Essex Boy (12 page)

Rocking gently back and forth on my heels in the dock I dared not look at the judge as he began to sum up the case. ‘Please no more than five, please no more than five,’ I kept saying over and over again to myself. The judge paused momentarily before addressing me directly.

‘Steven Ellis, I am in no doubt that you feared for your life and for the lives of your family members. The men who sought to harm you are undoubtedly vicious thugs, cowards and bullies, but that does not give you the right to arm yourself and roam the streets of Essex. This is England, not the Wild West. You will go to prison for 15 months.’

Turning to my family in the public gallery I raised both hands above my head and began shouting, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ I thanked the judge and almost skipped down the steps to the holding cells to begin my sentence.

CHAPTER SIX

While serving my prison sentence, I was approached by a man who
introduced himself as Tony. I had noticed him staring intently at me earlier in the day, not in a sexual way I hasten to add, although you do get a few of those in jail. His face was unfamiliar and so he had begun to unnerve me. Forever cautious but always polite, I had asked the man who he was and why he thought that he knew me.

‘I am Steve Darrow’s brother,’ he replied.

I shook Tony’s hand and said that I had known Steve for several years but was unaware that he had a brother. Steve had been one of the very few kids at my school that had never tormented or bullied me. Tony told me that he hated his prison job cleaning toilets and would do anything to work alongside me as a gym orderly. Feeling obliged to repay his brother’s kindness, I did what I could to make Tony’s stay in prison carefree by putting him in touch with those that sold contraband, and I also put his name forward for a job in the gym. Less than a week later, Tony was given a job working with me.

Since gym orderlies spend longer periods of time out of their cells than many other inmates do, prison staff insist that they reside together; it simply saves prison officers the trouble of having to open up or lock several cells at irregular times rather than just one or two. For the next three months, Tony and I co-existed rather than lived together in my cell. I say that because Tony found it hard to cope with his loss of liberty and my never-ending practical jokes. I tended to forget the world that we had left behind but Tony was always pining for it. He would be sitting on a chair looking morose and gazing into space and I would bounce a healthy portion of my dinner off his head or douse him in water. He never did see the funny side of my pranks, but they always made me laugh.

The day I was discharged from prison was undoubtedly the happiest that I had ever seen him. Two days before that magical day, when I was to walk to freedom, my father had been confronted in the street by Tucker. The fact that my youngest sister was also present meant nothing to the bully as he shouted obscenities and warned that I would be murdered as soon as I set foot outside the prison gates. When I was told about Tucker’s threats, I applied to the prison governor to be released at a different time from any of the other inmates. I wanted to foil any plot that Tucker may have planned to attack me, but my plea for common sense was denied.

With no help forthcoming from the prison service, I arranged for a friend to pull up outside the prison in his car. As soon as the gates were opened, I ran out, jumped into the car and we raced away. Fortunately, Tucker had been making more empty threats and was nowhere to be seen. I felt an obligation to visit my friend who had sold me the Volvo. The very least that I owed him was an apology for all the trouble that my actions had caused. Looking genuinely pleased to see me, he thanked me for the Christmas card that I had posted through his door on the day of my arrest but added that he wished I had never bothered. Puzzled, I asked him what he meant.

‘The police officers who saw you that day had no idea what was in the envelope you put through my letterbox, so they raided my house again. They found a small amount of cannabis and as it was my second offence within a few months I was imprisoned for six weeks.’

Mumbling yet another apology, I walked sheepishly to my friend’s car and we drove off. It’s fair to say that I am no longer on his family’s Christmas card list and they are most definitely not on mine. God forbid that I ever darken the poor man’s door again.

I knew that I could not remain in Essex because Tate and Tucker were still threatening to have me killed. I had no idea where to go, so I simply laid out a road atlas, closed my eyes and pointed my finger at the map. When I opened my eyes, I saw that I had selected Bournemouth as the place for my new life to begin. After collecting my car and my personal belongings I said goodbye to my family and headed for the south coast.

