Hard Landing (27 page)

Roper’s mobile phone rang. He stood up, grateful for the interruption. It was in the hallway, on a glass table with ornate brass legs. There was a regular phone on the table but the Ropers had been told not to use it. The only people who knew the number of the landline were the Church and it would only be used in the event of an emergency. Roper picked up his mobile. The caller had blocked his number. Nothing unusual in that. Most of his Church colleagues routinely withheld their numbers and when he was working undercover virtually every call he received was from a blocked number. He put the phone to his ear. ‘Roper,’ he said.

‘How’s it going, Sandy?’ someone asked.

Roper frowned. It was a guttural voice with an accent he couldn’t quite place. West Country, maybe, but flattened out from years of living in London. It wasn’t a voice he recognised. The mobile was his personal phone so the only people who had the number were friends, family, and the Church.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘Someone with your best interests at heart,’ said the man. ‘What did you think of the pictures, then?’

Roper bit down on his lower lip. The call was almost certainly from a throwaway mobile and therefore virtually untraceable. Even with the full resources of the Church technical boys they’d only be able to pinpoint the general area where the phone was being used. If he could have recorded the conversation then maybe they’d have been able to pick up clues from the background noise but as it was Roper was helpless.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘You know what we want,’ said the man.

Alice came out of the kitchen and stood behind him, evidently sensing that something was wrong. Roper turned away from her, not wanting her to hear. ‘How did you get this number?’ he asked. He didn’t expect an answer but he wanted to keep the man talking until he could think of something to say, something that would help him identify the voice.

The man chuckled. ‘How’s the missus?’

‘You can tell Carpenter he’s wasting his time,’ said Roper. Alice put a hand on his shoulder but Roper went into the sitting room. Through the net curtains he could see two Church bodyguards sitting in a blue saloon, but he knew there was no point in attracting their attention. There was nothing they could do. Nothing anyone could do.

‘Tell him yourself when he gets out,’ said the man.

Alice followed Roper into the sitting room and stood in front of him, her arms folded across her chest. ‘Who is it?’ she mouthed, but Roper turned his back on her.

‘There aren’t many ways you could have got this number,’ he said. ‘It isn’t listed.’

‘We’ve given you every chance to save yourself and your family any grief,’ said the man. ‘What happens next is up to you.’

‘And what is going to happen?’ asked Roper.

‘Sandy?’ said Alice, but Roper silenced her by pressing a finger to her lips.

‘You know what happened to the cop. We can get to you just as easily as we got to him.’

‘So why the phone call?’

‘Last resort,’ said the man. Roper could definitely hear a trace of West Country in his accent. ‘We were told to look for alternatives. We’d offer you money but the word is that you’re one of the untouchables, Sandy. Tell me I’m wrong and we can put six figures in your bank account tomorrow.’

‘That’s a possibility,’ said Roper. If he could persuade them to transfer money into his account it would leave a trail the Church could follow, a trail that would lead, hopefully, to Carpenter.

The man chuckled again. ‘Do I sound as if I’ve got “fuckwit” tattooed across my forehead?’ he asked. ‘We’ve had you well checked, Roper, and you’ve never got your hands dirty, not once. You and that cop are whiter than white.’

It was good to hear that a villain considered him incorruptible, Roper thought, even though that was what had put him in his present precarious position. ‘Which leaves us where?’

‘We’ve asked nicely. Now we’re telling you. Let it be known that you’ve had a sudden lapse of memory. That’s all you have to do.’

‘I can’t.’

‘We understand how that would be your first reaction,’ said the man. ‘You’re career Customs, worked your way up through the ranks, done your bit for Queen and country. Probably get a minor gong when you hang up your white hat for good. But you’ve got to understand who you are and who we are, Sandy, what we’ve got to lose and what you’ve got to lose. And is what you’ve got to lose worth what you’re going to gain by seeing my boss stay behind bars? What do you win? You get the satisfaction of seeing a family man like yourself sitting in a cell for ten years. Fifteen, maybe. And what have you got to lose? Well, you know exactly what you’ve got to lose. How old are you now, Sandy? Fifty-three, yeah? Birthday coming up next month. Retirement on the horizon. Those years with your wife and kids, that’s what you’re going to throw away.’

