The Wolves of London by Mark Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

people being stamped and kicked to death for a minor slight or ill-conceived joke; I’ve heard of crooks shooting or stabbing other crooks – sometimes even their best friends, blokes they’ve known for years – simply because of a disagreement over a restaurant bill or a misplaced comment about the other guy’s wife.
    Benny Magee was such a man. If you met him with no prior knowledge of who he was you’d think he was amiable, open-minded, softly spoken. And yet he’d been involved in some terrible things, and had spent as much of his adult life in prison as out of it. There’d been a lot of respect for him in Pentonville; people treated him with deference, even though he wasn’t the sort of bloke to throw his weight about and assert his authority. The first time I met him I was sitting cross-legged on the bunk in my cell, trying to concentrate on the psychology textbook in my lap. I had one finger stuck in my ear and my lips were moving in an attempt to block out the racket going on around me and get the words on the page to stick in my head.
    That’s one thing about prisons that they never focus on in movies and TV dramas. They never mention the noise. Morning, noon and night there’s an unceasing barrage of people shouting to each other, yelling abuse, crying, screaming for attention, banging the hell out of the walls and doors of their cells. It never stops. It goes on and on. The first time I was exposed to it I was terrified, I thought there was something kicking off, but after a while I realised that this was what it was like all the time, and that if I didn’t want it to crush me it was something I would have to get used to.
    I only became aware that someone had stepped through the open door of my cell when a shadow fell across the page of the book. Immediately my head snapped up, my heart thumping. I knew there were plenty of screws around, but I knew too that sometimes they could be purposely distracted, or even persuaded to turn a blind eye.
    When I saw Benny standing over me, my stomach clenched and the muscles in my shoulders went rigid. Until now I hadn’t crossed his path, though I’d seen him around and knew of him by reputation. The stories that other inmates had told me about him were toe-curling. It was said that he’d once nailed an informant to a wooden floor before removing his fingers and toes with bolt cutters; that he’d dealt with a business rival by hammering a tent peg through his eye and into his brain; that he’d punished an ex-girlfriend’s lover by tying him up, fastening electrodes to his testicles, throwing him into a bath of cold water, and then electrocuting him until he passed out, slipped beneath the water and drowned.
    What made these stories even more horrifying – and oddly more feasible – was the fact that Benny wasn’t much to look at. By that I mean he was unassuming – slight, with fine, sandy hair and a narrow, forgettable face. I’d have put him in his late thirties, which meant that he was about twice my age. Perhaps the one concession to his criminality was the fact that he had a small scar bisecting the left side of his upper lip. However, he could just as easily have got that from falling off his bike when he was a kid.
    I felt an urge to scramble to my feet and stand to attention, but I thought that might be construed as squaring up to him, so I stayed where I was, cowering and submissive.
    Benny wasn’t alone. Standing behind him was a big man, running to fat but still formidable, with a black moustache and hands like the clawed scoops on a digger.
    Bending at the waist, Benny leaned towards me until our foreheads were almost touching. He smelled fresh and faintly scented, of shower gel and deodorant, perhaps some kind of hair product. When he parted his lips to speak, my balls shrivelled and crawled into my belly, like a pair of snails retreating into their shells. I expected some blood-curdling threat to tickle my ears. But then I noticed that