A Prison Story
I met Roy Clarke on one of my first
nights on the watch. He was older than the other officers, myself included. Still, he shared the same stocky physique of his colleagues - the widening midriff, a
generous beard making up for the lack of hair on his head and a smattering of
tattoos inked so long ago they had blurred into nothing. I think he must have
noted my horrified expression as I first entered J Wing and thought I needed
looking after. He was right. The open prisons I was used to seemed like
holiday camps in comparison. At HMP Headingly, the architecture and
cramped conditions had changed little since Victorian times.
The squeeze on recruitment meant I saw only a few officers on the Wing at any given time. It was easy to lose
sight of my colleagues, who vanished completely among the swathes of prisoners,
glaring at me as I walked past. I sensed violence could erupt at any
moment. Roy said even the career criminals felt intimidated by the
place, with some men so terrified, they refused to leave their cells.
That’s why I appreciated having Roy
with me; someone to respond with when the fighting started and an ally to share
the burden of the 15-minute suicide checks. Roy looked like he’d lived and
breathed the prison for so long nothing would ever phase him. But I was wrong.
We were holed up in our office on J
Wing when Roy told me the story of Caleb Nichol. For once, the prisoners were
sleeping soundly, and we were swapping football stories. Roy worshipped the
Gunners while I was a Canary's fan, so it was hardly a meeting of minds, but it
passed the time. I’m sure we'd of carried on in the same fashion if Roy hadn’t
knocked my mug over and spilt my coffee all over the floor.
Roy muttered some choice words and
then said, ‘Go and get me a mop from the storeroom, will you? Don’t want to get
electrocuted by all these cables.’
He’d made the mess, but I got
up as Roy had been good to me. I made my way across the landing to the
storeroom and attempted to unlock it as quietly as possible.
The storeroom used to be a cell, like
all the others on the landing. Now it was crammed floor to ceiling with an assortment
of mops and cleaning products. As I opened the door, a cold blast of air hit me
like a freight train. I looked to see if a window was open, but everything was
secure, so I figured the heating was off. Shivering and eager to get back to my
office, I grabbed a mop and bucket and locked up the cell again.
When I got back to the office, Roy
said, ‘Find the bucket, alright did you? Everything as it should be?’
‘Sure, but it's bloody freezing in
there. I guess heating an empty cell’s a waste of money, but it was like
walking into a fridge.’
‘You didn’t notice anything strange?’
‘No, why should I? It’s just a
storeroom.' I started wiping the coffee off the floor. The mop made quick work
of it. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘I’ve always thought there was
something odd about that cell,’ said Roy. ‘I know it's daft, but I avoid going
in there if I can. I always get the feeling that I’m being watched.’
I’d always assumed that Roy was above
that sort of nonsense, but he seemed ill at ease. ‘Watched by who?’ I said.
‘This is probably going to sound
daft, but I think there’s something in that storeroom. I don't mean flesh and
blood, or even a ghost, but that used to be Caleb Nichol’s old cell, and there’s
something wrong with it. It’s more of a feeling than anything concrete.’ He
paused for a moment as if looking for the right words. ‘It’s like an
echo. Something you can’t see, but you know it’s there.’
‘Don’t be daft, Roy,’ I said, trying to
lighten the mood. ‘We both know the supernatural is a load of mumbo jumbo. I
didn’t think you were the type to believe in that sort of thing.’
Roy chuckled. ‘You won't find me
hiding under the duvet frightened of monsters, but I was brought up a Catholic.
And I’ll tell you this for nothing - if Satan ever fancied a tour of this
prison, he'd pick Caleb Nichol as his guide.
I could sense Roy gearing up for one
of his prison anecdotes, so I rested the mop by the door and sat down as
comfortably as possible on my rigid plastic chair. The frown on Roy's face
suggested this wouldn't be one of his usual light-hearted stories.
‘I’ve met hundreds of evil men but
Caleb Nichol is the one who really sticks in my mind. He was in for murder,
five little kids - completely random killings. He was finally caught after
murdering his mother and almost killing his father. With six life sentences to
his name, he was never coming out.
‘Of course, child killers suffer a
barrage of insults when they come into the jail, and Nichol was high profile. I’d
already seen several TV documentaries about all his crimes, and so had everyone
else. So when he came out of the first-night centre, the prisoners all knew who
he was, but everyone was deathly quiet. New inmates walk tend with a swagger,
trying to show they’re not to be messed with, but Nichol was different. He had
an aura about him that made you feel unsettled. He just stared
straight ahead, relaxed. Like he was taking a stroll in the park.
