Part Seventy
On the nice sunny Friday morning, Fenner reflected on his relative good fortune as he sat lazily with his feet up in the PO Room. It looked out on the first floor of G wing and, for this reason, gave him a chance to keep an eye on the prisoners. A new young female prisoner was pouring him a nice cup of tea. He liked being waited on as it gave him a sense of power. He could tell at a glance when the new prisoner first came that she was as green as they come, likely to be done over by the likes of McKenzy or Yates and in need of his special brand of care and protection, as long as she accepted just who was boss. This was one of his basic rules of the prison service which he stuck to rigidly..
"Is that how you like your tea, sir?" She said shyly and respectfully, glad to have a solid older reliable man treating her nicely. She wasn't used to that from men in her experience.
"You make it just the way I like it," Fenner said soothingly."I've seen you on the wing with some of the others giving you a hard time. I'll keep a special eye on you and make sure you don't come to any harm. Trust me," he looked at the faintly blushing girl in the eye almost trying to hypnotise her with his voice and stare.
"That's my girl," he added, placing his forefinger under her chin.
In every way, she was a vast improvement on that middle aged middle class snob Babs always looking at him in such a disapproving fashion. That time she shared a cell with Wade turned her into one of his worst enemies like the rest of those scheming bitches who made his life hell. Agreed, she wasn't violent and aggressive like some of them but she knew far too much about him and that is the worst crime of anything in his book. Never mind, he reflected to himself, most of them have all gone now ,everything is only a matter of time. The last serious trouble maker he's seen the back of was that tart Merriman who led him a right dance and conned him blind. She's six feet under, pushing up the daisies and can't do him any harm now as dead bodies can't talk. Now the trial's out of the way, he can take life a bit easier. He had to admit that it did give him a bit of a shock the Monday after the trial finished to read about it in the papers that both she and that mouthy boyfriend of her had topped themselves ,just like that. It was just as well that only Sylv and Di were around that night so that they will carry the can for it, not him.. Give everything time and the good times that he had before Stewart came will all come back for him to enjoy. A man needs a few perks in this dump doing a job for which you got no thanks.
A nice cup of tea, a copy of the Sun, Page 3 of course, the pick of the new prisoners and all he needs as well is a boss who will look the other way like the old days and he is made for life. Of course, the one fly in the ointment is Betts but she's got it in for Di at the moment and making her life hell so all he needs to do is to keep a low profile for the moment. His face darkened when he thought of Betts as that murdering Atkins came back into his thoughts. I'm sure that those two are shagging from the way that they are behaving, he thought to himself bitterly, but there's nothing definite. There is something in Larkhall that does that to aggressive female bosses once the power goes to their heads.
'It's as easy as clicking my fingers, Fenner. I could have you wiped off the face of the Earth in a matter of seconds. Don't you forget that.' Those words uttered by Atkins abruptly jumped back into his mind and he remembered the feel of her fingers round his throat. It made him break out in a cold sweat. If he was honest with himself, he hated Atkins more than anything else because she was more dangerous than anyone else. She knew more than the rest of those bitches and also had the gangland connections to bump anyone off once she made up her mind.
But London's a big place, he reasoned to himself. Apart from her connections with Betts, there is absolutely nothing to link his life with hers. People come and go, on the outside of Larkhall. You go up into the big city and ask directions off a passer by and you'll find that you've picked on a tourist, American or French, who knows less than you do. He's got his comfortable house near to Larkhall where he comes and goes each day and Atkins is probably swanning around somewhere in the sticks. She's off his personal map and she'll fade into the background and be no more than a bad memory.
He likes the look of that new prison Officer, Selena, Now she is someone who sets his pulse racing. She looks like she's an Ice Maiden on the surface but give him time, he'll
smooch her up a bit and he'll get his leg over eventually.
He strolled out onto the wing and caught sight of Betts chatting to the 2 Julies who were mopping the servery floor before she swanned off elsewhere. The more Betts is stuck away in her office looking over budgets, the happier he is.
"The mopping's a bit smeary, Julies. Can't you give it another once over?" he said quietly, on principle's sake.
"Yes, Mr Fenner," they chorussed with a fixed smile and made a token gesture at slopping some more water on the floor till they were sure he was out of sight.
"Men," Julie Saunders said scornfully. "I'd like to see a mop in his hand and stand over him till he got it right."
"You'd have to hang around a bloody long time, Ju," Came the equally derisive reply.
In the PO room, Di was complaining ten to the dozen . Even Bodybag found that Di had to make a big drama out of everything and was never known for short concise statements.
