Post Mortem, Gary Bell [best fiction novels .txt] 📗

walls to freedom in 1966, the Scrubs had remained a tabloid favourite. There was the infamous IRA rooftop protest of ’79, repeated riots, and so-called dirty protests during which inmates smeared themselves and their surroundings in excrement. One former governor penned a letter to The Times before resigning in 1981, calling the prison a ‘penal dustbin’. Inspectors consistently complained of poor hygiene and vermin infestations.

The situation was aggravated in the early nineties after Michael Howard, then Home Secretary for the Conservative government, conceived his famed ‘prison works’ sound bite, and the subsequent bipartisan efforts almost doubled the national prison population without bothering to provide the resources needed to support it. By the end of that decade, the Scrubs was revealed to have been the setting for the worst case of staff brutality in modern British penal history. The Prison Service had no choice but to publicly admit that its officers had subjected inmates to beatings, racial abuse, physical torture and even mock executions.

Almost twenty years later, things hadn’t improved much. Just a month before the almost concurrent capture of Andre Israel and suspension of Charli Meadows, a whistle-blower from the Prison Officer Association published a damning report on the jail, citing forty to fifty violent incidents every month along with the resignation of fifty-seven officers in the last year alone.

The biggest problem now was drugs, and Spice reigned supreme. By 2012, rumour of its inability to show up in blood or urine tests had given it a foothold in most UK prisons. It was made illegal under the Psychoactive Substances Act four years later, but by then almost half of all prisoners across England and Wales were suspected of using it.

I was sitting under the duvet with the laptop open beside me, making basic notes on the drug, when Zara texted asking if I was still awake and free to talk. This was another of those disparities between generations. Where I would usually call, she would almost always text. As a case in point, I responded by ringing her back.

‘Ten o’clock news is cheerful tonight,’ she said on answering. ‘More stabbings. Another shooting. London has overtaken New York City in killings for the year so far.’

‘I’m sure our senior clerk will be thrilled. Percy would make a fine ambulance chaser if he wasn’t too busy watching out for hearses.’

I could almost hear her smile. ‘What’re you watching?’

‘Watching?’ I blinked indifferently at the television. ‘Gladiator, apparently. Channel Five.’

‘That’s one way to rile the dog’s PTSD.’ I could hear leaves of paper turning. Then, nearer to the phone, the clicking of a retractable ballpoint pen; from that distance it sounded like a stapler against my head.

I asked what she was working on.

‘Just going over the raid on the pub,’ she said. ‘Don’t know if you’ve had time to look yet, but there really isn’t much about it in Andre’s case papers. It does say that the police had a misuse of drugs warrant to search the licensed premises, but it doesn’t say how or why they got the warrant. As far as I can tell, the pub is clean.’

‘The magistrates most likely issued the warrant because of Omar Pickett, our supposed informant.’

‘That does make more sense, but if that’s the case then Pickett should be available to stand up in court, so he can tell the jury Andre wasn’t involved.’

‘Assuming he wasn’t.’

‘Well, yeah,’ she responded crankily. ‘If, on the other hand, the police had already been gathering surveillance on the suspects, and that led to the warrant, and their informant just happened to be there, then I want to know about that too.’

‘Your best bet is to ask via a disclosure request called a Section 8 application, which will demand that the Met provide an answer in court.’

‘Section 8 application,’ I heard her mutter, pen scratching paper. ‘Of course. I should’ve known that. My head is all over with this. I’m sitting here trying to work out exactly how your case connects into mine, but there are still so many pieces missing …’

‘That’s because we don’t know that the cases are connected,’ I reminded her. ‘Yes, my client worked there, but Wormwood Scrubs is a huge prison. Any correlation could be coincidental. You mustn’t forget that your client will most likely tell you anything you want to hear if it might help him walk, and my client has denied knowing anything about the drugs in her car to begin with. Your raid involved Class A drugs, while mine was Spice. As for Patch, well, I’ve always found it best to take his insights with a pinch of salt.’

‘But it sounds so plausible … in an implausible, far-fetched, mental sort of way. Luckily, we’re in one of the few professions that actually works on argument’s sake.’

‘That’s one way to put it.’

‘So, for argument’s sake, I was thinking we ought to go through the facts of both cases. Chronologically and geographically, I mean. Get things in order.’

‘I’m assuming that you don’t mean to do this tomorrow?’

She paused. ‘Well, if you’re watching your film …’

‘No.’ I yawned. ‘I wasn’t.’

‘Cool. I’m getting a map of the city up on the iPad in front of me, but my bearings outside the centre still aren’t that hot.’

‘All right, hold on while I do the same …’ Turning back to the laptop, I opened Google Maps and positioned the screen broadly over Greater London with Westminster in the centre. ‘Stick Big Ben in the middle,’ I told her, ‘that should make this easier.’

I waited a moment. ‘Done,’ she said brightly. ‘First, since this seems to be happening around the place, Wormwood Scrubs. That’s up and to the left, right?’

‘West, yes. It’s just above Shepherd’s Bush in Hammersmith and Fulham, about a half-hour drive out from the centre. If you’re looking at London as a clock face, with Big Ben there in the centre, the Scrubs should be at around the ten o’clock mark. Charli Meadows has worked there for four years, though she lives in Walthamstow, a corner away