Jim (gym orderly) drives me to Cambridge so I can spend the day at home with James. Mary is still in Japan. James and I buy four new koi carp from the local garden centre. Freedom is underrated.
5.00 pm
I drive Mary’s car back to the camp and leave it in the prison car park. This will be the vehicle I use to get myself to Lincoln and back each day. I decided not to drive my BMW 720 as it would cause all sorts of problems, with the press, the prison staff and the other prisoners. While I’m driving, I feel a little like Toad in his motor on the open road.
DAY 397
MONDAY 10 AUGUST 2002
9.00 am
I began work at the Theatre Royal Lincoln today and enjoy wearing a shirt and tie for the first time in a year. Couldn’t find a parking place and arrived a few minutes late. Over a hundred journalists, photographers and cameramen are waiting for me.
The first thing I notice is that my little office has bars on the window.
When I walk in the street during my lunch break, the public are kind and considerate. Find it hard to leave at five, grab a meal and be back by seven.
I reach NSC with three minutes to spare. If I’d failed to make it on time, I would have lost all my privileges on the first day, and probably been put to work on the farm.
DAY 424
SUNDAY 15 SEPTEMBER 2002
I can now leave the prison every Sunday and travel to Grantchester to be with Mary and the family for the day.
Today, my fourth Sunday, Mary and I have been invited to lunch with Gillian and Tom Shephard and a few of their friends at their home in Thetford. As Thetford is on the way back to NSC, and within the fifty-five-mile radius of NSC, we decide to take separate cars so I can return to prison after lunch.33
We leave the Old Vicarage at 12.15 pm.34
DAY 434
WEDNESDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 2002
Five idylic weeks working at the Theatre Royal. Annie goes into rehearsal with Su Pollard, Mark Wynter and Louise English. I’ve been in charge of the children and in particular their accommodation needs, as they go on tour around the country. After the terrible events in Soham, Mr Moreno is adamant that their safety must be paramount. I spend hours organizing where the young girls and their chaperones will stay in each town.
Today, I attend the 2.30 pm dress rehearsal of Annie at the Liberal Club and leave the cast after Chris Colby has run through his notes.35 I wish them all luck and depart a few minutes before six. I now feel not only part of the team, but that I’m doing a worthwhile job.
I arrive back in Boston at six and go to the Eagles restaurant for what I didn’t then know was to be my last steak and kidney pie.
On my arrival back at the camp, Mr Elsen, a senior officer, asks me to accompany him to the governor’s office. I am desperately trying to think what I can possibly have done wrong. Mr Beaumont, the governor, and Mr Berlyn, the deputy governor, are sitting waiting for me. The governor wastes no time and asks me if, on Sunday 15th, I stopped on the way back to the camp to have lunch with Gillian Shephard MP.
‘Yes,’ I reply without hesitation, as I don’t consider Gillian or any of her other guests to be criminals.
Mr Beaumont tells me that I have breached my licence by leaving my home in Cambridge. This, despite the fact that I remained within the permitted radius of the prison, had been with my wife, hadn’t drunk anything stronger than apple juice and returned to NSC well in time.
Without offering me the chance to give an explanation, I am marched to the segregation block, and not even allowed to make a phone call.
The cold, bleak room, five paces by three, has just a thin mattress on the floor against one wall, a steel washbasin and an open lavatory.
DAY 435
THURSDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2002
5.00 am
I have not slept for one second of the ten hours I have been locked in this cell.
8.00 am