They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

52 September 2011 — Roel Albazi

Seventy miles away from the service station that Sandra Jones had just pulled into, Prisoner Number FF276493 was on a call on his contraband phone in his cell in HMP Belmarsh.

The maximum security prison, in south-east London, a ball-and-chain’s lob away from the Thames, had housed in its time some of the UK’s most notorious villains, including Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, child murderer Ian Huntley, Islamic terrorists and an assortment of other charmers. The author Jeffrey Archer had also once enjoyed its hospitality and so had disgraced former MP Jonathan Aitken.

At 5.50 p.m., Prisoner Number FF276493, in his former life always attired in Armani or Versace, now wore a washed-out pea-green T-shirt, baggy grey tracksuit bottoms and plimsolls, and on his wrist in place of the Breitling was a crappy eighteen-quid watch he bought before coming in. Ending the call, he put the phone back under his pillow, then shuffled from his cell to join a queue of fellow prisoners on his floor of B Wing, to collect his evening meal off the steel trolley.

Anger burning inside him was a constant of Roel Albazi’s life now. He peered at the contents of his cardboard tray suspiciously, to make sure it was what he had ordered the previous day and they hadn’t given him a bloody vegan pile of crap again, in error. Satisfied, he carried it back to his cell. Two foil containers sat on it, one marked Shep pie, the other Sponge pud/custard, along with a plastic knife, fork and spoon and a paper cup.

As he had done at this same time for pretty much the last four years, he began the solitary ritual of his evening meal by slouching on the edge of his bunk and placing the tray down on his lap. He peeled the lid off the shepherd’s pie, then dug his plastic fork into the potato crust, releasing a whirl of steam.

Although ravenous after a hard workout in the gym, he hungered for something else more important to him than food. Revenge. The desire for it burned away 24/7 in his heart. He was feeling utterly frustrated, helpless and isolated. And uncharacteristically despondent. Everything was crap, constantly crap, and it just seemed to be getting more crap. One of his key contacts on the outside, an Albanian cousin, had stupidly just been busted for drugs.

Normally his hot meals were tepid by the time the trolley had been wheeled over to his wing from the kitchens on the far side of the prison, so when he took his first mouthful, he was startled by the scalding heat of the meat and potato, his tongue instantly frizzing. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted in anger and hurled the foil container at his cell wall, just a few feet away.

Most of the contents splattered from the container into a mess on the floor, the rest sliding down the sludge-green wall.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ he yelled again, even louder.

‘Fuck you!’ a voice yelled from a few cells along the wing, then another.

The chorus continued to grow to a crescendo, but he ignored it. He was thinking, as he did endlessly when he wasn’t thinking about Sandy Grace, about Song Wu.

Song Wu showed him no leniency. Instead he had messages delivered from her, sometimes by a Chinese fellow-inmate, other times by a prison officer who seemed to revel in it — and was probably in Song Wu’s pay, he reckoned. Messages that taunted him. Messages about his family back in Albania.

Messages about those three ivory photograph frames on Song Wu’s desk, that had all been facing away from him at the start of that fateful meeting with her over four years ago, and then were suddenly turned towards him.

The very old, bearded man with a fishing rod on the side of a river. His grandfather. He’d been found drowned in that river two weeks after Albazi had been arrested.

The second photo, of his mother and father, in their sixties, standing behind a market stall stacked with clothing. Both of them were burned to death in a fire in their tenement block, four weeks after his arrest.

The third photograph was of a dark-haired woman in her late thirties, standing in the city of Tirana hugging a little girl of about three. His sister, Emina, and her daughter — his niece, Aisha — both of whom he adored. Both dead, their little Fiat crushed by a truck. Six weeks after his arrest.

There was a chart on the wall above his pillow that he had made himself. His countdown-to-release calendar. If he kept his nose clean, he would be out of here in six years’ time.

At least he had a very substantial amount of money stashed away in Albania that the British police hadn’t been able to find. They’d seized all his other assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act. But he would be able to live fine after his release and he would still have some good years left. Not that he was concerned about that now.

His focus at the moment was on the prison officers here, and privileges. It wasn’t luxuries he wanted but information, and he knew the game. An army could only march as fast as its slowest soldier. Just as a chain was only as strong as its weakest link. And however secure a prison might be, it was only as secure as its most corrupt officer.

It hadn’t taken Albazi long to find him. Not once his cousin had gone to Albania, on his dollar, returning with cash to flash. Serious cash. Thanks to that, Albazi had his mobile phone and, pretty much whenever he needed it, crucial access to the internet.

Tall Joe Karter, the idiot, would have been out in two years’ time if he hadn’t been so goddamn stupid. Albazi had had the full download: a bully of an officer had been picking on Tall Joe, who was in the Category B prison HMP Gartree. Joe had been training in the gym throughout his time there, and finally lost it with the officer after one taunt too many. One morning, he threw him down an entire flight of stairs, fracturing his skull and breaking his back in two places, confining him to a wheelchair for life. Tall Joe wouldn’t now be released until less than a year before himself.

But the good news was that Tall Joe would be badly in need of money when he did come out. And the even better news was that Skender Sharka, who’d received the most lenient sentence of the three of them, was now out and in contact with Tall Joe’s pilot friend. And tasked with finding Sandy Grace and killing her when he did.

Albazi hated Sandy Grace more than he had ever hated any human. He held her responsible for the deaths of his grandfather, his mother, father, sister and niece. And what he hated most of all, not that he would ever admit it, was that she was a woman and had outsmarted him.

Only when she was dead would he be able to move on. And turn his attention to Song Wu. This bitch might think she was safe, invincible, protected by her triad ring of guards.

One day, he promised himself, she would suffer more than his family had suffered.

But for now his focus was Sandy Grace. He went to sleep on his hard bunk and even harder pillow, every night, thinking of her face.

Every day I wake in my cell and know you are still alive, Sandy, something else inside me dies.

It was exactly the same every morning. All that changed was the depth of Roel Albazi’s anger towards her. It just kept on growing deeper. The fuse burning down. Getting shorter.

He knew, thanks to Sharka’s work, that Sandy Grace had changed her name to Sandra Jones. He also knew her address in Jersey, thanks to the information Sharka fed back to him. He liked knowing that. Liked knowing something that her husband did not, and nor did the press.

He’d followed the press and media stories of the mystery of missing Sandy Grace, in the immediate aftermath of her failing to turn up to meet him that July day back in 2007. Her disappearance had become a major story, even making the national press for a short while.

According to the papers, the detective’s wife had seemingly vanished into thin air. For a long time the speculation had been rife that Detective Inspector Roy Grace had murdered his wife himself. Plenty of people were reported in the media saying if anyone knew how to do it, it would be him.

The fact that there were barely any clues, and possibly a string of red herrings, only served to reinforce the suspicion on Roy Grace.

Sandy had left work early the day she vanished. From analysis of her credit card, she had bought some paracetamol and a tube of toothpaste at a branch of Boots in Hove then filled her VW Golf with petrol. Shortly after — at the time she should have turned up in Shoreham with the £150K she owed him — she had seemingly abandoned her car in the short-term car park at Gatwick South, and apparently vanished off the face of the earth. He knew different.

Albazi might not be able to reach her now, from the confines of his prison cell, but the day would come. The day when he would fly straight over to Jersey and knock on her door. And then rip the smug bitch’s throat out with his bare hands.

That thought was the reason he marked off every single day on his calendar with a large black cross.

It was his reason to live.