and-see pudding, I’m afraid.’
‘I was wondering what you were doing about Helen’s little boy.’
Donnelly said, ‘Right,’ again and nodded, as though he had just been wondering exactly the same thing.
Bellinger nodded back, but she could see that this was the first time he had so much as thought about Alfie Weeks. ‘He goes to a local childminder,’ she said. ‘I just thought we should make some arrangement to have him picked up?’
‘Yes, of course. Is there any family?’
‘There’s a sister, Jenny. Lives in Maida Vale, I think. I’m not sure they’re particularly close, but… ’
‘OK, I’ll try and get that organized, thanks, Gill.’ Donnelly looked around. ‘I’m not sure-’
‘You want me to do it?’
‘That would be great,’ Donnelly said, taking a step away. ‘Might all work out very well, seeing as you’re a friend of Helen’s, I mean.’
He was already on his way back to the monitors as Gill Bellinger was telling him that she would let him know what she’d managed to organise. He raised a hand in acknowledgement and sat back down.
‘Takes me back,’ he said.
Sue Pascoe looked up at him. ‘What?’
‘Boys’ toilets.’ Donnelly smiled. ‘I remember, we used to go charging into the girls’ toilets every so often. A big gang of us, just running in there shouting and screaming, trying to see what it was like. What the hell you got up to in there.’ He looked at Pascoe. ‘Funny that the girls never seemed particularly interested in what our toilets were like.’
‘Yeah, funny that,’ Pascoe said.
‘Anything momentous happen while I was pointing Percy at the porcelain?’
Pascoe shook her head. ‘Well, he hasn’t given himself up or shot anyone, if that’s what you mean. But it might not be too far away.’ She nodded across to where Chivers was talking to somebody on the far side of the hall. ‘He was looking for you.’
‘What does he want?’
‘Says his boys can hear a load of crashing and banging coming from inside the shop,’ Pascoe said. ‘Bottles breaking and what have you, like he’s smashing the place up.’ She stared at the monitor, let out a slow breath. ‘Sounds like he might be losing it.’
‘So what do you think?’ Donnelly asked.
‘I think we really need to talk to him.’
Donnelly watched Chivers finish his conversation and start walking quickly towards him. It was hard to be sure, as the man’s expression never changed a great deal, but even from a distance the CO19 team leader appeared rather pleased with developments.
TEN
It was as ridiculous to generalise about a group of people as diverse as prison officers as it was about anybody else – pointless and ultimately reductive – but it saved time, so Thorne did it anyway.
They were, so Thorne imagined, either no-nonsense, by-the-book types or those slightly more sensitive sorts who could easily have become teachers if they didn’t like the uniforms quite so much. ‘Old school’ or ‘reconstructed’ might have been more accurate labels, but Thorne found it easier to think of them as ‘Mackays’ or ‘Barracloughs’; the archetypes named in honour of the two very different types of screw on the sitcom Porridge that he had adored as a kid.
Which he still thought about sometimes, in the middle of a particularly tedious trial.
Norman Stanley Fletcher…
The PO that escorted him from Bracewell’s office to the hospital wing was a thickset and balding fifty- something named Dobson. Like all the officers, he was wearing dark trousers and a black polo shirt with his name stitched into it, but it was not until Thorne commented on what the boys were wearing that Dobson revealed his true colours. At other YOIs Thorne had visited, the boys had worn tracksuit bottoms, and he was surprised that those he had seen that morning were wearing cargo pants beneath their dark blue sweatshirts or T-shirts.
‘That was the governor’s idea,’ Dobson said, nodding towards one of the boys. ‘Bloody good one, as well. They used to strut about with their hands shoved down the front of their tracksuit bottoms, grabbing their bollocks like wannabe gangsters. These days, we have to shake hands with the little bastards a hundred times a day.’ He pulled a face. ‘So… ’
To the likes of Dobson, the boys they banged up every night were no more than adult prisoners waiting to happen, whether they had started shaving or not and whatever he and his colleagues were required to wear as part of a more casual and caring regime. Thorne knew that there were those within the Prison Service who requested the posting to a YOI. Officers who enjoyed working with young offenders, because they felt there was a chance to make a real difference. There were others, however – a small minority, thankfully – who were unhappy to find themselves assigned to kids and saw no reason to treat the prisoners in their charge any differently to those who might previously have been subject to their less than tender mercies in Long Lartin or the Scrubs.
It was not hard to work out which category Dobson belonged to.
Ian McCarthy was waiting for them outside the doors when they arrived at the hospital wing. Dobson said, ‘Here you go,’ then turned and walked away.
‘He’s a charmer,’ Thorne said.
McCarthy opened the door for Thorne and ushered him through. ‘Bark’s worse than his bite,’ he said. ‘Like a lot of them.’
Thorne had naively imagined that Barndale’s chief medical officer would be older. That he might possibly be wearing a white coat. As it turned out, the man who showed him into his large, bright office and dropped into a chair behind a cluttered desk was, like the governor, a few years younger than Thorne himself and considerably better dressed. He was stocky with thick, dark hair and a well-trimmed goatee. There was a trace of a northern accent.
‘Roger said you’re looking into Amin Akhtar’s suicide.’
Thorne nodded and held up the stack of files he’d brought with him from Bracewell’s office. ‘Got to work my way through this lot as soon as I can, but I wanted to have a quick look around in here first.’
‘That’s fine-’
‘Just get my bearings, you know?’
‘Not a problem.’
‘You found Amin, right?’
McCarthy stood up, removed his jacket and hung it across the back of his chair before sitting down again. A heavy sigh made it clear that he was going to find talking about Amin Akhtar’s death hard work.
‘I’ve not been here that long,’ he said. ‘Only a year or so, and this is like the worst nightmare. There was a kid who cut his wrists in his cell a few months before I got the job, and I know this kind of stuff goes on in prisons, but Amin was here.’ He held out his arms. ‘On my watch, so… ’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I got here about seven-thirty,’ McCarthy said. ‘A bit earlier than usual because the governor had called a senior management meeting for eight o’clock and I needed to get a few things dictated in the office. I decided to do a quick round before the meeting and Amin’s was the first room I checked.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I always check the private rooms first,’ McCarthy said. ‘And his was the only one that was occupied.’ He looked down and straightened some papers on his desk. ‘Well, you know what I found.’
Thorne was thinking: clean slate. ‘I haven’t had an opportunity to see the police report yet,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Or the post-mortem. So I’d be grateful if you could tell me.’
McCarthy cleared his throat. ‘Amin had taken an overdose of Tramadol, which is the same drug he was being treated with. It’s related to morphine… ’