"I reckon that Karen Betts has got it in for me, Sylv," She complained. "She talked down to me as if I were a naughty schoolgirl about Ritchie's suicide. I mean it was terrible what happened but there was no reason for her to behave that way with me."
"Hmmph," Bodybag retorted. "Now you understand what I've been getting at all these months. It's because she hasn't got a man about the house. Mark my words. Women get funny like that at her age when they're in that situation. Don't worry as Madam was only looking for a scapegoat. Welcome to the club, Di."
It's only a matter of working out routines, she thought to herself with satisfaction. She was sitting in the parked car, the fourth in the row, watching Fenner as he came off his shift. As his car slid away down the road and he took himself in the direction of the same pub as on every night, she followed behind at a discreet distance. People pretend that they are creatures of impulse but it is not like that. Everyone has their comforting routine of the same supermarket, the same pub, the same group of friends, the same time of coming to work and leaving work, and she would bet even the same TV programmes though she hadn't got the surveillance equipment to check that out for herself. It all adds up to the same feeling of normality that everyone craves and they do it without thinking, without even being aware of it. Even the apparently spontaneous desire for a night out on the town rigidly observes these unconscious patterns of activity. It makes stalking Fenner so much easier. Then again, despite all the TV crime dramas and films over the years, what normal person suspects that they may be caught up in a real life situation. All the excitement and drama is on the other side of the TV screen. Anyone watching 'Crimewatch' thinks for a while that they, too, had the chance of watching some real life drama that they were an unwitting bystander of. But week after week goes by and it always happens to someone else, never them. So people resign themselves to a long stretch of boring normality in dull acceptance.
This applies to even such a man as Fenner whom she knew had taken a lot of chances in his life and the bastard had wriggled out of being nailed by the skin of his teeth. He thinks that life will settle down, and actively craves it. That is why he will not have the inkling of a suspicion that it is no accident that the car three cars behind him every night is hers and that she intends to follow his movements. Who, after all, looks out for danger, especially when he thinks that he is safe. His daytime is spent in looking out for possible danger in his job, he watches the signs of groups of prisoners conspiring together ,that is part of his jailcraft. Outside the grim walls of Larkhall, his defences are dropped with a sigh of relief and he is just like some other normal person going his own way. That is what will make things easy for her.
A TV programme like Cracker talks about profiling the criminal, what makes him tick. But the reverse applies to the stalker following someone like Fenner, especially when she has a bit of a head start. Everything about the life he leads will tell her just what sort of a person he is. In the end, the timing will be right. Even a conniving slimeball like Fenner won't even suspect that the anonymous looking person is watching his every move. If you don't do anything bloody obvious or stupid, her very existence won't be suspected. At the bottom of her very soul, she knows it. It is all a matter of persistence, cool planning and, above all else, time.
Just why she is letting herself in for all this extra hard work, she does not even have to question as this is something she has promised herself that she will do without fail. She has committed herself physically and mentally and all her strength is focussed on this one goal.
"Night Sylv," Fenner called out as he walked out into the bright sunlight after seven hours of artificial strip lights ready for the weekend.. He was ready for a swift half at the pub on the way home to put his feet up. It had been a long day with the boring day to day routines with nothing much happening. He had sorted out the Julies when they came to him about a leaky washing machine and had commiserated with Di when she was moaning on about that power crazed Betts. Secretly, he was cruelly amused that she was getting it in the neck and not him and the longer she took the heat the better, as she was being driven into the same camp as Sylvia and himself. Betts was doing a very good job of undermining her own position and that must be good news.
He drove confidently through the maze of streets and found his local, a backstreet pub and well away from Grayling's local. Sitting around hearing him drivelling away about his wet dreams wasn't his idea of a night out, not even to further his career. Playing a round of golf with Stubberfield on a Sunday morning with a few jars downed at the eighteenth hole and catching up on gossip was far more to his taste. He drew up a chair with some of his mates who were in the pub at that hour and immediately, he was engaged in an intense discussion about the football premiership and earnestly dissecting the standard of play on last night's game. This was the life, he felt, as he sank comfortably in his chair, a pint of beer in front of him and talking with the lads about anything except prisons. There was an unspoken agreement on this and lads night out meant talking about anything that came into their minds, especially if it wasn't about feelings and 'give me a cuddle' shit that he was used to with women.
If this is Fenner's idea of a night out, she thought, give me my idea of having a good time out anytime. How in hell they can stand yabbering mindlessly away about sod all. Still, this is building up her surveillance picture so that everything the bastard does is charted in her mind. Closeted away in a quiet alcove, she nursed her drink and kept her eyes and ears open.