Roper said nothing. His wife stood in front of him, deep furrows across her brow. ‘Who is it?’ she mouthed again.

‘This is the last time you’ll hear from us,’ said the man. ‘If we don’t hear by tomorrow that you’re refusing to give evidence, you’ll be a dead man. That’s not a threat, that’s a promise.’

Roper put the phone down.

‘For God’s sake, Sandy, who was it?’ shouted his wife.

Roper wanted to lie to her, to tell her that everything was fine, but he knew it was too late to tell her anything but the truth. So he told her. And when the tears came, he held her tight.

Shepherd had been asked what religion he practised when he was brought into Shelton and he’d answered truthfully: none. But religious services were one of the few occasions when prisoners from the different blocks got together and he wanted to see if Carpenter talked to anyone. Shepherd had asked to be put on the Church of England list. The Catholics were taken from the spur at nine fifteen for their service, and returned to their cells an hour later. Lee was also down for the C of E service so when their cell door was unlocked at ten thirty they both went down to the bubble. More than thirty prisoners were waiting to go to the service. ‘Didn’t realise we were in with such a religious lot,’ Shepherd said to Lee.

Lee wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘This is the big get-together,’ he said. ‘It’s when you chase up debts, catch the gossip on the other spurs, find out who’s been ghosted in.’

‘Ghosted?’

‘It’s when the screws move a troublemaker around at short notice. Shove him in a van and deliver him to another prison across the country.’ Lee grinned. ‘Carry on the way you’re going and you’ll maybe get ghosted one day.’

Carpenter came down the stairs from the threes with Gilly Gilchrist.

Lloyd-Davies checked off all their names on her clipboard, then unlocked the barred gate and walked them through to the secure corridor. Hundreds of other prisoners were on the move, all being escorted by prison officers.

At the entrance to the room where the service was to be held, the prisoners were given a thorough pat-down. Shepherd figured that religious services were the main opportunity they had for moving contraband between blocks so the guards had to be extra-vigilant.

He took a seat at the back of the room. There was seating for almost a hundred in front of a small wooden lectern and, in the far corner, a small electronic keyboard where a middle-aged woman in a flowery print dress and a wide-brimmed hat was playing a hymn.

Carpenter walked down the centre aisle and sat next to an overweight man with fleshy jowls, who was constantly wiping his face with a handkerchief. He had a gold earring in his left ear and receding hair cropped close to his skull. He whispered something to Carpenter, who nodded. The two men sat with their heads close together, deep in conversation.

Shepherd relaxed and ran through the thousands of photographs in his memory. He’d seen the man before, in a photograph, though, not in person. An arrest picture. Front and side view. Ronnie Bain. A major marijuana importer who’d been imprisoned for eight years after one of his gang turned supergrass. He was less than half-way through his sentence and had been labelled Cat A after two jurors had been offered bribes to bring in a not-guilty verdict.

Two prisoners gave out hymn books, which were passed from hand to hand along the rows. Shepherd settled back in his seat, folded his arms and looked round the room at the murderers, drug-dealers, paedophiles and terrorists. There were huddled conversations going on everywhere, and despite the body searches Shepherd saw notes and small packages being transferred from mouth to hand and from hand to mouth.

The elderly minister announced a hymn and the congregation shuffled to its feet. A Welsh prison officer standing at the door led the singing, his deep baritone echoing round the room. Shepherd did his best to keep up but he wasn’t familiar with the hymn. Bain and Carpenter were singing. So was Lee, who was sitting among a group of men in their twenties, all wearing the England football strip and sporting a variety of tattoos, predominantly bulldogs, the cross of St George, and blood-tipped daggers. They were all singing at the tops of their voices, heads tilted back, mouths wide open. They made Shepherd think of wolves howling at the moon.

