It was this moment of, like, clarity. This is it, I thought. You try to lose a couple of pounds and get yourself cheffed up in a shithouse. They came in, these boys, all of them, only instead of clocking me they just started piling into them cubicles.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘Turning pockets out. Flushing. I couldn’t see much, but the ones at the back of the line were pulling out bricks of dope, man. Serious shit. Only problem was, they weren’t too wise. They kept yanking that fucking chain till the system backed up and the armed feds stormed in and cut us down, yours truly included.’
‘Sounds like you had quite the night,’ I said. ‘Enough to suggest that jogging is bad for your health, anyway. You’re being indicted on a conspiracy charge, then?’
‘No,’ Zara replied, turning to the loose case papers she’d brought. ‘They’re aiming for substantive counts instead of conspiracy. Possession with intent to supply heroin, and they’re adding intentional obstruction of a police constable, concealment of items, on account of the drugs going into the toilet.’
‘I ain’t no trapper, man,’ Andre grumbled. ‘Truly, only thing obstructed was some dickhead’s cosh by this.’ He tapped his skull.
‘Getting away without a conspiracy charge is one good thing,’ I said. ‘At least you’ll only have to account for what were allegedly your own drugs. How many were arrested altogether?’
‘Six,’ Zara said, ‘including Andre.’
‘Any particular reason why you’ve been held on remand for the past two months?’
Andre looked to Zara. She answered for him. ‘Andre has a previous conviction for failing to appear, which prevented him from getting bail.’
‘After what charge was that conviction?’ I asked.
‘Being an artist,’ he said petulantly. ‘Trying to have, like, an outlet for creativity when you come from ends.’
Bemused, I turned to Zara. ‘Is that a crime?’
‘It was incitement to commit violent disorder.’ She sighed. ‘Andre is a musician with a fairly big following on YouTube. Last summer his music got him into trouble.’
‘Look –’ Andre leaned forward, clasping his hands together as if in prayer – ‘I’m not even gonna lie to you. I dropped a couple of beats without thinking and shit got riled up, but it was supposed to be a joke. Like now, looking back on it, I know it was stupid.’
‘Andre’s lyrics were blamed for instigating an argument that ended in a violent confrontation,’ Zara explained. ‘It’s called drill music, a type of rap. Andre made a comparison between two opposing gangs and, well, I guess both parties felt like they had something to prove because of it. They faced each other off with weapons in a shopping centre, somebody got burned with a corrosive substance, Andre was charged with conspiracy and he failed to turn up to the magistrates’.’
‘I had a gig the night before court. I warned them about it. That didn’t finish until five in the morning, then this fit girl asked me back to hers. It was either that or court and, you know …’
‘Yes,’ I replied drily, ‘and here you are remanded in custody because of your record of failing to appear. I hope it was worth it.’
A slight grin broke his sulky expression. ‘You should’ve seen her.’
‘What about that charge for violence?’ I asked. ‘Did they claim that you were a member of one of those gangs?’
‘No, it was just the music,’ he said, his good eye turning glassy again. ‘Just words. I don’t have no gang affiliations. Just cos I talk a bit street, it doesn’t make me no delinquent. Not all rappers are criminals. Yeah, I’ve smoked a bit of green here and there, who hasn’t? I don’t use hard shit and I don’t sling hard shit neither.’
I nodded, neatening one shirt cuff. At that time, I had no reason to believe or disbelieve a single word he was saying. ‘What about drugs here at the prison? Have you seen anything of the sort?’
‘Here?’ He studied me questioningly. For a moment, I thought he was going to clam up, but he answered slowly, a little more carefully, lowering his voice. ‘Two months I’ve been here. By the end of week one I’d been offered charlie, brown, rock, you name it. Day and night, them wings are smoky with weed.’
‘What about Spice?’
‘Everywhere. Some of the boys call it Cloud Nine. Turns men into zombie-lunatics like The Walking Dead, for real. There’s three or four ambulances coming out here every day. Whenever one does, another screw has to go with it, meaning nobody’s watching the wing, meaning another eight hours banged up in pads. What else is man supposed to do? It’s easier to get loaded in here than it is back in ends and everyone is playing the game. Only thing is, you’re gonna find yourself in somebody’s pocket fast.’
‘Whose pocket? The officers? Other inmates?’
