It was like walking into a waking nightmare, and he realised just how badly he had underestimated the people before him. They were capable of so much more than he could ever have guessed. He realised that despite the pamphlets he had read, and the books on the prison service he had pored over, he had no real idea of what to do with violent criminals like these. Nobody had. That was the trouble with the prison service. If someone had told him this would happen he would have laughed in their faces. He dined out on his stories of the criminals he had in his care, and now he would be ridiculed and vilified in the national press on top of everything else.

No one would take into account that Eros should have been in Broadmoor, that Brunos and the black man laBrett were intelligent and manipulative, that the men were bored out of their skulls with nothing to do and too much time to do it in. That the cons in here were basically the top echelon of the criminal world, looked up to by everyone in prison as real villains, blaggers and the like. That the men here were doing sentences longer than most marriages lasted and should in reality be treated with respect and asked to help in the running of the Wing, instead of being treated like animals with no privacy whatsoever - even the act of opening their bowels done in a toilet devoid of doors and while reading a paper, to give them a semblance of privacy. That they were sexually active and the only way open to them was with one another, which led to self-hatred, disease and deviance. That wives left them, divorced them, and stopped bringing their children in to visit. That the drugs which were growing more and more rife were their only escape from the boredom of the day, and their way of coping in a system which locked them up and threw away the key.

Rapists had their own prisons where people tried to help them; young offenders were helped. These men were just left. A whole sub-class of society left to rot away and gradually grow more bitter and more explosive as time went on.

No, no one would think of that aspect.

They locked them up, left them to stew and this was the upshot.

Hanningfield walked towards the men, brave now it seemed that everything was under control. And as he opened his mouth to speak, Georgio walked through the crush of men and threw the contents of the bucket into his face.

Hanningfield smelt the stench before he tasted the contents of the shit-bucket. His stomach seemed to rise up inside him as it rebelled against what he knew was inside his mouth, in his eyes, and covering his good suit.

All he could hear was the roar of mocking laughter as the men called out in jeering voices:

‘Shit up the Governor!’