Cover

Dedication

For Louise, as always

Epigraph

When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter One

Tuesday, 14 May 2019

The prisoner being transported in the back of the Serco van was having a laugh and joke with the two fresh-faced young prison officers sitting with him. He was being escorted from the high-security wing of HMP Wakefield to HMP Spring Hill, an open prison in Buckinghamshire, to complete the last few weeks of his six-year sentence. They chatted about last night’s Manchester United game, the sending-off and the high tackle that caused it. The two officers, Steve and Aaron, new recruits to the outsourcing firm, were relaxed. It was the last trip of their working day and this pension-age prisoner handcuffed to Aaron wasn’t going to be any trouble.

Neil Wright was a wiry little guy with red Ferrari brand glasses, a soft white beard and just a few tufts of snowy hair. The paperwork gave his age as sixty-seven, but he looked well over seventy. He was described as a low-risk offender unlikely to reoffend. The crime he’d committed back in 2013 was listed as manslaughter.

He barely looked capable of swatting a fly.

Towards the end of the journey, Steve had asked him about the crime, something he wouldn’t have dared with a more intimidating villain. Wright took a while to reply. He eventually said he had accidentally killed his wife during an argument. She had threatened him with a kitchen knife, and during the struggle to disarm her she had tripped. She fell and banged her head on the stone-flagged floor of their cottage. Manslaughter. The two officers were quite understanding of Wright’s explanation and his regret for what he’d done. Steve, the older of the two, was divorced, and he admitted his own relationship had verged on violence during its breakdown. We’ve all been there, he told the prisoner. Could have been any of us. Wright smiled. Aaron, just twenty-two and unmarried, listened to the conversation. He was a tall, well-built lad, with a soft innocent face and a snub nose. The prisoner, sitting right next to him because of the cuffs connecting them, asked him a few questions and listened carefully to the answers. Aaron volunteered that he was a Crewe Alexandra fan, and lived just around the corner from the ground. He liked techno music. He admitted that he and a girlfriend had just broken up. The prisoner nudged his elbow and told him to cheer up. Plenty more fish in the sea, eh? Then the prisoner held Aaron’s lanyard, and commented on the picture. What a friendly guy, Aaron thought. He hadn’t expected how normal some of these prisoners would be.