Justice City

by D.G. Compton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In a governmental Punishment and Protection centre, Charge Nurse Landon is wondering why one of the new inductees seems familiar. Meanwhile Chief Inspector Duncan is driving home from a stakeout in Liverpool. When the two men's destinies meet, the result is a complex mystery with a political edge.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 284

Sample

Look up there. Those burnished black ramparts hacked into the side of Skagg Tor – that’s Justice City, firstborn and flagship of the nation’s Punishment and Protection Centres. Two hundred thousand square metres of crag and bracken, levelled, terraced, built over, populated, five thousand inmates to three hundred prison staff (a uniquely cost-effective ratio), the entire P & P area enclosed in black steel walls ten metres high, windowless and intricately riveted, with a gaunt black road zigzagging down from them. At the bottom of the road lies the main Manchester-Huddersfield autoroute; at the top of the road, looming over a gravel turnaround laid out with armoured trucks in mind, stand the windowless black steel gates, in the windowless black steel walls, of Justice City.

The name, of course, is a political statement; so is the building material. Both were intended six years ago as vote-getters, did the job then, and still do now. Of the two, the steel is the more truthful. Justice City isn’t a city, and the justice it delivers is maybe debatable, but its walls, although six years old now and rusting a bit round the door sills, are still basically as unassailable as their steelness and blackness and windowlessness was intended to suggest.

In many ways, especially when seen from down here on the main autoroute, Justice City does a fine job. Ordinary decent citizens passing in their cars can see that: they can see how it subjugates the land. They can look up and see for themselves how big and black and unassailable it is, and people they believe have told them it’s also cost-effective. It’s right-thinking, too. The name says it all: Justice City. Wrongdoers are brought to it and, profoundly, they receive it. It’s more than just a prison. Ordinary decent citizens, as they pass in their cars, understand its significance very well. They can see that it’s more than just a prison. It reassures them and at the same time, secretly, it terrifies them. It’s Justice City.

Seen from inside, too, the City is reassuring. There are gates and granite within its steel-walled two hundred thousand square metres. Grids of Long Term Incarceration (LTI) Blocks, a Hospital Wing, a Punishments Building, a Prison Procedures Research Unit, exercise yards and running track, chapel, library, ornamental gardens, vegetable gardens, motor transport pool, staff quarters, staff canteen, staff leisure centre, staff cinema, staff swimming facility … And then there are the famous walls, battleship Victoriana eight metres high, their black steel plating ten millimetres thick and riveted at fifteen centimetre centres, the rivets marching three abreast in clanging ranks up and across and down … It’s impressive. Did anyone mention trees? There are many trees, fruit and ornamental, deciduous and evergreen, and in another season there’ll be roses blooming.

So what’s the snag?

Is there one?

As has already been mentioned, Justice City has five thousand inmates and three hundred resident staff. There is also the occasional short-term ministry-approved visitor. Four times a day, however, the permitted number of inmates is exceeded. At five a.m. and ten a.m. and one p.m. and three a group of no more than six new inductees is booked in from Manchester: one hour later, at six a.m. and eleven a.m. and two p.m. and four, a similar number of long term inmates (LTIs) is discharged. New inductees are scrupulously balanced by LTI discharges. The staff/inmate ratio is pared to the bone, the prison officers’ union is watchful, and the governor, Mr Ransome, has made a commitment to his men never to exceed it for longer than one hour.

At this grey hour of a January morning few men are out of doors. The eight o’clock exercise detail (ten inmates) is exercising, the eight o’clock running detail (six inmates) is running, and twelve prison officers armed with shot-guns can be seen, supervising them. (No more than sixteen inmates are ever outside their cells at any one time: free association isn’t allowed. This is what makes such cost-effective staffing levels possible. This and the politically unfortunate guns.) Inmates wear fluorescent orange City tracksuits as a further disincentive to escape, and officers wear regulation blue. This morning the flat waterproof tops of their caps are damp and shiny. One visitor is in sight, marching from Inductions to the Prison Procedures Research Unit: identifiable by his khaki greatcoat, and his march, he’s a military policeman on secondment from the army jail in Oswestry. He’s observing prison management methods here, and he doesn’t belong. Neither do the inmates, but the staff treat them as if they did. Only the staff belong in the City.

