Tuesday, 14 May 2019

The prisoner being transported in the back of the Serco van was having a laugh and joke with two fresh-faced young prison officers sitting with him. He was being escorted from HMP Wakefield, category A prison, to HMP Spring Hill, an open prison in Buckinghamshire to complete the last few weeks of his six-year sentence. They talked about last night’s Manchester United game, the sending-off, and the high tackle that caused it. The two officers, Andy and Steve, new recruits to the outsourcing firm, were relaxed. It was the last trip of their working day and this little guy wasn’t going to be any trouble. Neil Wright, 63, had been put away for the manslaughter of his wife. According to him, she banged her head on the stone floor during an argument in which she threatened him with a knife. The paperwork confirmed he was now considered a low-risk offender unlikely to reoffend. The two officers, one of whom was handcuffed to the felon, were quite understanding of Wright’s explanation and regret for what he’d done. Steve, the older of the two officers, was divorced, and his own relationship had verged on violence during its breakdown. Andy, just twenty-two, with a soft innocent face and a snub nose, was a big Crewe Alexander fan, and lived just around the corner from the ground. The prisoner, having spotted Andy’s lanyard, memorised his surname.

As the van arrived at the gatehouse of the new jail, the driver passed across a clipboard holding a stack of documents, including the prison escort record and its matching risk assessment document, all neatly filled out. After being checked through by the gate officer, the barrier was lifted and the vehicle entered the courtyard. Other more detailed documents had been emailed to the prison governor ahead of the arrival. Everything appeared to be as it should be. Bureaucracy doing its job.

Every word of it was a lie.

The man they were unwittingly escorting was in fact a notorious child murderer and paedophile, who had at the Old Bailey in 1986 been given an indeterminate sentence for the killing of at least nine boys between the ages of ten and seventeen over a period of thirty years. The judge had described him as ‘Perhaps the most wicked, bestial and coldhearted killer ever brought before me.’ The decades in various segregation wings across the British penal system had gradually changed his appearance. The grinning, muscular, tousle-haired goblin of twenty-nine, a staple of the 1980s tabloid press, had gradually transmuted. He had aged badly, and was wiry, with only a few tufts of snowy hair and a grizzled beard. Only the dark watchful eyes, now behind red framed spectacles, were the same.

His real name was Neville Rollason. The fake identity was neat and flawless, utterly professional. It was not the result of some cunning piece of sleight of hand by the prisoner himself or any of his associates. It was far too comprehensive for that. It was in fact created by a senior officer in Special Branch, under instruction from the Home Office.