The Wolves of London (6 page)

Lifting the envelope from the drawer, I stared at the name on the front and sighed. Then I opened the envelope and took out the folded sheet of paper, which was low-grade, flimsy, torn from a standard-issue prison notebook. Unfolding the sheet with one hand, I lifted the telephone with the other and thumbed the connection button. As soon as the receiver started to hum I dialled the number scrawled on the sheet.

When the phone rang at the other end my mouth went instantly dry and my head and heart started to thump in unison.

He won’t be there
, I told myself almost hopefully.
He gave me this number years ago. He’s bound to have moved. He might even be back inside.

After three rings the phone was picked up. ‘Hello?’

The voice was wary, clipped, unwelcoming.

‘Benny?’ I said.

‘Who’s this?’

I licked my lips. They were so dry it was like pushing a stone between two sheets of sandpaper. ‘I don’t know if you remember me, Benny, but… it’s Alex. Alex Locke.’

I
start each academic year by telling my new students about my less-than-illustrious past. I do this not to impress them, or frighten them, but simply because university campuses are hotbeds of gossip and hearsay, and if
I
didn’t say anything then chances were that sooner or later they would stumble upon some far more distorted version of the truth.

Although kids of that age – or young adults, as our esteemed principal insists on calling them – like to pretend they’re too cool to be impressed by anything or anyone that’s older than they are, the initial response I never fail to get from each influx of students is wary respect bordering on awe. Many of my colleagues think I should milk this for all it’s worth, but I’m not comfortable with the ‘hard man’ image – and not only because it’s misplaced. The thing about violence is that it’s so antithetical to the majority of so-called civilised society that in the eyes of those who’ve rarely been exposed to it, it attains an oddly glamorous, almost mythical status.

But real violence isn’t glamorous at all. It’s savage and ugly and squalid. People are often destroyed by it, both physically and emotionally. It leaves nothing but fear and misery in its wake; it fucks up lives, permanently, irrevocably.

This is something I take great pains to drum home when I’m telling my story. Career criminals might
seem
cool with their designer suits and their entourage of hangers-on, but they’re really not the sort of people you want to be around. The majority of them are psychological wastelands; sociopaths. Yes, they can appear loyal, friendly, even charming, but in truth they often only mimic human behaviour in order to get what they want. And woe betide anyone who becomes a nuisance to them, or outlives their usefulness, or just happens to be in their way at the wrong moment. I’ve heard of people being stamped and kicked to death for a minor slight or ill-conceived joke; I’ve heard of crooks shooting or stabbing other crooks – sometimes even their best friends, blokes they’ve known for years – simply because of a disagreement over a restaurant bill or a misplaced comment about the other guy’s wife.

Benny Magee was such a man. If you met him with no prior knowledge of who he was you’d think he was amiable, open-minded, softly spoken. And yet he’d been involved in some terrible things, and had spent as much of his adult life in prison as out of it. There’d been a lot of respect for him in Pentonville; people treated him with deference, even though he wasn’t the sort of bloke to throw his weight about and assert his authority. The first time I met him I was sitting cross-legged on the bunk in my cell, trying to concentrate on the psychology textbook in my lap. I had one finger stuck in my ear and my lips were moving in an attempt to block out the racket going on around me and get the words on the page to stick in my head.

That’s one thing about prisons that they never focus on in movies and TV dramas. They never mention the noise. Morning, noon and night there’s an unceasing barrage of people shouting to each other, yelling abuse, crying, screaming for attention, banging the hell out of the walls and doors of their cells. It never stops. It goes on and on. The first time I was exposed to it I was terrified, I thought there was something kicking off, but after a while I realised that this was what it was like all the time, and that if I didn’t want it to crush me it was something I would have to get used to.

I only became aware that someone had stepped through the open door of my cell when a shadow fell across the page of the book. Immediately my head snapped up, my heart thumping. I knew there were plenty of screws around, but I knew too that sometimes they could be purposely distracted, or even persuaded to turn a blind eye.

