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  ‘They’ve had my phone card off me an’ all!’ came the distant wail before a door slammed behind us and everything went quiet.

  ‘Are, um, drugs a problem at all?’ I asked as we stamped up through the darkness to the main work hall.

  ‘Massive. Massive,’ she replied with feeling. ‘Used to hide them up the bum’ – this with a faint air of nostalgia – ‘but these days it’s an under-the-foreskin job. And I’m not going there.’

  She glanced at me wryly and for a short but throat-punchingly vivid second seemed poised to order me to Go There, to pass the rest of the afternoon in an inspection cell with a queue of trouserless lags thrusting their unwashed loins at my Marigolds. ‘Got something here, miss,’ I’d announce cravenly, my voice quavering with self-disgust. Over she’d stride, before stooping down with a shake of the head and a weary tut. ‘How do we distinguish cannabis resin from the by-products of physical neglect, Moore?’ And with my brittle features crumpling, I’d mumble, ‘Using the nose, miss.’

  The work hall was a huge and dingy loft room, the kind of place where by rights an escape committee should have secreted its homemade glider. Instead it was cluttered with disordered rows of Formica tables, upon which, it was difficult not to notice as we entered, lay the recumbent forms of a great many young men in grey tracksuits. A Radio Rentals era telly displaying the silent face of Rodney Trotter dangled unwatched from the rafters.

  ‘It’s not always like this,’ piped up one of the two officers seated behind a huge old desk at the front, like public school prefects monitoring detention. None of her charges reacted to her words or our presence. ‘Just that we’ve got no work to do now.’ Her colleague drew my attention to the floor, which I now noticed was liberally strewn with small foam discs. Correctly sensing that this spectacle raised many more questions than it answered, my guiding guard said, ‘All the inflight headsets come here from Virgin Atlantic. The inmates take off the old ear covers and put on new ones.’ She turned to the desk. ‘How many d’you normally do a month?’

  ‘Three hundred thousand. But since September 11 we’re down to 80,000.’

  It was oddly intriguing to discover that the next hands that would finger my foamies after I’d handed them back to the stewardess were those of a north London larcenist. ‘How much do they get?’ I asked soon after as we wandered past a glazed door behind which a woman in plaits was failing to keep the attention of her computer-skills class, one of whom had a towel draped over his head.

  ‘Two fifty.’

  ‘An hour?’

  An incredulous gurn. ‘A week.’

  I was completely lost now, but at the same time becoming slightly more at home. It was somehow heartening to hear the officers address each other, tongue half in cheek, as ‘Mister Harris’ or ‘Miss Evesham’, in cosy Porridge fashion. I even began to strike up a rapport with my guide, who it turned out was a relative newcomer to the screw game, having been ideally groomed for the profession by spells in the Army and as a pub landlady. ‘I needed a challenge,’ she said, as if it had been a toss-up between learning to windsurf and physically overpowering sex case fruitcakes. ‘But first time I come in here, I looked up at them five floors and thought, fuck.’

  Feeling a common bond at last, we moved on to what was clearly the conversational staple for both prisoners and guards. ‘Morale is absolutely godawful. The hours are ridiculous, and the money . . . d’you know we only get sixteen grand? Join the Met and you get twenty-five for doing a similar job. And everything’s geared towards the inmates – say or do anything they don’t like and you’re up before the number-one governor for abuse or excessive force. And don’t get me started on the paperwork.’

  Was the discovery that prison was a bit shit really such a shocking epiphany for inmates and their guards alike? Just as Bernie’s dad had tried to warn me about one side of this equation, so my friend Ian had alerted me to the other. He’d done some research on prisons and had been appalled at the absenteeism rate: the average prison officer takes three weeks off sick every year.

  We went outside and, shadowed between the perimeter walls and the warehouse cages of A wing, I managed to get her talking about something else. ‘Yeah, we’ve had the odd escape. Got an E-man now who’s always at it – he just tried to get a pass out to his mum’s funeral. Checked it out and she died three years ago. Now, if you ever saw a prisoner in this area . . .’ – we were now at the foot of a huge, white wall topped with razor wire – ‘the shit would really hit the fan.’