There was no work on a Sunday but Shepherd was let out of his cell after lunch to help clean the floors on the spur. He worked with Charlie Weston and met Hamster and Ginger for the first time. Hamster was a lanky West Indian with a speech impediment that made him sound as if he was talking with his nostrils pinched together. Ginger was dressed from head to foot in Manchester United gear, including a baseball cap, team strip, wristbands and trainers with the team’s logo on them. It was Ginger’s sole topic of conversation as he worked. There was no sign of Carpenter.

Shepherd spotted Lloyd-Davies walking along the spur, her head down, deep in thought. ‘Ma’am?’ he said.

She looked up, frowning.

‘Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but is there any chance of me getting on the gym list this afternoon?’

‘Bit short notice,’ said Lloyd-Davies.

‘I keep asking but I’m told the list is full.’

‘Everyone wants to go to the gym. You have to take your turn. Anyway, you all get three hours of association today and the exercise yard is open. Do a few laps of it.’

‘Some people don’t seem to have a problem getting on the gym list every day.’

Lloyd-Davies squinted at Shepherd. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Just that some guys are in the gym every day but I’m having to get down on my knees for one session a week.’

‘You’ve only been here a few days,’ said Lloyd-Davies. ‘These things take time. And under prison rules you’re only entitled to an hour a week in the gym. Anything above that is a privilege, not a right.’

‘Yeah, well, it looks to me as if some prisoners are getting more privileges than others.’

‘That’s the whole point of the privilege system,’ said Lloyd-Davies. ‘Carrot and stick. Gym time is one of the carrots we offer.’

‘So, how do I go about getting more carrots from you, ma’am?’ said Shepherd, grinning.

‘Stop giving me grief, for a start.’ She grinned back. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ She pointed down at the floor. ‘You’ve missed a bit.’ When he looked down she chuckled. ‘Made you look,’ she said, and walked away.

Carpenter finished his cappuccino and placed his cup and saucer on the table. The coffee was a pale imitation of what Bonnie made for him at home but, then, she had a two-grand state-of-the-art coffee-maker that Carpenter had had shipped from Italy. He’d put in a request to have a coffee-maker in his cell but the governor had turned it down as a safety risk. It was a nonsense ruling, but so many prison rules owed nothing to logic. Prisoners weren’t allowed kettles, but they were allowed Thermos flasks of hot water. From an electrical point of view, a coffee-maker was no more of a danger than the television sets the prison supplied. Carpenter had applied to buy a larger model for his cell but that application had been refused – another nonsense ruling – but a DVD player had been approved. Now all he had to do was to accumulate enough money in his account to buy it. He was on enhanced status, which meant he had thirty pounds a week to spend. There was nothing he could do about his phone calls, which had to be paid for from his account, but he could reduce all the other drains by getting other people to make purchases for him. All the food and drinkin the cell came from other prisoners. Carpenter placed orders and they brought it to his cell. He reimbursed them on the out, at a rate of ten to one.

Carpenter strolled out of his cell and leaned over the rail. Prisoners were lining up to be searched before going out into the exercise yard. Carpenter hated the yard. It reminded him of his schooldays. Turfed out of the classrooms for an hour to burn off excess energy so they’d be good little boys when lessons resumed.

Carpenter pushed himself off the rail and walked down the stairs to the ones. Several inmates nodded at him – anyone who’d been on the spur for any length of time knew who he was. Carpenter didn’t plan to be behind bars long enough to have to build relationships. He’d bought Digger, and that was all he needed.

Hitchcock’s cell was opposite the pool table. The door was open, but Carpenter knocked. ‘Okay if I come in?’ he asked.

Hitchcock was lying on his bunk. ‘What do you want?’

‘A chat,’ said Carpenter.

‘I just want to be left alone.’

‘Difficult objective to achieve in here,’ said Carpenter. He walked in and closed the door. It was a double cell and Hitchcock was on the top bunk: he rolled over so that he was facing the wall. Carpenter took the ring out of his pocket. ‘I think this is yours,’ he said.

Hitchcock twisted round. His mouth opened when he saw the wedding band. He rolled over again and took the ring from Carpenter, staring at it as if he feared it might disappear at any moment. ‘Where did you get it from?’ he asked.

‘Thought you might want it back,’ said Carpenter.