Leaving prison and then moving to a completely new area is difficult enough, but when you have little or no money it is nigh on impossible. Landlords demanded references and two months’ rent in advance and potential employers snubbed me as soon as they learned of my most recent address. I ended up ‘living’ in a tiny dingy bedsit. During daylight I would look for work and at night I would sit in a local bar sipping lemonade, as the very thought of spending an evening lying on my bed watching the damp climb the walls of my ‘tomb’, as I called it, horrified me. While standing in a queue at a petrol station one morning, I noticed that the till was crammed with cash and there did not appear to be an alarm system. During my numerous lemonade-sipping sessions, I had become acquainted with a local criminal and that night I mentioned the garage and the contents of its till to him.

When the pub closed, we drove to the garage and after looking around agreed that we would break into it the following night. The easiest point of access appeared to be the roof and so after climbing up onto it, we removed a section of tiles, cut through the roof felt and dropped down into the loft. After working out roughly where the till would be below, we sawed through the joists and removed the foam tiles from the false ceiling. Unbeknown to my accomplice and I, the garage proprietor had installed a sophisticated listening device that was connected to a control centre. As we hacked and sawed away at the joists a silent alarm was activated and the police were notified that intruders were on the premises. When we heard a car drive onto the forecourt, we assumed that it was somebody checking to see if the garage was open, so I advised my friend to stop sawing until the car had gone. After a few minutes, the car remained on the forecourt with its engine running and my friend began to panic. He urged me to make a run for it with him.

‘It’s the police, Steve, I just know it. Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

I honestly didn’t think it was the police, so I told him to shut up and be quiet. Five minutes later, I began to wonder if my accomplice’s concerns were founded and the car outside might belong to the local constabulary. Lowering my head through the hole in the ceiling I glanced towards the forecourt and saw a policeman staring straight back at me.

‘Fucking run. Get out of here,’ I shouted to my friend.

I managed to get out of the loft and onto the roof quite quickly but my accomplice, who clearly enjoyed his food, struggled to fit his large frame through the small hole that we had made. Leaping almost cat-like from the roof, I landed on the other side of a large fence in somebody’s garden. As my friend continued to struggle to haul himself out onto the roof, a police officer grabbed both of his legs and hung on to him. Moments later, both men ended up on the shop floor buried beneath a heap of plasterboard and ceiling tiles.

Nobody appeared to be pursuing me, so I walked briskly down the road and hid among some bushes under a large conifer tree. I must admit I felt pretty pleased with myself having escaped the long arm of the law with such ease. ‘In half an hour everybody will have gone and I can take a leisurely walk home,’ I told myself as I lay under the tree staring up at the stars. I tried to scream as I was suddenly dragged backwards from the bushes. The pain in my left leg was excruciating but I was in total shock and so no noise came out.

Two large police Alsatian dogs had gripped my legs in their jaws and were running back towards their handler as if I were a stick he had thrown for them to fetch. Just when I thought that it couldn’t get any worse, a full-figured policeman landed on my chest and informed me that I was under arrest. When he asked if I wished to make any reply to his caution, I shook my head, not because I wanted to remain silent, but simply because I was barely able to breathe.

The dogs had been a tad overenthusiastic when removing me from my hiding place, so I was taken directly to hospital rather than the police station as I needed to have the gaping wounds in my arse and legs sewn up. As well as a fistful of powerful painkillers and a clean pair of pants, I was in desperate need of a decent solicitor. I was still on parole from prison and any conviction could have led to me being returned to complete the remainder of my sentence. When I raised my concerns with a solicitor, I was advised that because I had suffered such serious injuries during my arrest it would be unlikely that I would be treated too harshly. Despite a plethora of damning evidence against us, both my friend and I refused to accept our guilt and so we were bailed pending further enquiries. Now that the police knew I was in town and that I was facing a prison sentence, I decided that it would be a good idea to leave. Aiming the finger of fate once more at my atlas, I closed my eyes and prayed for a destination awash with opportunities.

