Chill Factor (19 page)

“It’s a long time since you were here” she observed. “I’m over the road, now. Just ask and they’ll point you in the right direction.”

I did some thinking before I went down to Control to find someone authorised to interrogate the computer systems. The CRO would tell us Chilcott’s record, the PNC would have other stuff about him. Confidential stuff. Trouble was, his name would be tagged in some way, and any enquiry we made would be relayed straight to Special Branch and NCIS. They were on our side, I decided, so I did it anyway.

The print-outs didn’t make pleasant reading. Chilcott started young, served the usual apprenticeship. He had a full house of cautions, followed by probation and youth
custody
. As an adult he’d served two years for robbery and eight for armed robbery. After that, it was all hearsay. A series of building society raids were put down to him, as was a bank heist that netted over half a million and left a security guard shot dead. I was wrong about one thing – he wasn’t a cop killer. A uniformed PC, under-experienced and over-
diligent
, walked into a stake-out that nobody had told him about and was shot for his troubles. He didn’t die, but in his shoes I’d have preferred it. The bullet fractured his spine, high up, and left him a quadriplegic. Chilcott escaped and fled the country. Nothing had been heard of him since 1992, but rumour linked him with a string of gangland killings. Maybe the money was running out, I thought.

Her Majesty’s Prison Bentley sits four-square on a hill just outside Halifax. It’s a Victorian-Gothic pile, complete with battlements, crenellated turrets and fake arrow-slits, but with the proportions of a warthog. The architect was
probably warned about the gales that howl down from the north, so he built it squat and solid. It strikes terror in my heart every time I visit the place. I swung into the car-park, mercifully empty because we were outside visiting hours, and gazed up at the gaunt stone walls, wondering if Mad King Ludwig ever had a skinhead brother.

Gwen had told the gatehouse to expect me, but they put a show on before accompanying me to her office.
Double-check
my ID, a quick frisk and then through the metal detector. She runs a tight ship. She has to; Bentley houses some of the most dangerous men in the country, as well as remand prisoners.

I’d forgotten how handsome she is, in a Bloomsbury-ish sort of way. Strong features, hair pinned back, long elegant fingers. No faded delicacy with Gwen, though. At a shade under six feet tall she’d be a formidable opponent, tearing towards you brandishing a hockey stick. We shook hands and pretended to kiss cheeks, and I flopped into the leather chair she indicated.

I told her she looked well and she said I looked tired. That made it twice, recently. One of her officers, male, approaching retirement age, knocked and poked his head round the door to ask if I preferred tea or coffee. Gwen thanked him, calling him Thomas. He called her ma’am.

“These are the transcripts,” she said, reaching across the polished top of her desk to pull a sheaf of loose sheets towards us. She’d joined me at the wrong side of it, where you stood to receive her wrath; or words of encouragement; or the news that your wife and the bloke you didn’t grass on had run away to Spain with all the money. “I’ve highlighted the relevant bits,” she added, pulling her chair closer to mine, so we could both read them. I detected the merest hint of her perfume, which was heavy and musky and put me off balance for a moment or two.

I studied the lists, then said: “I never realised just how much work was entailed with these, Gwen.” Someone had to
obtain a printout of all the calls, with times and numbers, and then transfer that information to a transcript of all the
tape-recorded
conversations that somebody else had prepared.

“It’s a bind, Charlie. And all for so little return.”

“Now and again you come up with gold,” I said. “Maybe this is one of those times. How do you know who made the calls?”

“The hard way. An inmate has to ask to use the phone, and we keep a book.”

“Which wing is whatsisname on?”

“Paul Mann? A-wing.”

Maximum security, for long term prisoners in the early years of their sentences, and the nutcases. “What’d he do?”

“Poured paraffin over his girlfriend and ignited it. It burns deeper than petrol, apparently.”

“She died?”

“Eventually.”

“Mr Nice Guy.” I read the scraps of conversation from the sheet, next to the London number he’d dialled: 

Tuesday’s conversation was even less fulsome: 

Two days later we had:

Thomas came in with the teas, on a tray with china cups and a plate of biscuits. We both thanked him and Gwen poured the tea. I reached for a bourbon, saying: “Whoever transcribed this cares about your sensibilities.”

