Murder in the Museum. Simon Brett
Approaches’.
The vagueness of the subject had suited her well, and she’d launched into the first visit to Austen with an open mind, prepared to go where the participants led her. Seven prisoners had been there at the beginning of the session, three left during it, and two more wandered in. Sandy said that was par for the course, and pressed Jude to do another session a few weeks later. The sequence had now continued, more or less on a monthly basis, for nearly nine months.
Though there were one or two faces that recurred, Jude got used to being confronted on each occasion by a roomful of strangers. The shifting nature of the prison population made her realize how acute was the problem of continuity in Sandy Fairbarns’ job. Individuals might be encouraged and nurtured towards individual goals – exams and qualifications – but a lot of the educational effort was regarded by the prisoners as an optional entertainment, to be assessed against the rival attractions of the television, the gym or a kickaround with a football.
The subject-matter of Jude’s sessions usually started with her talking about some alternative therapy – be it yoga or acupuncture – but very soon the conversation moved away from the medical to the more general. There was usually resistance to be overcome. Jude was an attractive woman, so she had to survive an initial onslaught of sexist banter from men starved of female company. There was a lot of swearing, and frequently aggression between the prisoners, reviving old quarrels.
But each time her good sense, good humour and serenity would gradually allow discussion to flow. Amongst the shifting group of multi-ethnic, multi-faith prisoners, discussion quickly homed in on human psychology and belief systems. Because Austen was an open prison, there were a good few highly educated prisoners – mostly solicitors, as it happened – who were skilled in reasoned argument, but Jude was usually more impressed by the articulacy of the less privileged. Many of them, unused to discussion of abstract concepts, quickly caught on to the idea, and more than held their own with the more highly trained debaters.
Each session creaked for the first twenty minutes, then gained fluency. There was a lot of laughter, too, and the arrival of the warder to announce the two hours were up always came as a surprise. ‘New Approaches’ frequently ended up as philosophy, and always as a form of therapy.
And each time Jude was escorted by Sandy back across the compound to the Austen main gate, where she would hand in her visitor badge, Jude felt a sadness. She was going back out into the real world. The men whose ideas had flowed, whose identities had been so alive for the previous two hours, were going back to the stultifying, imagination-cramping repetitions of prison routine.
The reason Jude kept her activities at Austen secret was not the false modesty of philanthropy. It was the respect that she had for what Sandy Fairbarns was trying to achieve, and an unwillingness for knowledge of it to get to the wrong people. She could imagine the mileage in newsprint that a hang-’em-and-flog-’em right-wing politician could get out of the news that prisoners were being given instruction in healing and alternative therapies.
She also felt that talking about her work would be a betrayal of the confidences which some of the prisoners had shared with her. They had their integrity, and she had hers.
It was serendipity that Jude’s next visit to Austen was scheduled for the Monday after she had had lunch with Carole at the Crown and Anchor. As she got off the train from Fethering, she made a private prayer to one of her gods that Mervyn Hunter would once again be part of her group.
The walk from the station to the prison was pleasant in the autumn sunshine. HMP Austen was set on the flat coastal plain only about a mile from the sea. Behind her Jude could see the blue-grey humps of the Downs, receding ever paler into the distance. The town of Fedborough nestled in the crevice where their undulations began. If you had to be in prison, there were worse venues.
And yet Austen was still bleak. The path she trod, past the redbrick houses of prison officers, made Jude think of the other people she had seen walking along the same route on other afternoons. Harassed wives, snapping at trailing, whining children, going to snatch an hour’s visit to their errant husbands.
She remembered some words of Sandy’s. ‘You see them coming in, wiped out, totally exhausted, worried about money, worried about how the kids are behaving, forced into single parenthood. Then you see the men – a lot of them down here have been putting in time in the gym, and they’re brown from all that working outside, positively glowing with health. And you ask yourself: Who’s actually being punished here?’
And yet Austen Prison was a place of punishment. Undeniably so. Though the dark redbrick entrance Jude approached could have belonged to a College of Further Education, the fact remained that there were walls all around the compound and the blocks in which the men slept were locked at night.
Compared to other prisons, of course, the security at Austen was light. Anyone sufficiently determined to get out wouldn’t need to form an escape committee. It would be easy enough to hop over the wall, or become detached from an outside working party and slip away. Indeed round Christmas that did happen as home-loving prisoners decided they needed a few hours with their families. But such events were rare during the rest of the year. Most of the prisoners with experience of Category B and C prisons knew just how easy they had it in Austen. They knew how many fewer locked doors there were between them and the outside world. They knew how much more time they were allowed to spend outside their cells. It wasn’t the perimeter walls that kept the men inside Austen Prison; it was the knowledge that if they escaped and were – as they almost inevitably would be – recaught, their next sojourn would be back in a Cat B or C nick. And that would not be funny.
Apart from the white-collar criminals – the aforementioned solicitors, bent financiers and careless accountants – most of the Austen population were young men banged up for minor offences that didn’t involve violence. There were also quite a few lifers, serving out their last few years of punishment in an environment which had a little more in common with the world outside than the grim compounds where they had spent the bulk of their sentences.
Sandy Fairbarns was in the entrance hall to greet her, and vouch for the incomer. Jude was issued with her pass by a cheery prison officer who recognized her from a previous visit. They went through into the prison grounds and walked across towards the Education block.
Austen Prison was laid out with generous allowances of space between the blocks. These were one-storey brick rectangles with pitched roofs, and the walls were painted a pale institutional yellow. The gardens between were beautifully kept. Some of the gardeners were crouched over beds, shirts removed to build up their tans even in the weak October sunshine. Men in blue overalls or denims wandered around with a kind of purposeful aimlessness. In spite of the space and the sunlight, there was a hangdog air about the place.
When she did her first session, Jude had refused the offer of a prison officer actually in the room, but she was instructed to leave the door open and issued with an alarm whistle to summon the officer on the landing if there was trouble. But there had never been trouble, and she didn’t anticipate any. The men in her group might have been threatening to each other, but never to her.
Even the lifers. In fact, particularly the lifers. Jude knew, because Sandy Fairbarns had told her, that, defined by their sentence, they were almost all murderers; and yet never had she met a less dangerous, less frightening group of men. She longed to ask each the circumstances of their crimes, who they’d actually killed and why, but she knew that was beyond the remit of her position in the prison. She also knew that she was seeing a specific minority of murderers. The truly vicious would not be given the relatively soft option of Austen at the end of their sentences. But it was still strange to encounter them. They were a quiet bunch, tainted by sadness and inadequacy. If all murderers were as gentle as these men, she decided, there could be no more crime fiction.
Mervyn Hunter appeared the most vulnerable of the lot. He had the haunted look of a man rarely untroubled by his own internal demons. At the first of Jude’s sessions he had turned up, febrile with shifty paranoia, and had not opened his mouth once. She hadn’t expected to see him again, but to her surprise he was there on her next visit, and became one of her most regular participants. Gradually he