courthouse in Barnet for two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.
I’d just have to make sure the meeting was a short one.
10
A hundred and fifty years ago, HM Prison Pentonville was considered a model of the perfect nick. Politicians made millenarian speeches about it; penal experts came from all over Europe to see it and coo over it; and no doubt many an old lag committed imaginative new crimes just so he could get banged up in it.
It was the first prison in England built to an American blueprint known as the separate system. It was sort of a refinement of the Victorian panopticons, where sneaky little architectural tweaks and twiddles allowed the prisoners to be watched for every second of every day, no matter where they went.
In the separate system, though, the cruelty was a bit more refined than that. The designers still made a big deal out of having clear lines of sight and high-mounted guard platforms, but the main inspiration here was to knock the fight out of the prisoners by denying them any human contact. Not only was the prison as a whole split up into a sprawl of different wings that had no contact with each other, but the same separation was enforced at meals, in chapel, even in the exercise yard. Inside, cubicle walls divided every shared space into a honeycomb of miniature rooms, so you were always alone even when there were a thousand people sitting or standing right next to you. Outside, you wore a specially designed cap with a downward-extended peak to hide your face, and nobody ever used your real name. Like Jean Valjean, or Patrick McGoohan, your number became your official identity. If you failed to answer to your number, you got a week in a punishment cell. If you gave your name to another prisoner, you got another year nailed onto your sentence.
It was a roaring success, in terms of making the prisoners docile: after a few months of this treatment, most of them were as meek as lobotomised lambs. Okay, a few of them – maybe more than a few – would slip a little further along the bell-shaped curve, from passivity into apathy, and then into psychotic withdrawal or catatonia. But some people are never going to be happy no matter how much you do for them.
After a high-profile lawsuit brought by the family of a guy named William Ball, who went into Pentonville sane and came out a frothing berserker, they started to liberalise the regime, and the whole idea of control by dehumanisation went into a bit of a decline in the UK until they opened Belmarsh in 1991. Pentonville’s not that bad today, if you compare it to somewhere like Brixton or the Scrubs. It’s even got its own pool room and a big bare hall where you can show movies – and its blindingly whitewashed frontage is so meticulously maintained that it causes regular pile-ups when drivers coming along the Caledonian Road incautiously glance across at it just as the sun breaks out of cloud cover.
All the same, as Juliet and I checked in through the clanging gates and banging doors the next morning, it didn’t seem like the jolliest place on earth. The acoustics in a prison are unique: every echo sounds like a taunt or an insinuation, and there are always a lot of echoes. It didn’t help that the sky outside was blue-grey like a bruise, with the first drops of rain just starting to fall, or that the security procedures, even for remand prisoners, are so much like decontamination protocols: as though you’re bringing the outside world in with you, and they don’t want any atom of it touching the prisoners.
We were randomly chosen to be searched, but given the effect that Juliet has on people of all sexes and persuasions I wasn’t sure how much randomness was actually involved. The women officers who searched her certainly took their time over it, and I had to loiter outside the guard station long after their male counterparts had impounded my hip flask and ceremonial dagger and given me a receipt. When the doors opened and Juliet strode on out with her hands nonchalantly in her pockets, the women warders who followed her looked a little dazed and haunted: it was just a standard non-intimate search – a ‘rub-down’ – but if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you.
Reunited, we were ushered through another set of doors – more bangs and clangs, more echoes, like the opening credits of
Remand prisoners have their own visiting room, and although there’s a guard present the regime is a bit more relaxed than it is for other inmates. Instead of the glass shields and wall-phones you see in the movies, there’s a room like the common room in a school: bare walls enlivened by a few yellowing posters advertising long-defunct public information campaigns, semi-comfortable chairs set up around low tables, and a coin-op coffee machine.
The room was empty, and I threw a questioning look at the guard, who wrenched his stare away from Juliet with an effort.
‘He’s on his way down, sir,’ he said. ‘Won’t keep you more than a minute or two.’
Juliet crossed to one of the clusters of chairs and sat down to wait. I got a coffee from the machine before I joined her. She watched me approach with detached interest.
‘You’re walking a little stiffly,’ she observed as I sat down. ‘I noticed that yesterday but I forgot to ask.’
‘Someone tried to drop me down a lift shaft a few nights ago. It’s okay. I dodged.’
Stuff like that doesn’t faze Juliet in the slightest. She noted my unwillingness to talk and didn’t ask any more. The truth was, that whole incident with the faulty lift had been preying on my mind more than somewhat. If someone tries to kill a private detective, then it’s almost a mark of respect: it means you’re getting close to something, and the opposition are taking you seriously. If someone tries to kill a jobbing exorcist, and if said exorcist is as badly in the dark as I felt right then, it’s probably just a sign of a basic character flaw.
Or maybe I was close to something, and I was just too dense to see it when it was right under my nose. That was a sobering thought, and I was still soberly thinking about it when a man walked into the room. It obviously wasn’t Doug Hunter: too old, for one thing, and for another he didn’t fit the description Jan had given me in any respect at all. He was slightly built, almost bald and very pale. He wore a nondescript light grey suit that looked as faded as his skin, but his eyes were a darker, colder grey, magnified by strong prescription lenses, and his thin face wore an expression of brusque impatience.
‘Mister Castor?’ he inquired. I was expecting him to do the usual comic double take when he saw Juliet, but from where he was standing she must have been out of sight behind me.
‘That’s me,’ I said.
‘My name’s Maxwell.
I nodded, but he was taking my assent for granted and already carrying on. ‘Douglas’s condition is still deteriorating,’ he said. ‘Even just in the last few days, there’s been a marked change, and it’s all for the worse.’
My confusion must have shown on my face. ‘He’s not well?’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise—’
Maxwell made a palms-out ‘don’t put words in my mouth’ gesture. ‘The medical situation is complicated by the legal one,’ he said. ‘Not an unusual occurance in here. I’ve made a diagnosis, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t share it with you. The point is that Douglas has had to be quite heavily medicated. With aripiprazole, if that means anything to you.’
‘It doesn’t,’ I admitted.
Maxwell raised his eyebrows expressively. ‘It will mean something to the defence, mark my words,’ he said. ‘The point is, since this is your first visit you’re apt to find him a little odd to talk to. He’ll be drowsy and unresponsive, but at the same time he’s likely to show a certain restlessness and discomfort. These are side effects of the drug, not of his condition.’
‘And his condition is –?’ I probed.
Maxwell made the same gesture again. ‘I can’t discuss that with you right now,’ he said, ‘although I’ve discussed it at length with Mrs Hunter. The other reason for me coming in to talk to you like this is that I’m advising you very strongly not to excite or upset Douglas in any way. If you do, it could have an adverse effect on his condition and it could be unpleasant – physically unpleasant, I mean – for you. The governor is keen that you should express understanding of these conditions. He would have liked you to sign a waiver, but he’s aware that everything I’m saying here has nuances which could be significant in a court of law.’
I shook my head in complete mystification. I had the unusual and uncomfortable sense of meanings flying
