Heaven (A Prison Diary 3)

When the two men left I was buzzing. An hour later I wanted to abscond.

5.00 pm

I call Mary. She has just left the chambers of Julian Malins QC, and is going to dinner with Leo Rothschild.

DAY 191

FRIDAY 25 JANUARY 2002

8.15 am

I’m called out of breakfast over the tannoy and instructed to return to the hospital immediately. Five new prisoners came in last night after Gail had gone home. She needs all the preliminaries carried out (heart rate, weight, height) before Dr Walling arrives at nine. One of the new intake announces with considerable pride that although this is his fifth offence, it’s his first visit to NSC.

10.30 am

Once surgery is over, Dr Walling joins me for a coffee on the ward. ‘One of them was a nightmare,’ he says, as if I wasn’t ‘one of them’. He doesn’t tell me which of the twenty patients he was referring to, and I don’t enquire. However, his next sentence did take me by surprise. ‘I needed to take a blood sample and couldn’t find a vein in his arms or legs, so I ended up injecting his penis. He’s not even half your age, Jeffrey, but you’ll outlive him.’

2.00 pm

The new vacuum cleaner has arrived. This is a big event in my life.

4.00 pm

I call Mary at Grantchester. She has several pieces of news; Brian Mawhinney has received a reply to his letter to Sir John Stevens, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, asking why I lost my D-cat and was sent to Wayland. A report on the circumstances surrounding that decision has been requested, and will be forwarded to Brian as soon as the commissioner receives it.

Mary’s next piece of news is devastating.

Back in 1999, Julian Mallins had kindly sent a note he had retained in his files (see overleaf), sent to him by Geoffrey Shaw, junior to Michael Hill for the defence in the libel trial. In the note, Shaw asks Julian for my two diaries for 1986 (an A4 diary and an Economist diary) ‘in case Michael asks to look at them’. Julian passed the diaries to Shaw and Hill for inspection, and told Mary he is pretty sure that they would have gone through them thoroughly – and clearly found nothing worthy of comment in them, since they were not an issue in the libel trial. Julian added that it would be ‘absolute rubbish’ to suggest that the Star’s lawyers could not have examined these two diaries (which Angela Peppiatt had claimed in the criminal trial were almost entirely blank) in court for other entries.

Later Julian wrote to Mary: ‘English law in 1986 was not an ass. If it had been Michael Hill’s suggestion that the alibi evidence was all true, except for the date, neither Lord Archer in the witness box nor the judge, still less Lord Alexander nor I, could have objected to Michael Hill going through the rest of the diary to find the same dinner date with the same companion at the same restaurant but on another date.’

None of us had known anything of Peppiatt’s pocket diary for 1986, in which she noted both her own and my engagements, kept as her own property for over ten years, but produced in court as my ‘true’ diary for that year.

Mary also tells me that she has written to Godfrey Barker about his earlier reference to dining with Mr Justice Potts some time before the trial, when the judge might have made disparaging remarks about me. She now fears Godfrey will disappear the moment the date of the appeal is announced.

DAY 192

SATURDAY 26 JANUARY 2002

10.00 am

I weigh myself. Yuk. I’m fourteen stone two pounds. Yuk. I lost eleven pounds during my three weeks at Belmarsh, falling to twelve stone seven pounds. At Wayland I put that eleven pounds back on in ten weeks, despite being in the gym every day. At NSC the food is better, but because of my job I don’t have time to go to the gym (poor excuse). On Monday I must stop eating chocolate and return to the gym. I am determined to leave the prison, whenever, around twelve stone eight pounds.

1.00 pm

I have a visit from an inmate who was sentenced to three months, which means he’ll serve around five or six weeks. His crime? The theft of £120 while in a position of trust. He was a policeman. I am not going into much detail about his crime, as I’m more interested in the problems a police officer faces when being sent to jail. He’s remarkably frank.

On his arrival, he was placed in the north block, and within minutes recognized a drug dealer he’d arrested in the past. He reported this to Mr Hughes, the unit officer, and was immediately placed in segregation overnight. The duty governor had to make a decision the following morning as to which one to ship out. He chose the drug dealer, as he had recently proved positive for an MDT. The policeman was put back on the north block, given a job in the kitchen and told to keep his head down. That was a week ago. So far no one else has recognized him, but he still has two weeks to serve.

Incidentally, he was originally charged with stealing £1,000, which, by the time the case came to court, had dwindled to £120. However, that was three years ago, and during that time he was suspended on full pay (a little over £60,000).

The police and Prison Service don’t seem to care how much taxpayers’ money they spend. If either service were a private company, they would be declared bankrupt within a year. I’m not suggesting he shouldn’t have been charged, but I am saying it ought not to have cost over £100,000 and taken three years to discover if he’d stolen £120.

2.00 pm

I stand in the drizzle watching the prison football team do a little better than last week. However, one of our best strikers, Jean-Noel, is called off when Mr Masters (our coach) receives a call over the intercom to say that Jean-Noel has a young lady waiting for him in the visits hall. He runs off the pitch, quickly showers and changes, and joins his girlfriend.

At the time we are 1-0 in the lead. We lose 5-1.