Dead Men's s Boots

The timing was going to be tight, though. I needed to be back at the courthouse in Barnet for two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.

I’d just have to make sure the meeting was a short one.

10

A hundred and fifty years ago, HM Prison Pentonville was considered a model of the perfect nick. Politicians made millenarian speeches about it; penal experts came from all over Europe to see it and coo over it; and no doubt many an old lag committed imaginative new crimes just so he could get banged up in it.

It was the first prison in England built to an American blueprint known as the separate system. It was sort of a refinement of the Victorian panopticons, where sneaky little architectural tweaks and twiddles allowed the prisoners to be watched for every second of every day, no matter where they went.

In the separate system, though, the cruelty was a bit more refined than that. The designers still made a big deal out of having clear lines of sight and high-mounted guard platforms, but the main inspiration here was to knock the fight out of the prisoners by denying them any human contact.

Not only was the prison as a whole split up into a sprawl of different wings that h nisoad no contact with each other, but the same separation was enforced at meals, in chapel, even in the exercise yard. Inside, cubicle walls divided every shared space into a honeycomb of miniature rooms, so you were always alone even when there were a thousand people sitting or standing right next to you. Outside, you wore a specially designed cap with a downward-extended peak to hide your face, and nobody ever used your real name. Like Jean Valjean, or Patrick McGoohan, your number became your official identity. If you failed to answer to your number, you got a week in a punishment cell. If you gave your name to another prisoner, you got another year nailed onto your sentence.

It was a roaring success, in terms of making the prisoners docile: after a few months of this treatment, most of them were as meek as lobotomised lambs. Okay, a few of them – maybe more than a few – would slip a little further along the bell-shaped curve, from passivity into apathy, and then into psychotic withdrawal or catatonia. But some people are never going to be happy no matter how much you do for them.