She beamed at me. “Sweet, isn’t he?”

“What’s Mann’s tarrif?” I asked.

“Thirty years,” she replied, easing an over-filled cup in my direction.

“So ordering a Rolls Royce would seem a little
premature
?”

“I’d say so.”

“And would you say that fifty thousand pounds was a
reasonable
price for killing a man?”

The cup was halfway to her lip. She paused and lowered it back to its saucer. “Mann killed his girlfriend because the baby was crying,” she told me.

I bit half off the biscuit and slowly chewed it. When my mouth was empty I asked: “What did he do with the baby?”

“The baby? Oh, the room was on fire, so he tried to save the baby. He threw her out of the window. Says he forgot they were on the seventh floor.”

“Jee-sus,” I sighed.

The prisons have a dilemma. It doesn’t take long for a
hierarchy
to form, with men like Mann and Chiller as the
kingpins
. They build up a coterie of acolytes and prey on the weaker inmates. Contrary to popular opinion, for most
prisoners
once is enough. All they want to do is put their heads down, serve their time and never come back. Faced with someone like Mann, they back down, accept the bottom bunk, hand over their phone cards and cigarettes. The men at the top never want for drugs, booze, cigarettes or sex. They still run their outside empires through a network of contacts, and anyone who steps out of line gets hurt. The occasional broken leg, slashed face or crushed hand is
amazingly
good for business

So the prison governors move them. They allow the hard men to become established and then transfer them to the other end of the country, with maximum inconvenience. It’s called ghosting. He eats his breakfast in Brixton, full of the joys of life, and at lunchtime finds himself hobbling out of the van in Armley, squinting up at the coils of razor wire above the walls, wondering who the top cat is. On any Monday morning prison vans, usually accompanied by the local police, are criss-crossing the country like worker bees seeking out new feeding grounds.

There is a down-side, of course. The constant exchange of prisoners creates an unofficial inter-jail communications network that cannot be improved upon. When the inmates of Hull decide to have a dirty protest, or to hurl tiles down from the roof, it’s no coincidence that the prisoners in Strangeways, Bentley and Parkhurst choose exactly the same time to do exactly the same thing. The great revolution of the late twentieth century has been in communications, and the prison population is leading the field.

Some of it is high-tech, some of it lower than you’d
believe people could go. Phone cards, not snout, are the new currency, but the big porcelain phone in the corner is
available
to everyone with a strong stomach. The days of slopping out are over because most cells now have a toilet. The
prisoners
are not as overjoyed about this as you might expect. Once they had a room, now they have a shithole in the corner of the cell, behind an aluminium sink unit to give a modicum of privacy when you’re sitting there. What no one envisaged was the communications opportunities this created. What no one realised was the ingenuity of caged men.

All the toilets lead down to a common drain. Take a small receptacle – your cellmate’s drinking cup will do fine – and drain all the water out of the toilet u-bend. Pour it down the sink. You are now connected to the drain. If somebody else does the same thing elsewhere in the prison, even in
another
wing, you can now have a conversation without raising your voice above a whisper. There may be interruptions of a nature that BT users never experience, but you’ll never be left hanging on through three movements of the
Four Seasons
. To break the line, terminate the call, you simply flush the toilet.

I didn’t feel hungry. I’d had no lunch but the thought of having a long and meaningful conversation with your head down the pan, listening to all the extraneous noises,
savouring
the odours, is a wonderful appetite suppressant. Perhaps I could sell the concept to Weight Watchers and never have to work again. I won twenty-five thousand pounds in a quiz programme on television, then had a long hot soak in the bath. Freshly scrubbed, I managed a tin of chicken soup, with some decent bread, followed by a few custard creams. In deference to all the people who think I looked tired I went to bed early and, unusual for me, slept like a little
dormouse
.

“Where were you, yesterday?” Gilbert asked at the morning prayer meeting.

