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

Just her and three kids. Single mum, different dads.’ He didn’t say it cruelly, but there was a sharp enough edge behind it. Once again, his sister didn’t seem to notice.

‘No partner?’ I asked. ‘No boyfriend?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Just me.’

‘Do you rent or own your home?’

‘On twenty-three grand a year? What do you think?’

‘If you could just answer the questions, please.’

‘Rent.’

‘And how old are your children?’

‘Twelve, eight and two.’

I jotted the numbers down. ‘You pay for childcare?’

‘No.’ She watched me work on the notepad. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Calculations. The prosecution is going to perform a very public autopsy of your finances, and the first move will be to weigh the cost of keeping three children and a rented property in the Waltham Forest borough against your annual income. If there are discrepancies to be found, Miss Meadows, then they will do their utmost to find them and use those to speculate over alternative means of income. I’m just trying to ease you into how that might feel in a court full of strangers.’

Her brother snorted. ‘They’ll argue that she earns an impossible wage, but they’re part of the same system that pays her a peanuts salary to begin with. Then they’re going to accuse her of being a crook because she’s somehow managed to make ends meet. Everybody knows that drugs are rife in that place. They’re everywhere. Charli’s being scapegoated because a few junkies kicked the bucket the other month. I know it, you know it, and the prosecution know it for sure.’

Patiently, I placed the pencil down on my jotter. ‘Mr Meadows, while I appreciate you coming here to support your sister, unless you plan on climbing into the witness box and speaking for her in the courtroom then I suggest that she gets into the habit of answering for herself.’ He rolled his eyes and went back to pacing. I continued. ‘Being staff, you’ll know that prohibited articles within Her Majesty’s prisons are graded according to their seriousness and classified as List A, B or C articles. List C covers the likes of food, drink, tobacco and clothing, and carries a maximum penalty of a fine after summary trial. List B is more along the lines of alcohol and mobile phones, can be tried either way, and the penalty on indictment is imprisonment not exceeding two years or a fine. Offences regarding List A articles, however, which include weapons, firearms, explosives and drugs, are triable on indictment only and carry a sentence of up to ten years’ imprisonment.’

I couldn’t tell if she’d nodded or just trembled. She must’ve known the outcome by now, but hearing such things aloud always lent them serious weight.

‘They found the drugs in your car, correct?’

‘Allegedly,’ her solicitor said, cutting in and raising her hand to object. It reminded me of characters in those stylish American legal thrillers, and I briefly wondered if she was deliberately trying to emulate them. She certainly looked the part. ‘The prosecution claim that our client had been smuggling the contraband into the grounds from her vehicle outside. A search was conducted using dogs, and the illicit material was apparently discovered concealed beneath the spare tyre in the boot of her car. Synthetic cannabinoids. Spice, a Class B substance.’

‘Spice. Now, I may be wrong,’ I said, ‘but I was under the impression that one of the main reasons for this Spice’s popularity in prisons was that it couldn’t be detected by canines.’

The solicitor nodded. ‘That used to be the case, and it’s still early days, but they’ve recently managed to train a handful of dogs across the country to identify it.’

‘And who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?’ I said. Nobody smiled.

‘It used to be a legal high,’ Delroy Meadows said bitterly, coming to rest and wrapping his hands over the back of his sister’s chair. ‘Spice! Used to sell it in the shops up in Camden, for God’s sake.’

‘Alcohol is still perfectly legal,’ I said, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend trying to carry a bottle of Jack into prison.’ I flicked through the case papers until I found the printed photographs of the evidence: a blue Vauxhall Corsa, 2000 model, sitting in the staff car park of the prison; a close-up of the open boot, contraband packed tightly underneath the spare tyre; the contraband itself, laid out on a table with a ruler alongside it, and then again on a set of scales; the images went on. ‘I’m confused – it looks like rolling tobacco.’ The pouches were standard Golden Virginia, their contents brown, leafy, recognisable in texture to any smoker. ‘It is rolling tobacco, isn’t it?’

‘Synthetic cannabinoids are typically designed to look like cannabis,’ the solicitor explained, ‘but they are actually just liquid chemicals spayed onto existing products. If it looks like cannabis, more often than not it’s actually a weed called marshmallow or another similar herb. Oregano, even. The ten pouches you see in those pictures are supposedly worth a total of up to ten thousand pounds on the prison market. The prosecution claims that it is tobacco, but drenched in the chemical and is, therefore, classified as synthetic cannabinoids.’

‘That’s interesting,’ I said slowly, a defence already forming in my mind. ‘I assume you went through some sort of professional training course prior to being hired, Miss Meadows?’

‘Yes,’ she replied quietly. ‘A two-week entry-level course at the Prison Service College in Rugby.’

I nodded, mostly to myself. ‘Which immediately contradicts a lack of mens rea on the whole, but I just wonder …’

‘Men’s what?’ she asked, straightening slightly.

‘Mens rea,’ I repeated. ‘The knowledge that you are, in fact, committing a crime. The Crown only has to prove that you knew you were conveying something prohibited into the prison, but it does not have to prove that you knew exactly what that item was in order to make a charge. In other words, whether you believed that this Spice was still a legal high or not would be irrelevant. You’ve done enough training by now