A thick fog had descended on us. It came creeping off the Thames at dusk and now clung to every corner of the city, still and unmoving. It was Saturday night, October 31st, Halloween. I was sitting in the back of a black Mercedes Benz, wearing a black tux...
Seven weeks later, I was taken in a wheelchair by a nurse, a hospital porter and my mother, from ward 3B on the fourth floor, into a service lift heading to level zero. Somebody within the walls of this building had leaked the news of my discharge to the...
BEEP…BEEP…BEEP. Plumes of thick smoke rise from the small piles of burning leaves that are dotted around the ancient church cemetery, stinging the eyes of the mourners and choking their lungs, as they file out into the murky gloom of the graveyard, their...
June 2016 <Woke up early with this sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach. As I write this the sun is just breaking through, casting a golden glow onto the painted brickwork above the cell door, bringing a new day and what should be a new chance at li...
December 2015 < It was another sleepless night; I have got kind of used to the odd noises that resonate inside this old building. Not only the clicks and clangs from the ageing pipework, but the guys who shout out indecipherable nonsense in their sleep...
November 2015 < Incarceration. Whoever it was that first devised that word and its meaning, captured the cold isolation that exists inside this institution perfectly. Locked away from the world and loved ones, unable to do anything but wait. Even the m...
October 2015 < News travels quickly in this place, bad news I found out travels quicker. The whispers and furtive, sideways looks at breakfast time told me that there have been a development. I could imagine what was being said, if I were in their posi...
August 2015 < Michael Dolan arrived at my cell door last night. Dolan is or was an infamous London gangster. He was also the psychotic ringleader of a gang of thugs here. He is what they call a ‘lifer,’ in for a string of violent offences in the 1990s,...
Part one Spring 2020. The streets were quiet and empty. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, not even a single line of vapour trail spoiled the perfectly clear blue. My children were playing happily in the back garden and enjoying the unseasonably warm spring...
I can’t explain it, and I’m really not sure I want to. It’s been there for so long that I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t, this desire for vulnerability, the risk of being caught, and the exhilarating threat of exposure and humiliation that it brings...
“How much did David Hamilton know of your affair with his wife?” I heard the question as soon as the last word of the statement had been completed. It pierced the silence like a gunshot. The female reporter sat on the end of a row about halfway up in thi...
“Penny for them,” Sally said, her voice drawing me back into the room, as would a hypnotist clicking his fingers. We were now alone. She sat in a wicker chair in the corner facing me as a low murmur of thunder sounded over the hills in the distance. “What...
Sunday morning My dad always called my mother a witch. You see, she has this sixth sense, ‘a feeling,’ she calls it. She instinctively knows when something, normally bad, is going to happen, and that is what I was experiencing at that moment. It was a k...
Late evening The soft lapping of the water against the side of the boat and the rhythmic putt putt of the motor were failing to be a calming influence as I fought against the waves of claustrophobia. I’m not sure exactly how long we had been on the boat,...
Summer Late Afternoon The girl carefully left her sun lounger, and although the pool’s edge was only a metre or so from where she lay, walked its full length, completely aware of the attention that she attracted, as men and women alike lowered their sungl...