When I saw Benny standing over me, my stomach clenched and the muscles in my shoulders went rigid. Until now I hadn’t crossed his path, though I’d seen him around and knew of him by reputation. The stories that other inmates had told me about him were toe-curling. It was said that he’d once nailed an informant to a wooden floor before removing his fingers and toes with bolt cutters; that he’d dealt with a business rival by hammering a tent peg through his eye and into his brain; that he’d punished an ex-girlfriend’s lover by tying him up, fastening electrodes to his testicles, throwing him into a bath of cold water, and then electrocuting him until he passed out, slipped beneath the water and drowned.

What made these stories even more horrifying – and oddly more feasible – was the fact that Benny wasn’t much to look at. By that I mean he was unassuming – slight, with fine, sandy hair and a narrow, forgettable face. I’d have put him in his late thirties, which meant that he was about twice my age. Perhaps the one concession to his criminality was the fact that he had a small scar bisecting the left side of his upper lip. However, he could just as easily have got that from falling off his bike when he was a kid.

I felt an urge to scramble to my feet and stand to attention, but I thought that might be construed as squaring up to him, so I stayed where I was, cowering and submissive.

Benny wasn’t alone. Standing behind him was a big man, running to fat but still formidable, with a black moustache and hands like the clawed scoops on a digger.

Bending at the waist, Benny leaned towards me until our foreheads were almost touching. He smelled fresh and faintly scented, of shower gel and deodorant, perhaps some kind of hair product. When he parted his lips to speak, my balls shrivelled and crawled into my belly, like a pair of snails retreating into their shells. I expected some blood-curdling threat to tickle my ears. But then I noticed that Benny’s pale blue eyes were not trained on me, but trying to make out the title of my book.

‘What you reading?’ he asked.

Not quite trusting myself to speak, I held up the book.

‘
Psychology of Behaviour
,’ he said, and pulled a mildly impressed face. Straightening up, he turned to the man standing behind him. ‘See this, Michael? Here’s a boy who’s using his time wisely. There ought to be more of his sort in here, don’t you think?’

The moustached man grunted in what I took to be assent. I couldn’t, though, work out whether Benny was taking the piss. Part of me was still convinced I was about to be punished for daring to try to rise above my station.

Turning back to me, Benny asked, ‘What’s your name, son?’

‘Alex,’ I said, but the word came out as little more than a dry, crackly wheeze. I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Alex Locke.’

Benny nodded sagely, as if I’d posited a workable solution to a difficult problem. ‘How long have you been in this shithole, Alex?’

‘Nearly a month,’ I said.

‘And what are you going to do when you get out?’

Still wary, I said, ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Just reading that for the hell of it, are you?’ Benny said, nodding at the book.

‘Oh… no. I’m doing some A levels. Psychology, maths and English. If I pass them I might do a degree.’

‘A laudable ambition.’ Benny looked at me. His eyes made me think of glaciers reflecting the pure, piercing blue of an Arctic sky. I tried not to shiver. ‘Do you know what laudable means, Alex?’

I did, or thought I did, but his eyes were freezing my brain, rendering me incapable of thought.

‘Good?’ I said lamely.

‘More or less. It means commendable. Worthy of admiration.’ He paused for a split second, and then asked mildly, ‘Do you know who I am?’

My mouth was suddenly so dry I couldn’t swallow. I nodded and managed to tear my lips apart to whisper, ‘Yes.’

Benny smiled. ‘Then you’ll know it’s too late for me. I’ve gone too far down the road to damnation to turn back now.’ He placed a hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. I imagined that hand wielding a hammer, banging nails into a rival’s flesh, or a tent peg into an opponent’s eye.

‘But not you,’ he said. ‘There’s still time for you to mend your ways. Do me a favour, Alex. Don’t fuck it up.’

‘I won’t,’ I whispered.

‘I hope not. I’ll be watching out for you. While you’re in here I’ll be your guardian angel. Anything you want, just ask. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Good lad.’ He turned abruptly and nodded at Michael, who preceded him out of the door. At the threshold Benny turned back. ‘Oh, and Alex?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t be afraid.’