  Men were ambling about the exercise yard – it was only 11.40 and they’d already had lunch – and I passed close enough to the wire to hear one mumble to another, ‘Just hitch a caravan on the back and you’re away.’ I was still contemplating the possible criminal implications of this comment when we rounded the corner and were presented by a square of lovingly tended lawn framed by neat flower beds.

  ‘The prisoners’ garden?’

  ‘You could say that, I suppose, because it’s actually where, um . . .’ She tailed off, and instinctively I understood. Here before us, beneath this turfed patch smaller than a suburban back yard, lay – or, more likely given its modest dimensions, stood – the bodies of 120 executed criminals. I suppose my expression must have given it away. ‘It’s not something you really want to gossip about when you work here,’ she said, closing the discussion and leading us back indoors.

  But I’m afraid I’d wanted to linger. If there was one thing that set the Monopoly era’s penal system apart from today’s, it wasn’t the cat or the crank or the birch but the death penalty. After the infamous Newgate Prison was demolished in 1902 its gallows were removed to Pentonville: ‘The finest scaffold in the whole country,’ reminisced their regular operator Harry Pierrepoint, ‘being fitted to hang three persons side by side.’ Thereafter the model prison that had been designed as the bold new face of criminal correction became the capital’s capital punishment capital.

  More criminals were executed at Pentonville in the twentieth century than at any other British prison. Doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen lay under that lawn, buried along with a photograph of the mistress he had quicklimed his wife for, and the serial necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie, and umpteen notorious others I seem to know slightly too much about. (A particularly disquieting revelation was that when the police finally apprehended Christie he gave his name as – help me, Mummy – John Waddington.) There were six German spies, and a handful of Great War traitors. For sixteen years until their exhumation the lawn had covered the bones of Timothy Evans, whose execution for two murders later attributed to Christie led to a posthumous pardon and ultimately won the argument for the abolitionists.

  By the thirties few British prisons had a permanent scaffold, but Pentonville was happy to help out with a gallows-to-go delivery service. Its proximity to the unrivalled transport connections of King’s Cross made Pentonville the natural choice to hold the ‘hanging kit’ that was sent by train around the country to facilitate provincial death sentences: despatched along with the flat-pack gallows was an ‘execution box’ containing two ropes (one new; one used), a white hood and straps to pinion the . . . the, er . . . it’s difficult not to say ‘victim’, really. Just as it’s easy to imagine why Pentonville’s staff and prisoners would rather not dwell on that corner by the north-eastern wall and its 120 dead lifers. A hundred and twenty people who had been killed for killing perhaps 150 more – that’s an awful lot of bad karma for one lawn. It was too much to take in then and it still is now.

  The last execution at Pentonville took place on 6 July 1961; the old condemned cell, where Crippen and Christie and all spent their final hours, was later converted, Bernie’s father had bitterly informed me, into the probation officers’ staff room. But Britain’s last set of working gallows, over the Thames at Wandsworth, wasn’t dismantled until 1995.

  ‘Next time, Mr Moore, bring some ID with you and I won’t have to ask about your . . . Sebastian Paris.’ I was back in the Audit Unit with t
he bullet-headed Mitchell brother who had signed me in, and what should have been an exchange of parting pleasantries had taken on the air of an ill-tempered parole-board interview.

  ‘Next time? Not at my age,’ I mumbled dismissively.

  I’d noted during our earlier encounter that he was the sort of man you wouldn’t want to see angry, and now he was angry.

  ‘You’d be surprised, Mr Moore,’ came the coldly ominous reply; then, horribly, its deliverer stood up behind his desk and jabbed the small space between our faces with a Prison Service Biro. ‘Now you’ve seen it, let’s hope you won’t be back.’

