Captives

FORTY-THREE

The office was large, functional rather than welcoming. Efficiency was the keyword. It was a place of work, after all, thought Peter Nicholson, and it had been his place of work for the last sixteen years. He'd seen many changes in the penal system as a whole and Whitely in particular during his days as Governor at the prison. The changes since he first began working in the service had been radical, to say the least. He'd begun back in the fifties as a prison officer. He'd served his early years in Wandsworth. In fact, he'd been one of two warders who had escorted Derek Bentley from the condemned cell to the hangman on January 28 1953. Bentley had been sentenced to hang because his accomplice, Christopher Craig, despite having fired the shot that killed a policeman, had been too young for the rope.

After Wandsworth Nicholson had moved around from prison to prison, serving his time as surely as any of the inmates in those institutions. The difference was that he could go home at the end of every shift. He had an increasingly long key chain to show for his years of service.

His enthusiasm for his work and his intelligence had led to him being appointed Assistant Governor at Wormwood Scrubs. From there it had been only a matter of time until he was given his own prison.

Whitely was all he knew and had known for the last sixteen years.

The penal system he worked in was not the only thing that had changed during Nicholson's time. His own attitude had hardened, too. He'd originally joined the service after his mother had been attacked and beaten almost to death in 1950. He felt that he was acting, by proxy, for her and all victims of crime like her in his role as gaoler. And that was exactly how he viewed his job. He didn't see his task as correcting the ways of men who had strayed into crime and needed help; he and his warders existed to protect society from the kind of human garbage locked within the walls of Whitely.

He stood up, glancing across at the photograph of his wife on the desk. The image smiled back at him as he straightened the frame. He moved over to the window of his office and looked out.

He could see into the empty exercise yard. Beyond it, protected by a high stone wall, was a small chapel in the grounds of which were a number of graves, each one marked by a simple marble marker; some were actually decorated by headstones or crosses. They bore the names of prisoners who had died at Whitely. Men who, with no family on the outside, had nowhere else to rest. Even in death they were confined within the walls of the prison.

A couple of inmates were picking up leaves from around the graves, sweeping them into a large black sack. The skeletal trees that grew close to the chapel rattled their branches in the wind, which whipped across the open ground.

The closest town of any size to the prison was over twelve miles away, across barren land now unfit even for farming. The remains of an open-caste mine, shut down over a decade earlier, lay to the west.

A single road, holed and pockmarked, connected the prison's main gates to a small tarmac road which wound through the hills and moors like a dry tongue in search of water.

The wind rattled the window in its frame but Nicholson remained where he was, keeping vigil, gazing out over his empire.

The buzzer on his intercom interrupted his thoughts.

He turned and flipped a switch.

'The warders you asked to see are here, Mr Nicholson,' his secretary told him.

'Send them in,' he instructed her.

A moment later the door opened and five men in uniforms trooped in. Nicholson motioned to them to take a seat. He leant on his desk top, waiting until the last of them was seated, then stood upright again, pulling himself up to his full six feet. He looked an imposing figure.

'You know what this is about,' he said curtly. 'I want to be sure that everything runs smoothly when this blasted delegation gets here tomorrow. Any hint of trouble, I want it stamped on.' He looked at each man in turn.

'Will you be showing them round yourself, sir?' asked John Niles.

Nicholson nodded.

'How many are there?' Raymond Douglas wanted to know.

'Four. One woman.'

'That should please the men,' said Niles, smiling. The other officers chuckled but Nicholson didn't see the joke.

'If any of those bastards finds out that one of them is going to be a woman, there could be trouble,' Nicholson said flatly. 'Take care of it.' He smoothed his hair back with one hand. 'I want them in and out of here as quickly as possible. I don't like the idea of people investigating my prison.'

'Why are they coming to Whitely, anyway?' Paul Swain enquired. 'We're not the only prison in the country that's overcrowded.'

'That's perfectly correct. Unfortunately, however, we are the only prison where a remand prisoner was murdered by a lifer recently.' He held up his hands in a dismissive gesture.

'I hope they're not too disappointed by what they see,' said Gareth Wart on.

Nicholson looked at him unblinkingly.

'Meaning what?' he said irritably.

'You have to agree, sir, conditions are below standard.'

'Standard for what? This is a prison, in case you'd forgotten. The men here are here because they broke the law. Most of those in Whitely are here because they're too unruly or dangerous even for other jails to cope with.' He fixed Warton in his gaze. 'We, Mr Warton, have the scum of the earth under this roof.'

'They still deserve better conditions,' Warton persisted.

'They deserve nothing,' Nicholson hissed. 'They're here to be punished. We're here to ensure that punishment is carried out.'

'Isn't it our job to help them too, sir?' Warton said.

'Yours, perhaps, if that's how you feel. I don't see it as my job to help them. It's my job to help the people on the outside and I do that by making sure the scum in here stay in here.' He fixed Warton in the unrelenting stare of his cold green eyes. 'Do you know what we are, Mr Warton? We're zoo keepers, paid to keep animals behind bars.'

Warton coloured and lowered his gaze.

Nicholson sucked in an angry breath and turned back to look out of his office window.

'When the delegation arrives I want them brought here,' he said. 'I'll show them round the prison, round the recreation rooms and cells. If they want to speak to any of the prisoners they can. But I want at least two men present at all times.'

'Will you be taking them to the maximum security wing, sir?' Swain asked.

'Yes, and the solitary cells,' the warden told them.

'What about the hospital wing?' asked Niles.

'No,' snapped Nicholson, turning to face the officer. 'The infirmary, perhaps, but there's no need to show them anything else.' He looked up and down the line of faces. 'Are there any questions?'

There weren't. Nicholson dismissed the warders, returning to the window for a moment as if searching for something out in the windswept yard.

From where he stood he couldn't see the hospital wing.

The thought suddenly spurred him into action.

He turned back to his desk, picked up the phone and jabbed an extension number.

As he waited for it to be answered he drummed lightly on the desk top. The phone was finally answered.

'We have to talk,' said Nicholson. 'Come over to my office. It's important.'