Chapter 8

I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I was scared shit-less when I was first locked up in my cell at a high-security prison somewhere in the wilds of the west country. I had never been incarcerated anywhere before. I had heard the rumours. Heard what happened to 'pretty-boy' lags like me in jail. I knew I could look after myself if I had to, but if I was ganged up on? Who knew?

My first day in there I met a man who was to remain a friend until his death a few years ago. An habitual criminal called Archie 'Rembrandt' Squires. He was just a few years older than me and I was to share a cell with him. I suppose you could say he took me under his wing, explaining all the dos and don't s; who was who in the prison; all that sort of crap.

He was, he informed me, the best forger in the country and was only locked up because he'd been grassed up by someone he'd sold a forged work of art to, who had then tried to sell it on at a Sotheby's auction ... Archie was a right laugh. He was relatively small in stature, delicate even, but also one-hundred percent heterosexual. He was just a really smashing bloke who happened to be serving 8 years for making money out of his hobby. He became my best friend when I intervened in an argument that was going on one day when I got back to our cell. A big bullying thug was threatening him for his 'ciggy' allowance, - demanding that he hand them over or he'd tear him a new arsehole. I made it quite clear that sort of behaviour towards my cell-mate wouldn't be tolerated and a swift kick to the bollocks further stressed the big man's understanding of the situation. From then on, Archie was my mate, watching my back and letting me know what was going on in the prison that I should know about.

Prisons are not quiet places: All night long someone is either coughing or sneezing; or singing as they try to forget where they are; or even in many cases, crying themselves to sleep. Guards are not quiet people either. Even if they wore rubber-soled boots, they would have their bunches of keys jangling on their belts as they walked the balconies during their constant night-time patrols. Consequently sleep is very difficult in prisons. Especially when you are locked up for the first time in your life. I was no exception. For weeks I suffered from insomnia, laying awake at night, totally unable to get to sleep. Archie would stay awake with me. Talking about anything and everything under the sun as he tried to distract me from the nightmare that my life had become.

I told him the truth about how I had come to be there. He believed me. The only person I felt ever did truly believe my version of events. In return he told me all about himself. How he was an orphan, never knew either of his parents or anything about them. Never even knew his real name, - he had been called Archie Squires after the man who had found him and handed him in to the police when he was an abandoned baby. As a baby, then a young child, Archie had been brought up in several Barnardos orphanages as he was moved around the country during the war. Never settling, never making friends he could call mates. He never even knew when his birthday was. Someone had told him his age once but they were unable to confirm his date of birth so he had picked the 21^st of June as his birthday, - the longest day of the year, - wanting his birthday to last as long as possible whenever he celebrated it.

Gradually, with Archie's help, I managed to start sleeping at night as I became more used to my environment.

It was through Archie that I found out in advance that some sort of attack on me was being planned in retaliation for what I'd done to Karl Simpson. Turned out the bloke I'd accidentally killed was a small-time low-life who unfortunately was related to one of the main drug gangs in the city where I lived. I don't know if my ex-wife was into the drugs or whether she was with him because of his money and bad-boy reputation. Either way, it would appear I had deprived the bitch of her meal ticket and possibly went some way to explain her hatred of me at my trial, even going some way to explain why she lied in court as she did. Revenge for what she reckoned she had lost I suppose...

Archie pointed out that I would have to defend myself wholeheartedly when the attack came. I would be unable to placate whoever it would be that came after me. They wouldn't listen if I tried to talk them out of it the way my martial arts training had taught me to do. It would be me or them. No half measures. If I didn't finish them, they would finish me.

A few days later, several weeks into my sentence, the attack came. My path was blocked as I was leaving the shower block by two huge men, as tall as my 6'4'' but much wider, together with another shorter bloke who looked as mean as a starving rottweiler. The two big guys circled either side of me, whilst the ugly bloke blocked my path and pulled a home-made shiv from his sleeve, - a knife fashioned from a shard of glass. Weapons like that are much more dangerous than an ordinary knife. The intention being that they are stuck into the victim and then snapped off so even if the medics do get there before the victim dies, the glass is almost impossible to extract before he bleeds to death internally.