It’s coming up to eight thirty, time to go indoors. Through the first floor window, third from the left facing south, of the Punishments Building, the back of Margaret (Peggy) London’s head is visible. The Punishments Building is the smallish granite-faced block with barred windows (not helpful: most of the buildings here are granite-faced, with barred windows) over there by the rose garden to the right of Inductions, which is just beyond Reception. Peggy Landon is going to be important to this story – she and Chief Inspector Alexander (Alec) Duncan, a CID man who’s a hundred miles away at present, driving home from an overnight stake-out, along a Liverpool street.

On the other side of the window, with her back to it, in a crispish white coat, Peggy Landon is sitting at a cluttered government issue desk. The room she’s in, neon-lit against the dreary morning, is bare but decent-sized. She seems only recently to have arrived. Judging from the way she sits at her desk, she’s hating it. She sits at it but she isn’t yet of it.

This is clear because, her back straight and her stomach pulled in, she’s making a pointed distance between herself and the central drawer-front. Her legs in their brown paisley tights are curled back distastefully under her chair and she holds her arms out over the desk top, elbows fastidiously raised, fingers and thumbs together, as she scans its littered surface for some reasonable starting point to her day.

On the desk are papers and ballpoint pens and file cartons, junk-mail drug promotions, a smeary computer terminal, an out-tray (no in-tray in sight), dirty coffee mugs and tangled elastic bands, a scuffed leather photograph frame containing a sunny colour picture of a pipe-smoking middle-aged man, two telephones, a plastic swimming cap, newspapers, an ophthalmoscope missing the screw-end to keep in its battery, and a number of empty potato crisp packets.

Chief Inspector Duncan, Alec, will learn a lot, in his close-up way, from this desk. The chief inspector is good at seeing things close-up, and less good at the panoramic. On some cases this gives him an edge. On others it makes him a walking disaster area. The trick for his superiors is to tell in advance which sort of case it’s going to be.

Alec will be good, for example, at the photograph in the leather frame: from the man’s likeness to Peggy Landon he’s a relative, and from the pipe and the scuffed frame it’s an oldish picture, carried round a lot, and therefore loved. From his age, he’s probably her father, and – in the absence of a more recent picture – he’s probably several years dead. But there seems to be no mother’s photograph, and no boy- or girlfriend’s. Does Oedipus rule, then? Alec will cautiously think so.

The picture is indeed of her father. Peggy Landon is thirty-two years old, an only child born in west London, now a trained psychiatric nurse who likes to call herself a psychotherapist. She joined the prison service after six months at a private psychiatric institution, she’s worked in Justice City since it opened, and now, with four nursing assistants in two shifts, she administers thresholding in the City’s Punishments Building, generally known as the House.

Her father was certainly well-loved, and is now fifteen years dead. He was a delusional schizophrenic and he died in a car crash which involved nobody else and was probably intentional, while driving under heavy medication on a long straight country road at two in the morning. There’d been a bitter family quarrel earlier that night, and the episode left Peggy and her mother with so many guilts and mutual recriminations that they’ve never addressed each other reasonably since. She has no boy- or girlfriend in the romantic sense, but she and Dr Karl Stanna, senior neurologist in the Prison Procedures Research Unit, have laughs together, and often sex.

Peggy Landon is, finally, not likeable. But she’s of her time and, given the pressures on her, it’s hard to see how she could have turned out all that differently. She lives within the black steel walls of Justice City (all staff do), she enjoys taking part in amateur TV theatricals in the staff leisure centre, and she swims twice a week in a vain attempt to plump up her breasts and plump down her legs. She’s short and dark, her face is prettier than her nature, and she wears short skirts and patterned tights that don’t suit her. She–

Just now that’s all the background information there’s time for. Peggy’s finished scanning her desk and she’s found what she was looking for. It was under the newspapers, in her in-tray where it should have been: the file brought up to her office from Inductions that morning by a City messenger, detailing last night’s four new inductees, ready now for thresholding.