I had never even heard of the town of Swanage in Dorset, but it turned out to be a place of outstanding beauty in more ways than one. I met Rhiannon while she was working as a part-time barmaid in a pub next door to where I lived. Her family were law-abiding God-fearing folk, who frowned upon the long-term unemployed, criminals and other types of social misfit. By day, Rhiannon studied at college, at night she worked for a pittance behind a bar and, when she wasn’t sleeping, she attended to her horses. I have no idea what she saw in me. Perhaps she was feeling charitable; perhaps I was a bit of an enigma, a welcome distraction from her Groundhog Day-type life. I had several reasons for wanting to be with her: she had her own flat, she had the means to serve me free meals at the pub and she looked pretty amazing. What more could a man who was out on his arse want? Within a few days I had moved out of my bedsit and into Rhiannon’s flat, which she shared with her dog, Bleep.

Rhiannon rang me one morning to say that one of her horses was ill and would I give her a lift to the vet’s as she needed to pick up some medication? When we arrived, Rhiannon began giving an in-depth explanation of the animal’s condition to a woman at the counter, so I sat down in anticipation of a very long wait. As the pair rambled on about the joys of horse riding my eyes roamed the room and came to rest upon an open till stuffed with money. Unfortunately for the vet, there was no known cure for my craving for cash and so that night I returned to the premises and broke in through the roof. As I emptied the contents of the till into a bag, a girl walked into the room. We looked at each other momentarily before turning and running in opposite directions. I clambered through a window and she headed for the front door. Once outside, I fought my way through a hedge and thorn bushes before making good my escape across a field. Among the £1,500 in cash that I had stolen I found receipts, invoices and various other pieces of paper. I was going to put them out with the rubbish for the bin man to collect but I remembered that he had called earlier that very day. Not wanting to have any incriminating evidence at my home, I threw the bin liner containing the papers and my household rubbish into an empty builder’s skip that had been left in our road. Mid-way through
EastEnders
the following night my front door was kicked off its hinges by two very unhappy-looking police officers.

‘Get your shoes on, Ellis. You’re under arrest for burglary,’ they said.

I was still on bail for the burglary at the garage and knew that, if charged with any other offence, the chances of me being returned to prison were extremely high. I decided that I would refuse to answer any questions during interview because the only evidence they could possibly have was from the girl who had caught just a fleeting glimpse of me. Even if she said that she could identify me, it would be her word against mine. My confidence boosted, I sat opposite the officers in the interview room with a broad grin on my face. However, my grin soon turned into a grimace as one of the officers produced an evidence bag that contained a bin liner.

The spectres of Tate and Tucker and the threat that they posed had never left me. For insurance purposes only, I had broken a shotgun down into three sections, put them in bin liners and stored the pieces around my car battery. If the police had found the shotgun while searching my home and vehicle in connection with the burglary, I was going back to prison for a very long time.

‘Can you explain this, Ellis?’ the officer said holding the evidence bag aloft above his head.

‘It looks like a bin liner,’ I replied. My heart was in my mouth as he opened the evidence bag and tipped the contents onto the table.

‘Well done, Mr Ellis, correct answer,’ the officer said. ‘Can you now explain how your household rubbish came to contain paperwork that was stolen from a vet last night?’

As the story unfolded I sank deeper and deeper into my seat. The man who had hired the builder’s skip was outraged that somebody had the audacity to throw a rubbish bag into it. So, after retrieving the offending bag, he had gone through the contents, found the vet’s paperwork and driven to the surgery. When he arrived, he had emptied the contents onto the reception desk and warned the vet about his future conduct. Anger soon turned to laughter as the irate skip owner discovered that he had not only snared a litter lout but he had also caught a burglar.

I am not sure if I laughed with relief because the police hadn’t found the gun, or if I laughed at my own stupidity for putting the bin bag in the skip but laugh I did.

‘It’s a fair cop, hang me now,’ I said. I was, of course, only joking but when I later sought the advice of a solicitor she told me that the police had been concerned about comments I had made and my general demeanour.

‘What do you mean “concerned”?’ I asked.

‘They think you may have mental health issues. Apparently you were laughing when you found out that you had been caught red-handed and you also talked about wanting to be hanged,’ she replied.