I was never sure whether he meant of him, of anyone else in the prison, or of life in general, and I never asked. All I know is that from that day onwards I was under Benny’s protection. I’m not saying that prison life was a breeze because of that – by its very nature it was a depressing, repetitive, soul-crushing experience – but after Benny’s visit I got the very real sense that my fellow inmates had changed their attitudes towards me.

The first month I’d been there I’d felt like a gazelle around which a pack of lions was constantly prowling. However, apart from a few threatening comments – which were ten a penny in prison and rarely the prelude to anything more serious; violence, when it came, tended to be swift, brutal and unexpected – I’d managed to avoid any kind of confrontation. I’d felt, though, as if I was being assessed, mulled over, considered for future action. As a result, I was constantly on edge and had tried to keep myself to myself as much as possible, which was one of the reasons why I’d buried myself in study. Maybe my fears were all in my head, but I didn’t think so. And even if they were, Benny’s intervention helped a lot, because after he’d spoken to me I felt much easier in my mind. The belligerent stares I’d been getting (or imagined I’d been getting) before, and the muttered conversations I’d noticed among various cliques of prisoners whenever I’d walked past seemed all at once to melt away. People might not have been friendlier towards me, but they were definitely less hostile. I didn’t make many friends in prison, but that suited me fine, because it meant I could get on with my studies without fear of interruption or distraction.

It might sound like a cliché, but prison was the making of me. In fact, you could go even further back than that, and say that if Chris hadn’t suggested to Ray that he bring me in on the job he was planning, I might well have ended up pissing my life away on some shitty estate. But because I was in on the job I got caught. And because I got caught I ended up in prison. And because I was in prison, and had time on my hands, I started reading books. And it was through that that I started my studies, and got a degree, and ended up teaching psychology…

Cause and effect. A long chain of linked circumstances. Everyone’s lives are like that, I suppose, full of ‘what if’s and ‘if only’s. Some people think it’s fate or destiny, some think it’s just a random series of events. Whatever your beliefs, the fact is we’re all given a choice of multiple paths to follow, and the ones we choose to take are what determines who we are, what we become.

That might not be very profound, but it’s true all the same. Looking back, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I’d not made certain decisions at certain times. Knowing what I know now, all I see is the equivalent of a jumper unravelling, at first stitch by stitch and then more and more rapidly, or perhaps more accurately a wave engulfing all before it, which starts with the ripples caused by a single dropped pebble into an otherwise calm lake.

But I’m jumping ahead of myself, and it’s important not to do that. I have to tell this story as I lived it, as it happened to me, and resist the urge to interject based on where I am now, and on what I know.

So. Benny Magee. The phone call. The next fork in the road. The next decision on whether to turn right or left.

It went like this:

‘Hello?’

‘Benny?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘I don’t know if you remember me, Benny, but… it’s Alex. Alex Locke.’

‘Alex Locke.’ He repeated my name with no inflection, and therefore no apparent recognition, whatsoever. I was about to start the tortuous job of reminding him of our association, whilst again wondering if, by ringing him, I’d done the wrong thing, when he spoke again, a note of incredulity creeping into his voice.

‘Fuck me. Alex Locke. The kid from Pentonville. What was it again? Psychology of Behaviour?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, not sure whether to feel flattered or alarmed that he’d remembered.

‘So tell me this, Alex,’ he said mildly. ‘
Did
you fuck it up?’

Even though I was tense, I couldn’t help but smile. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Glad to hear it. So where’s life taken you?’

I hesitated, feeling like one of the little pigs reluctant to open the door in case the big bad wolf should enter. I felt like this even though I knew that eventually, if he was going to provide me with the help I needed, I’d have to tell Benny more than I was comfortable with. ‘I’m a psychology lecturer.’

‘Good for you.’

‘So what are
you
up to these days?’

I blurted out the question to stem the ones he was asking me, but as soon as the words left my mouth I clenched my teeth and screwed up my face as if I’d bitten down on a sour lemon. What a dickhead! What was I thinking of, asking him that?