Outside Fenner's house, everything was relatively quiet on a Saturday morning apart from the first of the dedicated shoppers whose compulsion to drive to the shopping malls and to spend the hard earned money that they hadn't got. The rest of the population opened their bleary eyes, serene in knowing that there was no alarm clock to wake up to and the various attractions of Saturday sport, children's television or simple lazing in bed and letting the world go by. Not so was the car that pulled into the row of cars a little distance from Fenner's house and round the corner. It offered a superb view of the frontage of Fenner's terraced house, the front door and a set of four drawn curtains..She was in for a long tedious wait while she mapped in the typical day in Fenner's life. She got out her set of Walkman's and plugged herself in to her favourite music which made her believe that she was listening to the same music which she could have heard in her bedroom on a lazy Saturday morning. Only her alert eyes made her experiences any different and the security that she felt that should switch in a snap second to pulling the Walkman away from her ears, turning the key in the ignition and following Fenner's car down the road. She knew that she was a bit conspicuous with the rows of windows like huge square eyes all focussing down on her but she was gambling on the good old British habit of 'keeping themselves to themselves' and she figured out that a secretive man like him was hardly likely to be a pillar of the local community that a neighbour would tip him off about anyone spying on him.
Suddenly, there was a rustle of front curtains partly drawn as the house came to life and was the cue for her to be ready for anything. A little while later, Fenner emerged from the front door and rushed to his car and sped off down the road. Down the narrow streets, she tailed his car whose registration number was emblazoned obsessively on her mind as somehow symbolising him though exactly how, she couldn't say. She had to cut past some of the slower weekend drivers who doddered their way along as Fenner drove like a bat out of hell. Just why he was in a frantic hurry worried her and it was with a sigh of relief that she saw him pull up with a screech of brakes at the local supermarket. She didn't have to wait outside very long till he rushed out with a trolley stacked with a couple of multipack cans of beer and assorted junk food.
She was feeling tired as she had worked hard in gradually mapping out Fenner's life beyond the prison walls. The picture was coming together and once the time was right, she would know what to do.
Fenner's alarm clock had woken him up with a shrill constant sound as he slept his way through the morning after a night out with the lads. The all important football match was on and he was clean out of booze. He had to go like hell and have a quick swoop round the supermarket and get settled down ready. One phone call for a takeaway pizza and he was set up for a nice normal take it easy Saturday and he was master of his destiny.
On the nice sunny Friday morning, Fenner reflected on his relative good fortune as he sat lazily with his feet up in the PO Room. It looked out on the first floor of G wing and, for this reason, gave him a chance to keep an eye on the prisoners. A new young female prisoner was pouring him a nice cup of tea. He liked being waited on as it gave him a sense of power. He could tell at a glance when the new prisoner first came that she was as green as they come, likely to be done over by the likes of McKenzy or Yates and in need of his special brand of care and protection, as long as she accepted just who was boss. This was one of his basic rules of the prison service which he stuck to rigidly..
"Is that how you like your tea, sir?" She said shyly and respectfully, glad to have a solid older reliable man treating her nicely. She wasn't used to that from men in her experience.
"You make it just the way I like it," Fenner said soothingly."I've seen you on the wing with some of the others giving you a hard time. I'll keep a special eye on you and make sure you don't come to any harm. Trust me," he looked at the faintly blushing girl in the eye almost trying to hypnotise her with his voice and stare.
"That's my girl," he added, placing his forefinger under her chin.
In every way, she was a vast improvement on that middle aged middle class snob Babs always looking at him in such a disapproving fashion. That time she shared a cell with Wade turned her into one of his worst enemies like the rest of those scheming bitches who made his life hell. Agreed, she wasn't violent and aggressive like some of them but she knew far too much about him and that is the worst crime of anything in his book. Never mind, he reflected to himself, most of them have all gone now ,everything is only a matter of time. The last serious trouble maker he's seen the back of was that tart Merriman who led him a right dance and conned him blind. She's six feet under, pushing up the daisies and can't do him any harm now as dead bodies can't talk. Now the trial's out of the way, he can take life a bit easier. He had to admit that it did give him a bit of a shock the Monday after the trial finished to read about it in the papers that both she and that mouthy boyfriend of her had topped themselves ,just like that. It was just as well that only Sylv and Di were around that night so that they will carry the can for it, not him.. Give everything time and the good times that he had before Stewart came will all come back for him to enjoy. A man needs a few perks in this dump doing a job for which you got no thanks.
