Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (18 page)

When I set off for Stamford Prison, I wasn’t exactly heading into unknown territory. I’d visited enough prisons down the years. Too many. That sounds like resigned self-importance, but I can’t think of one prison I came away from feeling positive or optimistic.

Visiting rooms are sad places, no matter which side of the table you’re sitting, your every gesture, every word, overseen by prison staff and CCTV cameras. The inmates want more from their couple of hours a week and know they won’t get it, which explains why some prefer to do their time alone, regarding contact with their families as more punishment than privilege. The wives or partners are under sentence themselves; some are trying to push on with their lives, while remaining loyal to the man they’ve come to see. Others are on the verge of ditching him. No in-betweens.

The prisoners’ parents are the saddest to watch. They run the gamut of human emotion from bewilderment to anger that a child of theirs could’ve been so stupid. Then they turn on the system to find a reason. Unemployment, bad company, bad education, poor housing, that’s all before they turn back on themselves with guilt. You don’t hear much laughter in a visiting room, even from the kids, who’d rather be somewhere else for those precious few hours. You come away wishing there was another way, but knowing there isn’t, especially for the likes of Aaron Flaxman.

Everyone has their own mental image of a prison and Laura Peterson reckons it’s one of the four institutional portraits painted into our memory in childhood. The other three are hospitals, schools and churches. When they’re referred to we each see our own particular favourite, if that’s the right word, then flip the pages of the album to view others. My abiding impression of prison is the Victorian one, a poor man’s castle of a place, two turrets either side of a heavy wooden door. If it were to open, out would ride a knight on a white charger, lance in hand, and he would gallop towards an imaginary foe. In reality he’ll be a clapped-out prison van, hammering back and forth to the local courts.

People have an impression of the inside as well and Stamford was very close to mine. A central hub with five spokes bracing the rim of a wheel, each spoke being two tiers either side of a concrete floor, joined at the landings by metal joists holding up a safety net. And while the media get most things right, from the look of the place to the echoes, the kerfuffle and slamming doors, there’s one thing they’ll never capture. The smell. It lingers in the back of your throat long after you’ve left, being a mixture of sewage, sweat, stale food and disinfectant, none of them more palatable than the others.

I parked the Land Rover away from the main entrance and walked along beside the high brick wall, with its buffers running along the top of it. At the entrance I went through the usual security rigmarole with the Officer of the Day stalling at just one item I was carrying.

“What’s in the bag?” he said.

“Chocolates.”

Something about my answer appeared to baffle him. “What d’you mean, chocolates?”

“Chocolates,” I repeated. “A box thereof.”

Bewilderment became suspicion. “Let me see.”

He examined the box, took note of the price, then asked why I was bringing Belgian chocolates to a prisoner, especially one like Aaron Flaxman. Looking back, I think that was the point at which my visit started to go wrong. In answer to his question I said I’d tried to get hold of some skunk but my supplier had a school exam that day. He referred to the letter on the desk beside him in which the Ministry of Justice had sanctioned my visit and he decided not to get into an argument. He summoned a young prison officer and asked him to show me into Reception Room C.

It was laid out in the sort of discomfort I’d expected. A single Formica table with a springy metal chair either side of it, a third chair over by the wall. The decor was just as homely. The walls were cream, the floor was grey, the lights were bright. The Officer of the Day kept me waiting half an hour before bringing Aaron Flaxman down from his cell on the remand wing. We didn’t greet each other formally, no handshake, no friendly exchange of names. He stood just this side of the doorway and looked across at me.

“I’ve had to leave a really interesting class because of you,” he said. “Transcendental meditation: a search for inner calm.”

I asked him if he’d found any and he smiled, lip curled at one side.

“I hear you want to talk to me,” he said, eventually. “What about?”

“Murder,” I replied. “Vic Wesley, Freddie Trent.”

The prison officer who’d brought him in closed the door behind them. Flaxman and I watched as he strolled over to the chair by the wall, sat down, took out a tablet and began to play
Xenonauts
on it. Flaxman pulled out the chair his side of the table, turned it at an angle and sat, one leg over the other, arms folded. I pushed the chocolates in his direction. He reached out for them, removed the cellophane with his teeth and examined the card which described them. He picked one out and started on it, half sucking, half chewing.

He was a big man, mid-thirties, dressed in prison garb, grey tracksuit, white T-shirt. Emma Jago had called him an alpha male. He was a lot further down the Greek alphabet in my opinion, tough on the outside maybe, feta cheese on the in. It was a weird sort of face, everything slightly out of place: the lips too far down from the nose, the eyes too close together, the hairline starting too far back, not receding, just wrong. His hair was thick and parted down the middle, auburn in colour, and at the back someone had put a basin over his head and trimmed away the surplus. They’d steered clear of his big, bushy sideburns.

“Hawk,” he said.

He made a gargling sound deep in his throat, the other meaning of my name. Then he swallowed and reached for another chocolate. “My brief said I shouldn’t talk to anyone, let alone you. He says you’ve got a reputation.”

“What for?”

