Post Mortem by Gary Bell (free children's ebooks pdf .TXT) 📕

to stretch elegantly on one side. ‘You think she was coerced?’

‘I’d say there’s a strong possibility – either from outside the prison or within.’

‘It was suggested throughout the arrest interviews, but she’d never admit to it.’

‘Not many do.’

‘Plus, duress is a difficult defence without proof of an immediate threat. An extremely difficult defence.’

‘Yes, and still difficult even if we could prove the threat …’

I gazed into the empty chair beside the solicitor and took a moment more to deliberate our client. There really was no archetype, no ordinary criminal. We all built excuses to vindicate behaviour. I’d done it myself, during my own time in prison.

I was a convicted fraudster, but not because my hand had been forced at eighteen years old. Stealing had quite simply been easier than working – easy, that is, until I got caught.

But if Charli Meadows had been smuggling – and the supporting evidence seemed sound enough – then she was just a single link in a long chain. The fact that she hadn’t offered information on her suppliers in exchange for lenience suggested fear.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Lydia asked after I’d sat mutely for a while. She sounded genuinely interested. Her eyes burned green through the lenses of her glasses.

‘I was just thinking that it has been too long since I’ve been down to the Scrubs,’ I said. ‘I should probably start there. Get a feel for the place.’

‘Excellent.’ She opened her laptop, adjusted her glasses and began hitting keys. ‘I’ve got several clients on remand there at the minute, I could arrange for the two of us to go down on, well, let’s see –’

‘Ah, you needn’t worry about that,’ I told her quickly, waving a hand.

‘No?’ She looked up over her glasses. ‘Why’s that, Elliot?’

For another millisecond, I was disarmed again. ‘I’d prefer to make my own arrangements.’

‘Oh.’ The second audible full stop of the morning.

I didn’t want to tell her about Zara, or my chance of visiting the jail this afternoon.

I wasn’t even sure why.

The Meadows siblings returned a moment later, flooding the room with the smell of smoke, and when I looked into our client’s eyes, searching through her exhaustion for hints of truth, I was reminded of that sorry little bait dog. It was all I could do to refrain from getting up and going downstairs for a cigarette myself.

4

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