A nice cup of tea, a copy of the Sun, Page 3 of course, the pick of the new prisoners and all he needs as well is a boss who will look the other way like the old days and he is made for life. Of course, the one fly in the ointment is Betts but she's got it in for Di at the moment and making her life hell so all he needs to do is to keep a low profile for the moment. His face darkened when he thought of Betts as that murdering Atkins came back into his thoughts. I'm sure that those two are shagging from the way that they are behaving, he thought to himself bitterly, but there's nothing definite. There is something in Larkhall that does that to aggressive female bosses once the power goes to their heads.
'It's as easy as clicking my fingers, Fenner. I could have you wiped off the face of the Earth in a matter of seconds. Don't you forget that.' Those words uttered by Atkins abruptly jumped back into his mind and he remembered the feel of her fingers round his throat. It made him break out in a cold sweat. If he was honest with himself, he hated Atkins more than anything else because she was more dangerous than anyone else. She knew more than the rest of those bitches and also had the gangland connections to bump anyone off once she made up her mind.
But London's a big place, he reasoned to himself. Apart from her connections with Betts, there is absolutely nothing to link his life with hers. People come and go, on the outside of Larkhall. You go up into the big city and ask directions off a passer by and you'll find that you've picked on a tourist, American or French, who knows less than you do. He's got his comfortable house near to Larkhall where he comes and goes each day and Atkins is probably swanning around somewhere in the sticks. She's off his personal map and she'll fade into the background and be no more than a bad memory.
He likes the look of that new prison Officer, Selena, Now she is someone who sets his pulse racing. She looks like she's an Ice Maiden on the surface but give him time, he'll
smooch her up a bit and he'll get his leg over eventually.
He strolled out onto the wing and caught sight of Betts chatting to the 2 Julies who were mopping the servery floor before she swanned off elsewhere. The more Betts is stuck away in her office looking over budgets, the happier he is.
"The mopping's a bit smeary, Julies. Can't you give it another once over?" he said quietly, on principle's sake.
"Yes, Mr Fenner," they chorussed with a fixed smile and made a token gesture at slopping some more water on the floor till they were sure he was out of sight.
"Men," Julie Saunders said scornfully. "I'd like to see a mop in his hand and stand over him till he got it right."
"You'd have to hang around a bloody long time, Ju," Came the equally derisive reply.
In the PO room, Di was complaining ten to the dozen . Even Bodybag found that Di had to make a big drama out of everything and was never known for short concise statements.
"I reckon that Karen Betts has got it in for me, Sylv," She complained. "She talked down to me as if I were a naughty schoolgirl about Ritchie's suicide. I mean it was terrible what happened but there was no reason for her to behave that way with me."
"Hmmph," Bodybag retorted. "Now you understand what I've been getting at all these months. It's because she hasn't got a man about the house. Mark my words. Women get funny like that at her age when they're in that situation. Don't worry as Madam was only looking for a scapegoat. Welcome to the club, Di."
It's only a matter of working out routines, she thought to herself with satisfaction. She was sitting in the parked car, the fourth in the row, watching Fenner as he came off his shift. As his car slid away down the road and he took himself in the direction of the same pub as on every night, she followed behind at a discreet distance. People pretend that they are creatures of impulse but it is not like that. Everyone has their comforting routine of the same supermarket, the same pub, the same group of friends, the same time of coming to work and leaving work, and she would bet even the same TV programmes though she hadn't got the surveillance equipment to check that out for herself. It all adds up to the same feeling of normality that everyone craves and they do it without thinking, without even being aware of it. Even the apparently spontaneous desire for a night out on the town rigidly observes these unconscious patterns of activity. It makes stalking Fenner so much easier. Then again, despite all the TV crime dramas and films over the years, what normal person suspects that they may be caught up in a real life situation. All the excitement and drama is on the other side of the TV screen. Anyone watching 'Crimewatch' thinks for a while that they, too, had the chance of watching some real life drama that they were an unwitting bystander of. But week after week goes by and it always happens to someone else, never them. So people resign themselves to a long stretch of boring normality in dull acceptance.
This applies to even such a man as Fenner whom she knew had taken a lot of chances in his life and the bastard had wriggled out of being nailed by the skin of his teeth. He thinks that life will settle down, and actively craves it. That is why he will not have the inkling of a suspicion that it is no accident that the car three cars behind him every night is hers and that she intends to follow his movements. Who, after all, looks out for danger, especially when he thinks that he is safe. His daytime is spent in looking out for possible danger in his job, he watches the signs of groups of prisoners conspiring together ,that is part of his jailcraft. Outside the grim walls of Larkhall, his defences are dropped with a sigh of relief and he is just like some other normal person going his own way. That is what will make things easy for her.