“Turning nasty if things don’t go your way. On the plus side, you half killed a fellow copper.”

I laughed. The power of time and repetition had blown a three-second lapse of judgement on my part out of all proportion. I’d hit the man, certainly, but I did not half kill him.

“I’m a civilian now, just like you,” I said. “Tell me what happened that day...”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” He half stood up, interrupting the prison officer at a crucial point in his game. The officer told Flaxman to sit down, but Flaxman already had done. “I’ve been through this a thousand times, same words, same look on the faces of those I’m telling...”

“Which is?”

“You’re a lying bastard, we don’t believe you.”

I nodded. “It’s a funny old world where everyone thinks you’re guilty, except you.”

He looked away. “What was the name of it, that film my mother keeps on about? Jane Fondant’s dad was in it, turns a whole jury round.”

“
Twelve Angry Men
.”

“That’s the one.”

“I don’t think the bloke on trial had your history. Not someone who was born with a silver spoon, then took to robbing jewellers, running labour rackets...”

He screwed up his face in contempt. “What are you? You can’t be an ex-copper, there’s no such thing.”

“Oh, I’m ex alright, but it’s the ones still working you need to worry about. Carew and Sweetman.”

“Carew’s been on my back for years. Anything bad happens on his patch, I’m the first man he calls on. Gives me a sense of ... self-worth.”

I shrugged. “See it that way if you want, but they’ve given two years of their lives to you. If they’re out to nail you, they will.”

He sneered again. “The voice of experience, eh?”

Still sitting in the chair, he turned it and shuffled it up to the table. He wanted to keep the conversation low, out of the prison officer’s hearing and masked from the camera in the corner.

“I don’t care if they’ve given blood,” he said. “See, I’m going to win this one. The trial will be over in two weeks, maximum. Why?” He emphasised his first point by placing a clenched fist down on the table, raising his thumb. “First, I didn’t kill Vic and Freddie.” His forefinger joined his thumb. “Second, the only so-called witness is Liam Kinsella and my brief will have that tosser for breakfast.”

So he wasn’t worried by anything Kinsella might reveal. On the contrary, whatever he said might help him...

“They’ve got other stuff,” I said.

“Two bullets and some DNA, some off my dad’s pickup.”

“Narrows it down, I’d say.”

He waved the evidence away with a flap of both hands. “Opens it out. The old man has seven blokes working for him; they’re in and out of Mum’s kitchen all day, begging food. Dad leaves the key in the Silverado, anyone can drive it.”

“You do know Kinsella’s been offered immunity to testify against you.”

He smiled properly. Decent teeth, a lover’s gap between the two front incisors. “Well, of course he has, and who could blame him for taking it?”

“It goes a bit deeper than that, centres on his moral objection to the heroin.”

He looked at me, almost pityingly. “Moral objection, eh? Did it make his evidence any more compelling?”

“I don’t think it was
his
evidence. I’m not saying he wasn’t there when you killed Vic and Freddie; I just think there are ways of telling it and they’ve coached him so well he can recite it in his sleep.”

“Who are ‘they’?” he asked, reaching for another chocolate.

“Carew and Sweetman, you bloody fool! Aka Humberside Crime Squad. Trouble is, Kinsella’s desperate for you to get banged up so he can carry on looking for the expensive haul you and your crew brought in from Liepaja.”

He sat back in his chair, arms folded again. “Liepaja? Sounds foreign.”

“Denying the stuff ever existed won’t help you. Telling Blackwell where it is might do wonders. You know Blackwell?”

“I met him. Didn’t like him.”

“Met him where?”

“Here. He was on the same kick as you. ‘What happened that day, who were you with, where did you hide the scag?’ I told him to ease it all gently up his arse.”

“You reckoned that would help your case?”

He shrugged.

“I went up to Grimsby, met Emma Wesley,” I said. “No big fan of yours. Thinks you should be castrated, then be locked up forever.”

He laughed. “That’s Emma for you. No prisoners. Except me.”

“Listen, however sharp your brief is she can’t wipe out your past: what you did to those people in the jeweller’s. That got you eight years. Will a jury think you’re capable of murder?”

“Previous convictions aren’t meant to be dragged up in...”

“It’s called ‘bad character’ and barristers dredge it up whenever they can. Besides, you think those jurors don’t go home at night and look you up? It’s all there on Google, the manageress who collapsed and you just walked over, the other customer you thumped and got done for GBH.”

He put his hands behind his head and stretched out in the chair, in so far as it was possible to do so, and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know if you’re trying to scare me into something or out of it, but either way it’s not working.”

“And such is your faith in British justice, it’ll be alright on the night, eh? Put it this way, then. Where were you the day Vic and Freddie were murdered?”

He addressed a ceiling tile rather than me. “I was at the farm with my parents. It was my mother’s birthday...”

“So there’d been no meeting arranged, you, Vic, Freddie, Kinsella? Nobody was thinking of going to the police about the heroin? You hadn’t agreed a knock-down price for it with the Heritage IRA?”

“What heroin? Come to that, what IRA? Which all adds up to ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’ ”