She leafs through their papers, going first to the duty prison medical officer’s report sheets. All the inductees are in good health. Sufficiently good, that is, for the City’s purposes. Peggy looks next at their sentences. These are not her responsibility, they’re emphatically non-medical, but naturally she liaises with Captain Wilson, the punishments officer downstairs. There are never enough punishment rooms, and never enough hours in the working day. Scheduling is tight, and if any of this intake have to be laid over he’ll need to organize them into the Holding Block.

Reconciled to her desk now, she shunts clutter back out of the way, making room for the papers. One man’s sentence catches her eye – it’s unusually severe and she frowns and checks the crime. The inductee’s crime is rape and murder. The crimes of the other three are minor: non-payment of child support, indecent exposure, computer fiddle. Sentences of an hour or two, for a week or two, no problem. Peggy goes back, curious, to the rape and murder.

She remembers radio reports of the case. The victim had been a young black prostitute, beaten up, then raped and cut about. Seriously disfigured, the radio said, with a razor. She hadn’t died quickly or easily. The convicted man was known to have kept a string of prostitutes so she was presumably one of his and she’d stepped out of line. Peggy turns back to the inductee’s medical report sheet: name, sex, age, race, religion, height, weight, build, colour of hair and eyes, condition of teeth, distinguishing marks or features, trade or profession, addresses of next of kin … then the examining doctor’s comments, down finally to any known allergies. The inductee’s name is Albert Beech. He’s twenty-nine and Caucasian and big and muscular and blond, and healthy in every physical particular. As to his mental health, or lack of it, it doesn’t rate a mention. It’s none of the City’s business. Albert Beech has no religion, no trade or profession, and his next of kin live in Clapham, a mother and a sister. The sole distinguishing mark listed is his beard.

Peggy looks at the Albert Beech polaroids taken down at Inductions, full face and profile, early this morning, fully conscious, before the barbiturates in his pre-thresholding hot beverage. The eyes are mean but the beard is golden and luxurious. It doesn’t fit with a raped and murdered black girl and was probably grown at his counsel’s suggestion while Albert Beech was on remand, awaiting trial. It didn’t do him much good apparently: not with the jury and certainly not with the judge. The severity of Albert Beech’s sentence will bring the punishments officer’s room schedule to its knees.

Peggy stares at the polaroids – she’s seen this man before. Without the beard? It’s difficult to tell. She’ll have seen pictures of Albert Beech after his trial, on TV or in the papers. Or is this an older memory? But in any case, Manchester should warn them before sending on inductees with sentences like this. Room availability doesn’t grow on trees.

She bows her head, eyes closed, two fingers supporting the bridge of her nose, and shudders slightly. Judges don’t see what these sentences do. Concern for the victim is a good idea, of course it is, but nothing’s going to bring a young black woman back to life, or ease her pain. Some days she hates her job. Hates it.

She turns to the other three sets of papers, firmly displacing Albert Beech from her mind. It’s eight forty now, nearly time she went downstairs.

The polaroids show three total strangers. They’re all in good health, except that the indecent exposure claims he has a feather allergy. Peggy makes a note to tell Carole to find him a polyfibre pillow. Carole is kind-hearted. Jake, this morning’s other nursing assistant, is less so. Mention an inmate’s feather allergy to him and he’ll scour the City for a moulting parrot.

The computer fiddle says he’s a Christian Scientist. If that means he never accepts drugs, not even pain-killers, then the barbiturates in his breakfast hot beverage will have laid him out. Peggy makes a note that she may have to recalculate the thresholding dosage.

The non-payment looks as if he’s the perfect patient. Nothing to be noted – even his Comments section is blank. But she recognizes the examining PMO’s initials: Dr Peck is a sod and he often can’t be bothered. She taps the papers together, adds Albert Beech to them, and puts them back in the file.