‘As Nichol went into his cell, I
tried to walk past and accidentally tripped him up. You know I’d never goad a
prisoner, so I apologised, quite expecting all manner of abuse from him. But
instead, he got up and said nothing. He just looked at me. I can’t tell you the
feeling of fear that came over me. I stared into his coal-black eyes, and for a
moment, I was terrified - because - he'd seen me. It's hard to explain, but it’s
was like being recognised by a monster, an unnatural thing, who would carry my
slight until it had got its revenge. I stood there for ages, or so
it felt, almost in a trance. The officers took him into his cell, and I carried
on down Spur. But the look in his eyes stayed with me. I’m not sure I will ever
forget it.'
‘Child killer’s always give me the
creeps.’ I said, then shut up again quickly as I remembered Roy hated being
interrupted in the middle of a story.
‘Nichol’s first cellmate was Rory
McNulty, Roy continued as if oblivious to my interruption. ‘A big Irish fella
who had strangled his wife and his sister. He was a nasty piece of work, scared
of no one and nobody - apart from Nichol. A few days after Nichol’s arrival, we
noticed a change in McNulty. His usual bravado was gone. His skin had taken on
a sickly pallor, and instead of striding about the Wing as he usually did, he sat
the corner by himself. I asked him what the matter was, and he mumbled something
about his new cellmate. He said Nichol kept him awake, constantly muttering to
himself. He said Nichol was weird.
‘A week later, McNulty asked to move
cells. He said he’d wake up in the early hours, and Nichol would be standing
over him chanting in a foreign language. He said their cell stank, and Nichol
gave him the creeps. I spoke to Nichol, who gave me one of his sickly sweet
smiles and said he must have been sleepwalking. Said he couldn’t do anything
about it.
'As for McNulty, he’d done himself no
favours, and we all enjoyed his newfound meekness. He kept pleading with us to
move him, but we refused. I feel bad now for not taking him seriously - given
what happened next.’
‘Oh, come on, Roy,’ I said, forgetting
my vow not to interrupt. ‘You know these fellows will try it on when they can.
You can’t blame yourself for anything in this place. These blokes are devious.
You know that.’
‘I know, but it was a strange
business. One night about 2am there was a commotion. I was on duty, and I was
one of the first officers at the scene. McNulty was sitting on the edge of his
bed crying and rocking. His arms were lacerated with deep slashes. There was
blood everywhere. Nichol sat on the top bunk, and when I asked him what had
happened, he said McNulty had done it to himself. And McNulty just kept on
rocking, saying, ‘I did it, I did it. He told me to, he told me to.
‘We carried McNulty to the hospital
wing where they bandaged him up. He was acting like he’d gone crazy. Maybe he’d
got hold of Spice or some other drug, but his tests came back negative. Nothing
seemed to settle him. He said he saw shadows on the walls reaching out to him, and his condition continued to deteriorate. A couple of weeks later, he was
gone.’
I could see this memory was upsetting. Roy and with hindsight, I should have returned to our chat about the playoffs.
Instead, I found myself asking, ‘Do you think McNulty's madness was caused by
Nichol?’
‘Not at first, until I realised every
time Nichol had a new cellmate, it always ended badly. One inmate had an
accident in the machine room, cut his hand clean off. Another overdosed on
heroin and died; a third got onto the roof and jumped to his death. And so it
went on. All the prisoners became frightened of Nichol. No one would speak to
him, which only pleased him more. Even the officers became afraid of him and
avoided him when they could.
‘The other odd thing was his love of
what I called his ‘collections’. He worked as a prison cleaner and got busted
on cell sweeps several times for concealing scraps he’d scavenged from the
kitchen waste bins; Chicken bones; rotting meat; putrid things. He nearly lost
his job several times.’
‘Why on earth would he keep hold of crap like that?’ I said.
‘Who knows? But he was the kiss of
death to his roommates, that’s for sure. Nichol only ever had one visitor. He
was a tall, thin man, always immaculately dressed in an expensive suit. They
would sit together in the visitor's centre, giggling and whispering
conspiratorially. I looked at the name in the signing-in sheet once, wondering
if the man was a relative, but I didn't recognise it. Some sort of foreign
name. He was very similar to Nichol, though - the same shark eyes and a grin
that hinted at evil and depravity.