  I walked out into Caledonian Road feeling hollow and harrowed. It had been my intention to amble about the neighbourhood, putting the prison into the context of its uncomfortably close urban surroundings. But then it had also been my intention to get the board out and jovially inveigle an officer into having three shots at throwing a double. Instead I marched very briskly into the nearby train station without once looking back. In a thirties’ London jail there were degrees of punishment: hard labour, the birch, being hung by the neck until you were dead. It was good that these were things of the past. Now all we had was degrees of time – how much you did depended on what you’d done. It occurred to me as I sat on a damp platform bench that in spending even half a morning in prison I had just experienced the very worst punishment that society can now inflict on its members. And then, shocked at how quickly I’d been infected by all that whining self-pity, I whipped the board out on to the bench, clacked my car discourteously over the prisoner’s face and rolled. ‘Double three!’ I yelped, not at that stage having noticed the young mother piloting a pushchair past me. It was a proper Monopoly break-out.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Oranges

  ASK A MONOPOLY player for his favourite set and he’ll say, ‘Well, the Mayfair one.’ Ask a serious Monopoly player for his favourite set and he’ll say, ‘Get away from my title deeds! Away! Cheat! Rent! Mum!’ But soon afterwards, when he’s pinioned under your knees having houses stuffed up his nose, he’ll reluctantly splutter, ‘The oranges.’ He’ll never tell you why, though, not even when with a coldly vicious Weiss Engel gleam in your eye you convey a hotel slowly towards his left nostril. So I will.

  That there exists a handsome overlap between Monopoly obsessives and modem-married statistical analysts should come as no surprise. I am particularly indebted to a man who identified himself only as ‘Chris’ for the website in which he dissects in more detail than one might have thought feasible the bounteous data generated by his computer model of a 250-turn game of Monopoly.

  By individual location, Jail is by far and away the most commonly landed-upon square, claiming four times as many victims as any other on the board; as Chris himself explains, this is due to ‘the number of mechanisms by which a player can end up there: Go To Jail, Chance and Community Chest cards, and rolling three doubles in a row in addition to simply landing on “Just Visiting”’. One consequence of what I’m sure he’d be happy to hear dubbed The Chris Paradigm is that – and here I’ll have to refer you to the previous discussion of dice-digit probabilities – as I had just myself experienced the oranges are the set you’re most likely to see your token come to rest upon. So often will people land there, in fact, that despite Vine Street’s hotel bill being half Mayfair’s, a fully loaded orange set will on average bag £24,619 in a game, compared to £14,835 for the dark blues. And because I can hear someone – perhaps even Chris himself – muttering that for a fair comparison one should pit another three-property set against it, even the fabled greens don’t come close, netting just over twenty grand. Additionally, if I may be briefly permitted to out-Chris Chris, this takes no account of comparative development costs: £100 a house for the oranges; £200 for the greens.

  (It isn’t strictly relevant, but you might like to know that Chris’s rundown of set desirability is as follows: orange, red, yellow, green, dark blue, purple, light blue, stations, brown. He has particularly harsh words for the utilities, which between them can expect to yield an insulting £625 over the course of a game. ‘As a digression, we might question whether, in this context, they make a valuable addition to the game’ is his shockingly heretical verdict. As another digression, Chris, what would you replace them with? What’s that? Well, sweet of you to offer, Chris, but perhaps that remarkable archive of powerful adult imagery is best left on your hard drive.)

  But the oranges aren’t just deceptively unbeatable. They’re also unbeatably deceptive. There is, for instance, no such address as Marlborough Street in central London, unless one bothers with an inconsequential alley in South Kensington, which one doesn’t. Bow Stret we know – round the back of Covent Garden, home of the famous Runners, London’s first crime-fighting force. But Vine Street? Three are listed in the central area, all of a dimensional stature one might justifiably dismiss as poxy. And though all the other colour groups on the board share a bond of location or – in the case of the browns – knees-up gorblimeyness, no combination of the aforementioned orange possibilities seemed to turn on any lights.

  It’s always slightly bothered me. Only when I sat down and stared at the board for so long that the man in Jail’s mouth started moving did I get it. Bow Street was the key. It wasn’t Marlborough Street, but Great Marlborough Street (the first London A-Z might have appeared the same year as Monopoly, epically compiled on foot by unsung cartographic heroine Phyllis Pearsall, but Vic and Marge certainly didn’t bother checking their choices against the index). And recalling endless Newsroom SouthEast reports on pickpocket gangs, I suddenly knew which was the right Vine Street.

