Four Warned by Jeffrey Archer

Author:Jeffrey Archer [Archer, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller
ISBN: 9781447252481
Google: Z5aoAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18885607
Publisher: Pan
Published: 2014-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t Drink the Water

(from Cat O’ Nine Tales)

‘If you want to murder someone,’ said Karl, ‘don’t do it in England.’

‘Why not?’ I asked innocently.

‘The odds are against you getting away with it,’ my fellow inmate warned me, as we walked round the exercise yard. ‘You’ve got a much better chance in Russia.’

‘I’ll try to remember that,’ I replied.

‘Mind you,’ added Karl, ‘I knew a countryman of yours who did get away with murder, but at some cost.’

* * *

It was Association, that welcome 45-minute break when you are released from your prison cell. You can either spend your time on the ground floor (which is about the size of a basketball court), sitting around chatting, playing table tennis or watching television, or you can go out into the fresh air and stroll around the edge of the yard (which is about the size of a football pitch). There was a twenty-foot-high concrete wall topped with razor wire, and only the sky to look up at – but this was, for me, the highlight of the day.

While I was confined in Belmarsh, a category A high-security prison in south-east London, I was locked in my cell for twenty-three hours a day (think about it). You are let out only to go to the canteen to pick up your lunch (five minutes), which you then eat in your cell. Five hours later you collect your supper (five more minutes). At that point they also hand you tomorrow’s breakfast in a plastic bag, so that they don’t have to let you out again before lunch the following day. The only other taste of freedom is Association, and even that can be cancelled if the prison is short-staffed (which happens about twice a week).

I always used the 45-minute escape to power-walk, for two reasons. One, I needed the exercise because on the outside I attend a local gym five days a week, and, two, not many prisoners bothered to try and keep up with me. Except Karl.

Karl was a Russian by birth who hailed from that beautiful city of St Petersburg. He was a contract killer who had just begun a 22-year sentence for disposing of a fellow countryman who was proving tiresome to one of the Mafia gangs back home. He cut his victims up into small pieces, and put what was left of them into a furnace. His fee – if you wanted someone disposed of – was five thousand pounds.

Karl was a bear of a man, six foot two and built like a weightlifter. He was covered in tattoos and never stopped talking. On balance, I didn’t consider it wise to interrupt his flow. Like so many prisoners, Karl didn’t talk about his own crime, and the golden rule (should you ever end up inside) is never ask what a prisoner is in for, unless they raise the subject. However, Karl did tell me a tale about an Englishman he’d come across in St Petersburg. He claimed to have seen what happened in the days when he’d been a driver for a government minister.

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