He turned to Zara, who offered no assistance, and then glanced up to the camera in the corner of the ceiling, almost flinching. ‘I ain’t no snitch, all right?’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but a second application for bail requires a change in circumstances, and you look like you’ve had a rough week.’
He hesitated again, straining against pride. ‘You think it might get me out of here?’
‘I’m just exploring angles,’ I told him. ‘When you say that people are in one another’s pockets, how so exactly?’
‘Easy maths, innit? What costs you a fiver outside moves for a hundred in here, maybe two, but it’s all on tick. There’s no cash. Everyone’s got mobile phones to sort their money but even the phones are on credit for a grand apiece. Cons are ringing their mums and dads asking for cash transfers into the trappers’ accounts. Got junkies crawling from cell to cell begging for tea bags like tramps in the gutter. Grown men giving blowies for gear.’
‘And you know this how?’
‘Everybody knows this.’
‘What about members of staff who might have found themselves in the dealers’ pockets?’ I asked. ‘Have you seen any—’
‘Look,’ he whispered abruptly, pressing his hands flat onto the table in an exquisite gesture of finality, ‘I want out of this place. Couple of these fuckers they locked me up with are madmen. The ones taking Cloud Nine are even worse. Last week, one of them snatches a rat up off the floor at breakfast, right? This thing’s the size of a dog, I’m not even lying to you, just running around for crumbs. Man catches it by the tail, yeah? Lifts it up over his head and takes a bite out of it! Blood and fur and shit all over his face. Then the thing starts to bite him back, and these boys, they’re all just laughing, man. They’re laughing like it’s the funniest fucking thing they’ve ever seen. But I wasn’t laughing. Apparently, man who don’t laugh got something to hide, so …’ He pointed to his bruises, a movement that required no great accuracy.
‘You need to report this,’ Zara said.
‘What I need is bail! They’ll kill me in here. I was there in custody with them, don’t you get it? I heard it all. I know too much about them.’
‘Them?’ I grimaced and looked to Zara. Her expression grimaced straight back. ‘Who?’
‘The ones who were sitting in the pub that night!’ he whispered impatiently. ‘Don’t you hear what I’ve been saying? Call themselves the “E10 Cutthroats”. They’re the ones that done this to my face. They’re the ones running things in here now. Drugs, blades, you name it. That raid, it wasn’t no win for the police. It was played, man.’
‘Cutthroats? Who on earth are –’
‘Not now. You get me bail, then maybe we’ll talk. I can tell you stories, straight up. I can tell you about the one that got away. The one nobody’s seen since. Way I hear it, he’s gone ghost. On the run or something. Maybe dead.’
‘Another dealer?’ Zara asked. ‘I didn’t think any of them got away.’
‘One did,’ he said. ‘He was the only one I recognised in the bar that night. He never needed to make bail cos he was never arrested. Feds parted like water for Moses and let him walk.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Obvious, innit?’ he said. ‘Got to be a snitch, on their books or something. Word is he’s been playing both sides. One of them double agents you hear about. KGB shit.’
‘Interesting,’ I muttered. ‘You’re saying that the Met have got themselves a Kim Philby?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know who that is.’
‘This dealer,’ Zara said, ‘does he have a name?’
Andre nodded. ‘Wouldn’t be much of a person without one.’
‘But you won’t give it to us?’
He glanced up to the camera again, chewing his lip, so I interjected once more.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘if this lad really was carrying drugs that night, and you truly weren’t, then one could argue that you’re sitting here in his place. So, have the last two months been so enjoyable that you don’t mind serving a few more years on his behalf?’
Before he even opened his mouth, I knew from the strain on his face that we had him.
‘Omar Pickett. That’s who I recognised. The one that walked away. Omar Pickett.’
‘Where is he now?’ Zara asked.
‘On his toes or dead. These Cutthroats aren’t into prisoners.’
I nodded. ‘It’s a dangerous world you live in, Mr Israel. No doubt more dangerous since you landed in here, especially with inmates dropping like they did back in January.’
‘January?’ Zara frowned, glancing between us, missing something. ‘What happened in January?’
A brief silence. Andre sniffed, weighing me up. ‘You think you know about that? You don’t know nothing.’
I managed a dry smile. ‘Thirteen deaths. Misadventure. Bad drugs, right?’
‘Wrong, Mr Rook. Dead wrong. Thirteen bodies. Not one of them was accidental.’