“Bentley prison,” I replied, sliding a chair across and
placing
my mug of tea on a beer mat on his desk. “I left word.” There were only the two of us, because Gareth Aidey had a court appointment and was polishing the buttons on his best tunic.

“So you really went to Bentley?”

“Of course I did. Where did you think I was – having a round of golf?”

“I don’t know what you get up to. I’m only the super. Regional Crime Squad were after you, said that Special Branch had tipped them off that you were on to something.”

“Christ, that was quick.”

“Nobody had a clue what it was all about. I felt a right wally.”

“Sorry, Gilbert, but I didn’t know myself until after five o’clock. I was at Bentley until nearly seven.”

“So what was it about?”

I found the transcripts in my briefcase and laid them on his desk. “It looks as if someone in Bentley prison is trying to organise a hitman to do a job, and the hitman is a certain Kevin Chilcott. Remember him?”

“Kevin Chilcott? He killed a police officer, didn’t he, ten or twelve years ago?”

“As good as. I consulted the PNC about him and SB must have picked it up.”

“Humph!” he snorted. “Makes you wonder what else they pick up. So what have you got?” Gilbert read the excerpts, running his finger along the lines like a
schoolchild
. He mumbled to himself and turned the page over.

“That’s just the usual stuff,” I told him.

“What do you call the usual stuff?”

“Oh, you know…” – I adopted a whining voice – “
That you Sharron? Yeah. I love you. I love you. How’s your mum. She’s all right. Tell her I love her. She sez she love’s you. How’s your Tracy? She’s all right. Tell her I love her. She’s pregnant. Is she? Yeah. Whose is it? Dunno. When’s it due? January. It can’t
be mine, then
.”

Gilbert said: “OK, OK, I get the message. So this stuff stands out, then.”

“Like a first-timer at a nudist colony.”

“You’d better let RCS know.”

“I’ll do it now.”

Gilbert stood up and retrieved his jacket from behind the door. “I’m off to headquarters,” he told me. “Monthly
meeting
. You’re in charge. What can I report about the Margaret Silkstone case?”

“Solved,” I replied.

“Good. And the Peter Latham job?”

“Solved.”

“Good. As long as you remember you said it. Do you want me to tell them about this?” He waved a hand towards the papers on his desk.

“Might as well,” I replied. “Give you something to talk about.”

Special Branch are not a band of super-cops, based in London. Every Force has an SB department, quietly
beavering
away at god-knows what. They have offices at all the
airports
and other points of entry, and keep an eye on who comes in and goes out of the country. Anti-terrorism is their speciality, but they keep a weather-eye open for big-league criminals on the move. If you don’t mind unsociable hours and have a high boredom threshold it could be the career for you. Special Branch don’t feel collars, they gather
information
. The Regional Crime Squads specialise in heavy stuff like organised crime, the syndicates and major criminals. They are experts at covert surveillance, tailing people and using informers. They move about, keep a low profile,
infiltrate
gangs. Dangerous stuff.

“So where is he?” I asked an RCS DI in London when I finally found myself talking to someone with an interest in the case.

“Wish we knew,” he confessed. “Over the last five years
we’ve had sightings in Spain, Amsterdam and Puerto Rico. He moves around. What we do know, though, is that the money must have run out by now, even if he’s living very modestly. Half a million sounds a lot, but when someone charges you thirty per cent for converting it to used notes or a foreign currency, and someone else charges you for their silence, and so on, it soon depletes.”

“In the transcripts he says make it quick,” I told him.

“Sounds like he’s getting desperate, then. We’ll dig out a new description of him and circulate it to all points of entry. After that, we can only hope that someone spots him. Which district are you?”

“Number three.”

“So that will be our Leeds office?”

“That’s right.”

“Any chance of you getting the transcripts over there? If the conversations took place a month ago we might be too late already.”

“’Fraid not. I’ll address them to you and leave them behind the front desk.” It was their baby, so they could do the running around.

“OK. I’ll arrange for them to be collected, and thanks for the information.”

