He opened incoming mail with a wooden letter opener he’d bought from a curio shop on Cockburn Street. It was African, the handle carved to resemble an elongated head. This, too, he kept locked away whenever he vacated his office. His room hadn’t always been an office. He guessed it had started life as some sort of store. Maybe eight feet square, with two small, barred windows high up on one wall. There were metal pipes in the corner opposite the filing cabinet, and sounds from outside seemed to travel through them: distorted voices, barked orders, clanging and rattling. Dennis had taped a couple of posters to his walls. One showed the somber emptiness of Glencoe – a place he’d never been, despite regular promises to himself – while the other was a photograph of one of the East Neuk ’s fishing villages, taken from the harbor wall. Dennis liked them both equally. Staring at one or the other, he could transport himself to Highland wilderness or coastal haven, providing the briefest of respites from the sounds and smells of HMP Edinburgh.
The smells were worst in the morning: unaired cells thrown open, the great unwashed scratching and belching as they slouched toward breakfast. He seldom had contact-actual contact-with these men, yet he felt he knew them. Knew them through their letters, filled with clumsy sentences and spelling mistakes, yet eloquent for all that, and sometimes even poignant. Give the kids a big hug from me… I try to think about the good times only… Every day I don’t see you, a bit more of me crumbles away… When I get out, well start over…
Getting out: A lot of the letters spoke of this magical time, when past mistakes would be erased and fresh beginnings made possible. Even old lags, the ones who’d contrived to spend more of their life in prison than out, promised that they’d never stray again, that they’d make everything all right. I’ll be missing our anniversary again, Jean, but you’re never far from my thoughts… Small comfort for the wives like Jean, whose own letters ran to ten or twelve sides, crammed with the daily agonies of life without a breadwinner. Johnny’s running wild, Tam. The doctor says it’s what’s contributing to my condition. He needs a dad, but all I get are more of the tablets.
Jean and Tam: Their life apart had become a sort of soap opera to Dennis. Every week they exchanged letters, even though Jean visited her husband almost as regularly. Sometimes Dennis watched the visitors as they arrived, trying to identify letter writers. Then he’d study them as they made their way to this table or that, helping him match inmate and correspondent. Tam and Jean always squeezed hands, never hugged or kissed, seeming almost embarrassed at the less restrained behavior of couples around them.
Dennis seldom censored their letters, even on the odd occasions when something contentious cropped up. His own wife had left him a decade ago. He still kept some framed photos of her on the mantelpiece. In one of them, she was holding his hand, smiling for the camera. He might be watching TV, seated with a can of beer in his hand, and suddenly his eyes would start drifting toward that picture. Like Glencoe and the harbor, it took him to a different place. Then he would get up and cross to the dining table, where he’d have laid out the letters.
He didn’t take every last piece of correspondence home, just those concerning relationships that interested him. He’d bought a fax machine that doubled as a copier-cheaper, the shop assistant had informed him, than buying an actual photocopier. He would take the letters from his leather satchel and feed them into the machine. Next morning, the originals went back into the office with him. He knew he was doing something he shouldn’t, knew the Governor would be angry with him, or at the very least dismayed. But Dennis couldn’t see what harm he was doing. No one else was going to read them. They were for him alone.
One recent inmate was proving an intriguing specimen. He wrote a couple of times a day – obviously had plenty of money for stamps. His girlfriend was called Jemma, and she’d been pregnant but had lost the baby. Tommy was worried that he was to blame, that the shock of his conviction had caused her to abort. Dennis had yet to lay eyes on Tommy, knew he could say a few reassuring words to the kid.
But he wouldn’t. Wouldn’t get involved.
Another inmate, first name of Morris, had interested Dennis a few months previously. Morris had written one or two letters a week – steamy love letters. Always, it seemed to Dennis, to a different woman. Morris had been pointed out to him in the breakfast queue. The man looked nothing speciaclass="underline" a scrawny specimen with a lopsided grin.
“He ever get visitors?” Dennis had asked the warder.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
And Dennis had just shrugged, puzzled. The women Morris wrote to, they lived in the city. No reason for them not to visit. His address and prisoner number were printed at the top of each letter.
And then the Governor had asked Dennis to “nip along” to his office, informing him that Morris was banned forthwith from sending letters. Turned out, the sod was picking names out of the phone book, writing to complete strangers, sending detailed accounts of his fantasies.
The warders had laughed about it afterward: “Reckoned if he sent out enough of them, he’d get lucky eventually,” one had explained. “Maybe he would have, too. Some women on the outside go for the hardened con…”
Ah, yes, the hardened con. Plenty of those in HMP Edinburgh. But Dennis knew who really ran the show: Paul Blaine. Blaine was a cut above the muggers and junkies whose orbit around him he managed to ignore. When he walked through the prison halls, it was as if he’d surrounded himself with some invisible force field, so that no one came within several feet of him, unless he wanted them there. He had a “lieutenant” called Chippy Chalmers, whose lurking presence acted as a reminder of the force field. Not that anyone reckoned Blaine needed a minder. He was six three, thick-shouldered, and kept his hands half-clenched. Everything he did, he did slowly, with deliberation. He wasn’t here to make enemies or rub the warders up the wrong way. He just wanted to serve his time and head on out to where his empire still awaited.
Nevertheless, from the moment he’d walked in, he’d been the jail’s natural leader. The gangs and factions tiptoed around him, showing respect. Six years he was serving, having finally been nabbed on tax evasion, deception and fraud-probably out in a little over three, a couple of months already under his belt. He’d lost some weight since arriving, but looked the better for it, despite the gray tinge to his cheeks-same chalky look all cons ended up with, “prison tan,” they called it. When Blaine ’s wife came visiting, more warders than normal crowded into the hall, not because anything was going to happen, but because Blaine had married well.
“Achingly well,” one warder had whispered to Dennis with a wink.
Her name was Selina. At twenty-nine, she was ten years Blaine ’s junior. When the warders discussed her over break-time tea and sandwiches, Dennis had to lock his mouth shut. Thing was, he knew more about her than they did.
He knew just about everything.
She lived at an address in Bearsden, on the posh outskirts of Glasgow, visited her husband every fortnight rather than weekly, even though she was only forty-odd miles away. But she did write. She wrote four or five letters to every one of his. And the things she said…
I miss your hard-ons! See, Paul, I’m totally, absolutely lovestruck. If you were here, I’d straddle you till morning…