I knew instantly that I was not meant to walk out of there. The screws had conveniently disappeared leaving me to my fate, not caring one iota what was about to occur, - it would just mean one less villain for them to look after in their jaundiced view. My three intended assailants were certainly trying their best to frighten and intimidate me, telling me in great detail what they were going to do, how they were going to carve my chicken-shit body into little pieces. It worked, - to a certain extent anyway. Their confidence in their numerical advantage had turned into a blind arrogance as they surrounded me and cut off any means of escape I may have had, whilst the adrenaline surging through my body was making me a very nervous prey.

I had only maybe two small things in my favour. Firstly, they had no idea I possessed the defensive capabilities I did. For a highly-trained fighter, the fear for your life and the adrenaline surging through your body turns a mere man into a deadly war machine. Everything seems crystal clear; your concentration is at its peak; you have an enormous increase in your body strength too. But they didn't know that did they? - Secondly, and the one true advantage I really had, the one that could give me an edge, was the fact that I knew I would be fighting for my life whilst they were just doing a job.

Archie's words came into my head as we squared up to each other - "It's you or them my young friend." he'd warned me. With that in mind, all thoughts of avoiding a fight went out of the window. The bloke to my right was taken out with a kick to his leg with the heel of my shoe that agonisingly dislocated his kneecap and left him writhing on the floor. The one on the left received a 'roundhouse' kick to the face that broke his nose and a few teeth, leaving him spitting blood and snot as he sat back dazed onto his fat backside.

The ugly one was much more wary after his mates had been incapacitated so quickly, not quite as confident. He still had the advantage of having the weapon though. All the hours and hours of Karate training came to the fore automatically as I spun and gave him a backward kick to the head causing him to drop his weapon and fall to his knees holding his shattered jaw. I could have walked out then. I could have left them to their agony. But again, Archie's warning went through my brain. I had to finish it. I had to make a statement to any other of the prison lags who fancied their chances of ending my days...

I jumped behind the moaning shorter man, his weapon now useless on the floor as he held his broken face. Grabbing him around the neck, I hesitated only slightly as I gripped his newly deformed jaw and wrenched it sideways with all the force I could muster. All my pent-up anger came out at that moment. The hatred I felt; The despair; The revenge I needed; It was him who suffered for it. His body went limp. Instant death overcoming him as his neck snapped with a loud crack. I stood and glared at the other two, unblinking as I looked them alternately in the eyes.

"Tell whoever ordered this to come for me themselves if they want to finish me. Understand?" I growled quietly, making it quite obvious I was completely in charge of my emotions and there would be more to come if anyone wanted it. With that I calmly walked out of the shower block and went back to my cell to await whatever was to follow...

In prison, the worst offence for anyone to commit is to grass a fellow inmate up. It ranks up there with paedophilia and wife-beating in the eyes of the true criminal fraternity – the real hard-cases. Consequently, when my three assailants were discovered by the screws, all the two survivors would say was that they had all slipped on the soap and collided with one another.

The prison rumour-mill being what it was, every other person in the jail claimed to know what had actually happened in the shower block that day. Archie knew the truth, but I'm damn sure he never let on, so anything else was just rumour and conjecture as far as the rest of the inmates were concerned. What it did mean however, was that I was treated with a new-found fear, even respect by the rest of the prison community and given a wide-berth whenever I was out of my cell.

Of course a major inquiry into the incident by the police ensued. They never found out anything though, just what they were told by the two injured men as they repeatedly denied any wrong-doing. The investigating officers eventually gave up and settled for the fact that a highly dangerous and violent man was no longer part of the judicial system, and that it would save the tax-payer a small fortune in not having to keep him incarcerated for the rest of his sentence. The prison hierarchy was different though. I don't mean the governor or the rest of the prison officers, I mean the men who actually did run things in there.

All prisons have 'The Man'. Someone who the rest of the inmates are frightened of. Someone who runs everything. Every little scam that is going on. Even the screws know who is really in charge and go along with it if they know what's good for them. Our main man was a psychopathic killer called Billy McVie. - A London gangster who reputedly had an IQ of over 160 to add to his homicidal and criminal tendencies. He was the oldest of three brothers who apparently ran the biggest and nastiest of the major crime gangs in the country. They had their hands in everything. Drugs. Prostitution. Protection rackets, you name it, they controlled it. All this had added up to have made him number one on the police's most wanted list before they finally got their man.