  Though it didn’t help to explain Vic and Marge’s motives – the Atlantic City equivalents, St James Place, Tennessee Avenue and New York Avenue, were as blandly random as any other set on the US board – what linked the oranges was The Law. The Bow Street Runners. Marlborough Street Magistrates Court. Vine Street Police Station. I’d done it the wrong way round. Having done the time, I was now off to do the crime.

  Named after its shape, Bow Street merits a low score on the ‘now-there’s-a-thing’ originometer, but in fact grabs a couple of bonus points by being no such shape. Bow Street is about as much of a bow as a piece of All-Bran, and not much longer. Because it was sunny I’d gone up to town on my bike, and it took less than forty seconds to freewheel down it.

  Following the now familiar pattern, Bow Street was knocked up in the mid-seventeenth century as lodgings for the rich and famous – the fêted woodcarver Grinling Gibbons lived here – before succumbing to darker temptations. By the 1740s eight pubs were somehow squeezed into it, along with a number of notoriously outré brothels. Years before you could get arrested in Bow Street it was certainly the place to go if you fancied being picked up by the fuzz.

  Edmund Curll, fondly described as ‘the father of English pornographic publishing’, was living at No. 2 when in 1719 he made his name with a translation of the definitive German treatise The Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs. Having tolerated Curll for five years, in 1724 the authorities took exception to The Nun in Her Smock, this time a French original. No doubt hoping for the cat o’ nine tails but instead sentenced to an hour in the stocks, he imaginatively saved himself a pasting by winning over the tomato-toters with complimentary copies of some of his earlier publications. ‘The Unspeakable Curll’ was still at it in his early seventies, when to celebrate publication of The Pleasures of Coition in 1745 he was discovered ‘laying three in a bed at the Pewter Platter Inn’.

  Something clearly had to be done about Bow Street, and in the early 1750s the remarkable Henry Fielding – already an acclaimed novelist and playwright – did it by founding the red-coated Runners. No one seems quite certain why they were called that, but it’s my guess that as for the first twenty-odd years there were only half a dozen of the poor saps they’d have needed a Benny Hill turn of speed at the very least. Clearly overawed by the magnitude of their task, it’s not surprising that having failed to
beat the thieves they joined them. So corrupt and dishonest did the Runners become that it took years for their eventual successors, Peel’s bobbies, to gain the public’s confidence: in 1832 a coroner’s jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide after an unarmed constable was fatally knifed.

  I locked the bike up outside the magistrates’ court and walked up and down, mainly down, though, because like so many London roads Bow Street slopes towards the Thames. In the thirties Bow Street was very much a part of Covent Garden Market, where little had changed since the Artful Dodger’s days: stout ladies in crumpled old hats sitting outside shelling peas into enamel basins on their knees; a thousand porters with baskets on their heads; horses all over the place. The Foreign Fruit Market opened on to Bow Street and people would still come, as Charles Dickens had, to gawp at the pineapples. Top bananas Fyffes were based in the street, along with eight other exotic fruit brokers and salesmen: three pubs, a couple of banks, cop shop and courtroom – that was your lot.

  The pubs remain, two of them – the Globe Tavern and the Marquis of Anglesey – still under the same signs. But the fruiteries have long gone, relocated south of the river with the rest of the market in 1974, and as elsewhere in the locale the restaurants and advertising agencies have moved in. Hilton & Hooper banana importers had given way to Pizza Express and Amalgamated Fruiterers to a many-named operation subtitled Brand Response. Every other passer-by was blethering conspicuously into a hands-free mobile – not, as first it seems, talking to themselves, but certainly talking about themselves. A black-glass Range Rover with the registration ‘50HO’ throbbed by, tailed closely by a menopausal media male on his over-polished Harley-Davidson. All that was left of the old days was the terrific end flank of the Foreign Fruit Market, supporting the foyer of the new Royal Opera House extension like a towering glass and cast-iron Victorian bookend.