‘Then, without any warning, we found
Nichol dead. I opened up his cell one morning and discovered his body hanging
from the top bunk. I checked his wrist for a pulse, and it was still warm and
clammy to the touch. I remember the expression on his face; his contorted mouth
still had a hint of that mocking grin. Even in death, he managed to unnerve me.
‘Of course, no one in the prison was sorry he was dead, and I was one of a handful of mourners at his funeral. The tall man was there, although he didn’t seem very upset, and the odd thing he said to me sticks in my mind. I had gone over to him after the service and said whatever Nichol’s crimes, it was terrible for a man to take his own life, and the tall man just smiled at me and said, "There’s no need to grieve for Caleb. He’s with his father now." I often puzzled over that comment as I’d heard Nichol say several times how he hated God and his father was still living as far as I knew.
‘After Nichol’s death, two new
prisoners moved into the cell, and we thought that would be the end of it. We
were wrong. ‘The first lag, Thomas Colvin was a strong, silent type, resigned
to his sentence. He was an armed robber, in and out of prison for 30 years and
going nowhere fast. The second, Michael Fitch still only a teenager. He got
tanked up one night and knifed a doorman at a Club. Anyway, we thought this
would be a good match, as Colvin would teach Fitch to keep his head down and
steer clear of the nutters, but it wasn’t to be. A few days after they went into
that cell, they started kicking off - screaming at each other and getting into
fights. Colvin was taken to solitary, and Fitch began to self-harm. Not as bad
as McNulty, but nasty enough. He said he couldn’t get to sleep and heard voices
in his cell, telling him to hurt himself.
‘That seemed like a horrible case of
deja vu, so I got Fitch referred to a psychiatrist. Not that it did him any good.
He swapped his prescription for hard drugs, and soon he was blue lighting his
way out of the prison as well.
‘And so it went on. Same cell, same
trouble, until I started to notice things myself.’
Roy paused for a moment and took a
large sip of his coffee. I may have imagined it, but when he started speaking
again, his voice seemed quieter, and I noticed he kept glancing towards the
storeroom.
‘I’d be on the Wing late at night and
I'd see a tiny ball of bright light hovering about in the middle of the
landing. You could follow it with your eyes as it flew around, looping the
loop. I told Big Simon, who laughed and said I was seeing Willow-the-wisps, but
then he noticed it too. The light disappeared after a couple of nights, only to
be replaced by something more sinister. A black shadow appeared, darting at
speed, right past the cell. You’d get a strange compulsion to look up, and out
of the corner of your eye, you’d see a dark mass, similar to the size and shape
of Caleb Nichol. I’ve already told you I don't believe in ghosts,
yet I swear I saw that shadow and heard the sound of footsteps ringing on the
metal walkway. There was no one there, but I heard them stop right outside his
cell and for a while, I swapped my shifts over to H wing, just to avoid being
here.
‘Then one day, the Governors said the
cell had been flooded, and they were turning it into a storeroom. Maybe they’d
noticed the high level of incidents connected with it. During the refurb, the
decorators discovered one of Nichol’s macabre collections, hidden behind a
loose brick; a twisted mass of feathers and bone and a piece of paper with
strange symbols scribbled all over it. Written in blood, they said, although
that sounds a bit fanciful even for Nichol. I didn't see the paper myself; I think it got thrown away with the rest of the rubbish.
‘After that, the lights and noises
began to fade, although, to this day, I still hear the odd noise from inside that
room, even though it’s locked and empty. If I were prone to flights of fancy,
I'd say Nichol still lingers there, like a fluke wrapping itself around your
liver and slowly squeezing.’
Roy looked upwards towards the cell
again and for a second, I thought I heard the faint sound of footsteps walking
slowly towards us, before a commotion on the floor below sent us running to
investigate.
A week later, the shift rotas
changed, and I didn't see Roy for a while. When we finally caught up, he seemed
nervous and troubled, older somehow. When I asked what was wrong, he said the
prison had finally got to him, and he’d put in for a transfer to HMP Grendon.
Certainly, his health seemed to have deteriorated, taking with it his usual
cheerfulness.
Roy never made his move down to
Aylesbury. On his very last day, an officer found him lying face down outside
the door of that storeroom. A massive aneurysm, dead before he hit
the ground. In the open coffin at his funeral, you could still see the lines
from the metallic grate imprinted on his cheek.
With Roy dead, no one mentioned Caleb
Nichol to me again, but I’ll never forget my colleague or his story. And if I
ever need a mop from the storeroom; I’ll always send somebody else.
* * *
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