In England, murder normally draws a life sentence, which works out at about twenty years. Even so, twenty years is a long time in a maximum-security prison and it proved to be as hard for me as it would for any other first time offender. The strict routine, cramped cells, noise and above all else, the brutality of both guards and other inmates, were all designed to make life as hard as possible. I’d suffered and I’d learnt and finally, I’d come out of it alive. Now all I had to do was learn to live on the outside again.

        When I’d started my sentence, I’d been a relatively wealthy man with a good job, a large house and a wife. That was all gone now. My wife had divorced me and sold the house, then she’d taken every penny I had and married my best friend.

        He’d come to see me, about five years after I’d been sent down. He’d said that he wanted to apologise for what had happened and, I think, he wanted some sympathy, as she’d cleaned him out and then run off to the States with some oil magnate. That man obviously had more money than sense but even my ever loving ex wife hadn’t managed to spend his money as fast as he could make it and as far as I knew, they were still married.

        Life in prison had taught me quite a lot, but one of the most important things I’d learned was that I hadn’t committed the crime I’d been sent down for. That had come as a complete surprise as at my trial, I’d pleaded guilty, firmly believing that I had indeed been guilty.

        For some few months before my problems started, I’d been having a very passionate affair with a young and extremely sexy brunette. She was my boss’s secretary and we’d started the affair almost as soon as we’d met. It was definitely a case of lust at first sight.

        Unfortunately, she had the sort of wandering mind that took her body with it and our affair had soon grown stale for her. I wasn’t enough for her and she was servicing someone else as well, maybe more than one for all I know. I’d found that out when I popped round to her flat one evening after a long and enjoyable session in my favourite bar, with a couple of colleagues. 

        I’d opened the door to the flat and found her writhing around naked on the floor with my boss. The fight that had followed had been short and vicious.

        When the police had arrived, my boss and his secretary were both dead and I was just picking myself up off the floor. All three of us had been covered in blood, most of which seemed to come from the half a dozen holes that the pair of them were sharing.

        The carving knife that matched the holes was lying on the floor under my hand and needless to say, apart from being rather bloody, it carried a perfect set of my fingerprints. The bruise on my head had been put down to the heroic defence put up by the now dead lovers and was ignored at the trial.

        I’d happily pleaded guilty; knowing that they’d well deserved to die and being given a life sentence seemed only fair in the circumstances. 

        I’d believed that for the first nineteen years of the twenty I served. Then out of the blue, it all changed.

        I was out walking round the exercise yard one morning when a screw stopped me and told me to report to the governor’s office.

        I’d gone up there, trying to work out what I’d done to be hauled up in front of the old bastard and got a bit of a surprise.

        He told me that one on the other prisoners was dying of cancer and had asked to see me before he died. I was to be escorted to the local hospice where I would be allowed half an hour with him.

        I didn’t know the man, although like every other inmate, I’d heard a lot about him. He’d graduated through approved schools and borstals to soft prisons and finally on to a maximum-security wing on the Isle of White.  It was said that he’d take on any job, no matter how nasty, as long as the money was right and he had served time for just about every crime from petty theft to GBH, from bank robbery to drug smuggling.

        The drive by shooting of a minor African diplomat had finally seen him put away for life when his getaway driver had misjudged a bed and rolled the car as they escaped. He’d been a big, powerful man but when I saw him in that hospital bed, he was no more than a skeleton. The cancer had wasted him away almost to nothing and it was obvious that he wasn’t long for this earth.

        He’d beckoned me nearer with a tiny motion of his fingers and I’d had to lean across the bed to hear what he said.

        “I couldn’t make my peace without getting it off my chest. I had to tell you.”

        There was a few seconds break as he dragged breath into his lungs with a sort of asthmatic rattle; then he went on.

        “You were set up. You’re wife gave me five big one’s to stitch you. I followed you up from the bar and when I heard the shouting, I just walked in and belted you. That silly bitch you were seeing fainted and your boss was so terrified he just stood there quivering. I went into the kitchen, picked up the carving knife and did for both of them. Then I put the knife in your hand and scarpered quick.”

        Again, he had to spend a few seconds replenishing his air supply before telling me the rest of it.

        “I rang you’re missus and told her the job was done and she rang the law. When you went down, she paid me another five thou, sold the house and ran off with yer mate. Now it’s my turn and I wanted to go with as clear a conscience as Him up there’ll let me. Sorry mate.”

        I stood looking down at him, wanting to choke the bastard to death but realising there wasn’t much point in it and a few minutes later, he drifted off to sleep. I wished him an eternity in purgatory and left him to it.

        Now I lay on the bed looking up at a steel ceiling. The bed was surprisingly comfortable and I was able to let my mind wander back over the events that had led me to be here. Big Billy Baldwin had succumbed to the cancer two days after I’d visited him, I’d served the last few months of my sentence and been released.

        Finding my ex wife hadn’t been difficult, although she was living in the States; she kept in contact with a lot of our old friends. The look of surprise on her face, when she’d opened the door to me, had been quite genuine. That look hadn’t lasted long. Both barrels of a shotgun from four feet away removed it from her face. They’d removed her face as well, along with most of her head. I hoped she’d be happy where she was going.

        This time when I’d pleaded guilty in court I hadn’t even bothered to do it through a lawyer; I was guilty and that was that. I’d serve my time and either be released or die of old age, in prison.

        In fact, I’d only made one mistake. I’d forgotten that the State of California in the U.S. of A. handed out the death sentence for first-degree murder. That’s why I was laying on the bed. I was strapped down waiting for the flow of lethal drugs to start that would end my life just as surely as that shotgun had ended hers. My bitch of an ex-wife might just get the last laugh after all.

Contact the Author - Mickanical@btopenworld.com