It’s an odd thing. She’d like to be able to jargonize Albert Beech like the others, think of him as a category, as the multiple rape and murder, but she can’t. He isn’t a category, he’s flesh and blood. He’s Albert Beech, flesh, blood, and she’s seen him before … She sighs, pushes back her chair, gets up from her desk, goes to the window. She hopes to look out through the bars and over the City’s walls, to see the moor beyond, but the morning’s too dark and the window glass simply gives her back her reflection, and the precise bright office behind her. The electricity generating station is in the way, in any case, all four storeys of it, but that never stops her hoping … The mirror image of the clock on the wall above the copier catches her eye and she interprets it. Eight forty-five. It’s time she went downstairs.

The Punishments Building has three floors. There’s an unused top floor with a toilet, inventoried as spare capacity; a first floor for offices; and a ground floor with entrance foyer, a tiny dispensary, and a nurses’ room: this is the ground floor Open Area. Then there’s the ground floor Closed Area, thresholding rooms, a control room, and a machine room for the air-conditioning and the EAT (Extreme Audio-frequency Treatment) generating equipment. There’s also a lift down to Punishments, the large basement floor that extends out under the gardens and accommodates the EAT rooms, monitored from a central observation station. If the capacity’s available, inductees go straight down from thresholding to EAT; otherwise they’re moved to the Holding Block, known among the staff as Limbo, which borders the west-facing rose garden. Punishments has secondary access, into the City’s tunnel system which has exits in the LTI compounds as well as in Holding. No staff members like the Holding Block. They’d need to be sick to enjoy the fear that lives there.

From the ground floor entrance foyer of the House short covered walkways lead west to Inductions and Reception. It’s a compact arrangement, convenient for the staff. But the walkways have open sides, and on this January morning wet freezing winds gust across them. Daylight will scarcely reach the sour sodden gardens on either side of them until eleven or so, and the cheery electric glare that spills out through the armoured glass doors to the House is smothered before it’s gone two metres.

Like Peggy Landon, the old man now hurrying along the walkway from Inductions to the Punishments Building is important to this story. He’s a sight to see. He wears his regulation blue cotton staff coat over flared American red plaid trousers, a greasy yellow tie shows in the vee of his coat against a pink shirt much too large for his stringy neck, and on his head a Balliol college straw boater sits above faded wind-blown hair at a jaunty Chevalier angle. His feet bulge out through holes in his trainers and his large hands flap anxiously, scarcely connected to his arms, which are scarcely connected to his shoulders. Most people tighten up as they grow older. This man has loosened. He hasn’t shaved today, his false teeth whistle, and the badge pinned on his breast pocket, behind a row of different-coloured ballpoint pens, identifies him as GRANNY and his prison rank as PORTER.

None of this means that he’s a figure of fun to the City’s inmates. Granny Porter’s to be seen all over the place, cleaning brasswork, replacing light-bulbs, and newcomers may laugh at him, but there’s always a wiser man around to set them straight. Granny Porter is a City institution. He’s the oldest lag in Justice City. His presence there helps Governor Ransome, on his bad days, to live with himself, for it was the Governor, a couple of years ago, who finally took pity on him. He’s got form as long as both your arms, and one of your legs as well. He once drove cars for Albert Beech, and he was arrested by Chief Inspector Duncan (but never charged) back when Duncan was a detective sergeant. He dresses the way he does for very good reasons: he buys his clothes in Manchester’s charity shops, he likes bright colours, and he stopped looking at himself years ago.

This morning, as always, Granny Porter’s in a hurry. Maybe he hunches his shoulders and clutches at his boater because of the wind across the walkway, but he hurries because that’s what he does. He always hurries. He thinks it shows willing and he thinks that to show willing is the best way of making his luck last.

Before the governor gave him this portering job instead of flinging him out at the end of his sentence, he’d known this and other, lesser prisons on and off for fifty of his seventy-odd years, from the other side of the bars. He’d got his name Granny for tidy housekeeping on cell blocks the length and breadth of the land. Giving him this job was the best thing Mr Ransome ever did. Since he was hired Granny Porter hasn’t nicked so much as a mop-head. He’s no need to. He’s where he wants to be. He’d kill anyone who tried to shift him.