A TV programme like Cracker talks about profiling the criminal, what makes him tick. But the reverse applies to the stalker following someone like Fenner, especially when she has a bit of a head start. Everything about the life he leads will tell her just what sort of a person he is. In the end, the timing will be right. Even a conniving slimeball like Fenner won't even suspect that the anonymous looking person is watching his every move. If you don't do anything bloody obvious or stupid, her very existence won't be suspected. At the bottom of her very soul, she knows it. It is all a matter of persistence, cool planning and, above all else, time.
Just why she is letting herself in for all this extra hard work, she does not even have to question as this is something she has promised herself that she will do without fail. She has committed herself physically and mentally and all her strength is focussed on this one goal.
"Night Sylv," Fenner called out as he walked out into the bright sunlight after seven hours of artificial strip lights ready for the weekend.. He was ready for a swift half at the pub on the way home to put his feet up. It had been a long day with the boring day to day routines with nothing much happening. He had sorted out the Julies when they came to him about a leaky washing machine and had commiserated with Di when she was moaning on about that power crazed Betts. Secretly, he was cruelly amused that she was getting it in the neck and not him and the longer she took the heat the better, as she was being driven into the same camp as Sylvia and himself. Betts was doing a very good job of undermining her own position and that must be good news.
He drove confidently through the maze of streets and found his local, a backstreet pub and well away from Grayling's local. Sitting around hearing him drivelling away about his wet dreams wasn't his idea of a night out, not even to further his career. Playing a round of golf with Stubberfield on a Sunday morning with a few jars downed at the eighteenth hole and catching up on gossip was far more to his taste. He drew up a chair with some of his mates who were in the pub at that hour and immediately, he was engaged in an intense discussion about the football premiership and earnestly dissecting the standard of play on last night's game. This was the life, he felt, as he sank comfortably in his chair, a pint of beer in front of him and talking with the lads about anything except prisons. There was an unspoken agreement on this and lads night out meant talking about anything that came into their minds, especially if it wasn't about feelings and 'give me a cuddle' shit that he was used to with women.
If this is Fenner's idea of a night out, she thought, give me my idea of having a good time out anytime. How in hell they can stand yabbering mindlessly away about sod all. Still, this is building up her surveillance picture so that everything the bastard does is charted in her mind. Closeted away in a quiet alcove, she nursed her drink and kept her eyes and ears open.
Outside Fenner's house, everything was relatively quiet on a Saturday morning apart from the first of the dedicated shoppers whose compulsion to drive to the shopping malls and to spend the hard earned money that they hadn't got. The rest of the population opened their bleary eyes, serene in knowing that there was no alarm clock to wake up to and the various attractions of Saturday sport, children's television or simple lazing in bed and letting the world go by. Not so was the car that pulled into the row of cars a little distance from Fenner's house and round the corner. It offered a superb view of the frontage of Fenner's terraced house, the front door and a set of four drawn curtains..She was in for a long tedious wait while she mapped in the typical day in Fenner's life. She got out her set of Walkman's and plugged herself in to her favourite music which made her believe that she was listening to the same music which she could have heard in her bedroom on a lazy Saturday morning. Only her alert eyes made her experiences any different and the security that she felt that should switch in a snap second to pulling the Walkman away from her ears, turning the key in the ignition and following Fenner's car down the road. She knew that she was a bit conspicuous with the rows of windows like huge square eyes all focussing down on her but she was gambling on the good old British habit of 'keeping themselves to themselves' and she figured out that a secretive man like him was hardly likely to be a pillar of the local community that a neighbour would tip him off about anyone spying on him.
Suddenly, there was a rustle of front curtains partly drawn as the house came to life and was the cue for her to be ready for anything. A little while later, Fenner emerged from the front door and rushed to his car and sped off down the road. Down the narrow streets, she tailed his car whose registration number was emblazoned obsessively on her mind as somehow symbolising him though exactly how, she couldn't say. She had to cut past some of the slower weekend drivers who doddered their way along as Fenner drove like a bat out of hell. Just why he was in a frantic hurry worried her and it was with a sigh of relief that she saw him pull up with a screech of brakes at the local supermarket. She didn't have to wait outside very long till he rushed out with a trolley stacked with a couple of multipack cans of beer and assorted junk food.
She was feeling tired as she had worked hard in gradually mapping out Fenner's life beyond the prison walls. The picture was coming together and once the time was right, she would know what to do.
Fenner's alarm clock had woken him up with a shrill constant sound as he slept his way through the morning after a night out with the lads. The all important football match was on and he was clean out of booze. He had to go like hell and have a quick swoop round the supermarket and get settled down ready. One phone call for a takeaway pizza and he was set up for a nice normal take it easy Saturday and he was master of his destiny.