Die Alone

disappeared off the face of the earth.
What followed was one of the biggest investigations in British policing history, assisted by blanket media coverage. Every sex offender within a twenty-mile radius was picked up and questioned, but to no avail. There were no obvious suspects, no witnesses and no body. No reliable sighting of Dana was ever reported, and no trace of her was found. Eventually the investigation had been wound down and, finally, closed altogether, while the media moved on to other stories with more likelihood of an ending.
And then, nearly three decades later, Dana’s remains were unearthed in a small patch of woodland close to the River Thames, which had once been part of the grounds of a private boarding school but which had since been sold off for development. The remains of a second body, that of a young woman called Kitty Sinn who’d gone missing in 1990, were discovered nearby, and suddenly the case was open again.
I’d been twelve years old when Dana had gone missing, a year younger than she was. And yet it was her murder that had destroyed my own life and meant that I’d ended up in here, awaiting trial for double murder, having already survived two attempts on my life in the past year, and knowing that another one could be coming at any moment.
Like now.
It had been going for hours. A slow-motion riot, steadily gathering pace. Getting closer and closer.
Let me tell you one thing. There’s nothing much worse than being trapped in the Vulnerable Prisoners wing of a huge Category A prison while all around you the other wings burn as the prisoners seize control of it from an outgunned and outnumbered staff. I’ve been in some very bad situations in my life, and have come close to death on more occasions than I’d like to admit, but I had an especially bad feeling about this one.
The VP wing is the worst, most claustrophobic place to be in any prison. It contains the lowest of the low in the prison hierarchy. The rapists and the child molesters; the informants who’ve either betrayed or are about to betray their criminal brethren; and then, of course, men like me – former police officers. We were supposedly safe here, although I could testify to the fact that there was no such thing as safety in a prison when there was a price on your head as large as the one on mine. And the atmosphere in here now was the tensest I’d known it in the year I’d been here.
It had all begun just after six p.m., during recreation time when the cell doors are unlocked and the inmates have the freedom of the wing. The alarms had gone off. There’d been four guards on duty in our wing at the time and they’d disappeared en masse, almost without a word, locking the single exit door behind them. That had been more than three hours ago now and none of them had come back, which was pretty much unheard of. We were on our own in here, and what made it worse was that we could see everything that was happening on TV. Every cell had one, and there were a further two, with wide screens, in the main communal area. Prison life might be claustrophobic but it wasn’t without its comforts.
I was standing on the first-floor balcony while my cell mate Luke, a thin, nervous twenty-five-year-old with bad skin, gave me a running commentary on what was happening from inside our cell. And it was bad. The inmates had completely taken over two of the other wings, and on B wing they’d taken three guards hostage.
The speed and scale of the riot was a shock, but the fact that it had happened wasn’t. This prison was built to hold twelve hundred and now it housed two thousand. According to a report I’d read, there was also a 30 per cent shortage in staff. Add to that a heatwave that had sent temperatures soaring in recent days, as well as riots in two other prisons in the past week, and it made for a combustible mix.
‘The Tornado Teams are coming in,’ called out Luke, referring to the specialist squads of officers deployed whenever there was a major prison disturbance. ‘Hundreds of ’em. And riot police too,’ he added, sounding mightily relieved at the prospect of the outbreak soon being brought under control. But then he would do. This was his first time in prison, and he was on remand for unspecified sexual offences. I didn’t want to know the details, but I was pretty certain it involved a minor, which just made me feel sick. He’d always claimed he was innocent but I didn’t believe it. I doubted anyone in here was, and that included me. I knew too that if the other prisoners got in here, they weren’t going to be spending too long establishing guilt or innocence. They’d tear the place apart and everyone in it.
I was glad the Tornado Teams were coming but they were going to have to move fast. Even over the sound of the alarms coming from the other wings, I could hear the rampaging mob. They made a kind of ecstatic howling noise. It was the pure joy of destruction and violence. The release of all the frustrations that build up when you’re locked away for years on end, unloved and forgotten by everyone outside. It was a rage against their powerlessness.
I knew that feeling. I had it every day in here.
The problem was that there was no way out for these prisoners. The first thing the staff always do is secure the perimeters, lock all the outside gates, so that no one can get out and everything can be contained away from the public eye. Which meant their violence was going to be directed at something else. I’d been hoping it would be against property, or even the staff. But now I knew they were