He’s on his way back to the House now after returning the last empty stretcher trolley to Inductions. Some men are still able to walk after their hot beverage, but mostly they need the trolley. Escorting inductee trolleys is one of Granny’s better duties. He can lean on the trolley handles without people noticing.

As he bangs in through the foyer doors Missy Landon’s coming downstairs from her office, the red inductees folder on its clipboard in one hand. She’s a friendly soul but he touches his boater and slopes on by, making for his buckets and brooms. He’s showing willing.

Peggy looks up from the folder. She notices the musak that will play all day in the foyer. Granny Porter turns it on first thing, when he gets in at six, and she wishes he wouldn’t but she’s never asked him not to. This morning his coat is spotted with rain and he brings with him the smell of wind off the moors, and she forgives him his musak. She calls after him, ‘Morning, Granny Porter.’

‘Morning, Missy Landon.’

It sounds, with the whistle, more like Mishy.

‘And how are you today?’

‘Fine, ta, Missy.’ Disappearing through the door to thresholding and the washroom. ‘Lovely BM this morning, Missy. Lovely BM.’

‘Good, Granny. Very good.’

Very good … She grimaces. Christ, the social round. But she checks herself – no, that’s just the dark day getting at her. These things matter to Granny Porter; his bowel movements make the difference between happiness and misery. She’s bloody sure she’ll never linger on so long, but that’s another question.

Tapping the inductees folder, she descends the last few steps and looks in at the dispensary. It has a half-door, the bottom half incorporating a small counter-top, and it opens directly out of the foyer, to the right of the main entrance. In a few hours the vantage point it offers is going to be significant.

Jake is in the dispensary, sniggering at Granny Porter’s BM. That’s Jake de Carteret, lovey – it’s a Channel Islands name. Peggy doesn’t usually like Jake’s sort of gay but she’s used to him now and he keeps it away from the bedside. He’s a good nurse. She’s lucky to have him and Carole – both members of the afternoon shift are Hospital Wing rejects.

Jake catches her eye, stifles the snigger. He’s preparing the treatments wagon. He doesn’t usually like Peggy’s sort of straight but he’s used to her now and she doesn’t push it. They’ve worked together for a couple of years, she knows her job, and she’s never sloppy. It gets up his nose the way most people piss around.

Like Peggy and Granny Porter, Jake is important in this story. He’s twenty-seven, pony-tailed, quick, small, sharp-featured, and he arrived at the House via a young designer friend who died of AIDS. That got him out of the design scene and, wanting to help, into hospital nursing. Four years of not being able to, of deaths and more deaths, got him out of hospital nursing and into the prison service. He couldn’t bear to see another Kaposi sarcoma, and someone had told him that prison inmates were shipped out before they reached that stage. And once he was in the prison service – because he’s smart and bright – it was only a short step to Justice City, and once he was in Justice City – because he’s happy with the work the House does – it was only a short step here.

There are two ways of getting on to the staff of the House. Either you’re drafted here because the Hospital Wing wants to get shot of you, or you apply because you’re happy with the House’s work. Jake applied. He’s done his punishments stint downstairs and now he’s thresholding. He’s happy with the House’s work; he sees its point. He doesn’t enjoy the reality of it, to be blunt, the pain, but he sees its point. This might be thought a narrow distinction, but both for him and for the House’s director (who screens out the enjoyers) it’s sufficient. The way the system works there’s precious little sadists could go for, but no one wants to take the risk.

As far as Jake is concerned it had been a brilliant idea, officially separating off two of the traditional prison functions, retribution and incarceration (the two Ps, Punishment and Protection), from the rest. The other four functions, denunciation, deterrence, reparation and rehabilitation – especially rehabilitation, which had long been discredited – simply confused the issue. It was obvious, really. People wanted to be protected, and they wanted villains to be punished – the rest was elitist egg-head shit. Even so, it had needed the government to be in serious trouble, its electorate genuinely pissed off at the apparent av. . .