“My pleasure.” I asked him to keep us informed and replaced the receiver. Another satisfied customer, I thought, as I delved into Gilbert’s filing cabinet where he keeps his chocolate digestives.

After two of them I rang Gwen Rhodes at HMP Bentley and told her that the hard men were now on the Chiller case and that they had promised to keep us informed, but don’t hold your breath. People say they will, then don’t bother. It’s a mistake. I always make a point of saying my
thank-yous
, letting people know what happened. They remember, and next time you want something from them you get it with a cherry on the top.

Gwen said: “So the message was definitely for Chilcott,
was it?”

“They think so, Gwen. Apparently his money should have run out by now, and they’re expecting him to make a move. This might be it.”

“Good,” she said. “Good. Glad we could be of
assistance
.”

“Listen, Gwen,” I said. “While you’re on the line, there’s something else I’d like to ask you.”

“Ye-es, Charlie,” she replied, in a tone that might have been cautious, may even have been expectant. What was I going to ask her? How about dinner sometime? The theatre?

“A few weeks ago you had a remand prisoner of mine called Anthony Silkstone,” I said. “I was wondering how he took to life on the inside.”

“Silkstone,” she repeated, downbeat. “Tony Silkstone?”

“That’s the man.”

“Killed his wife’s murderer?”

“That’s him. Anything to report about his behaviour?”

“I read about him in the papers but I didn’t realise he was one of yours, Charlie. Knew we had him, and he certainly didn’t cause any problems. Let’s see what the oracle says…” I heard the patter of keys as she consulted the computer
terminal
that sat on her desk, followed by a soft: “Here we are,” to herself, and a long silence.

“Gosh,” she said when she came back on the line. “You can send us as many like him as you can find, Charlie. A golden prisoner by any standards.”

“Oh,” I said. “What did he do?”

“It’s all here. First of all the other inmates, the remandees that is, regarded him as some sort of folk hero. It explains that the person Silkstone killed had murdered his – Silkstone’s – wife and was also a sex offender. Is that true? Was he a sex offender?”

“Um, it looks like it.”

“So that gave him a big pile of kudos, in their eyes. You
know what they all think of nonces. It goes on to say that Silkstone took an active part in the retraining programme we’re conducting, and became a popular lecturer in
salesmanship
. He even promised one or two of them an interview with his company, when they were all released. We need more like him, Charlie. Send us more, please.”

“That sounds like my man. He’s a little treasure, no
mistake
.”

“He certainly is. Anything else you’d like to ask?”

Dinner? The theatre? “No, Gwen,” I replied, “but thanks a lot.”

Wednesday morning Sophie Sparkington received a letter from the admissions tutor at St John’s College, Cambridge, where she would be reading history, and I received one from the matron of the Pentland Court Retirement Home, Chipping Sodbury.

Mine was handwritten on headed paper, and was addressed to the senior detective at Heckley Police Station. It said:

Stapled behind it was another sheet of the same paper, with the same handwriting. This one read:

Dave came in and I handed him the letters. He read them in silence and shrugged his shoulders.

“Mothers,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“Which would you rather be: the murderer’s parent or the victim’s parent?”

“Don’t ask me. I wonder if Hitler’s mother said that she always knew he’d turn out to be a bastard, or if she loved him right to the end. What do you want to do with it?”

“Drop her a reply, please. Not the card. Make it a letter, in my name. Then show it to Annette and stick it in the file.”

“OK. Nigel rang,” Dave said. “Wants to know if we’re going to the Spinners tonight. He says long-time-no-see.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Eight thirty.”

“Looks like we are, then.”

“Oh, and he says not to laugh, but he’s grown a moustache.”

“A moustache?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Nigel?”

“Mmm.”

“This I’ve got to see.”

But I didn’t, because he never came. We’ve developed a new routine for our Wednesdays out. The Spinners is about two miles from each of our houses, so we walk there. It’s a
half-hour power walk and that first pint slides down like snow off a roof when you stroll into the pub and lean on the bar. Towards closing time Dave’s wife, Shirley, comes in the car for an orange juice and takes us home.