Killing Time Read Free Page B

only ever read about. Some of the state’s most infamous rapists, murderers and child molesters are in this unit. What have I done to deserve this? I am a middle-aged ex-lawyer who had a raging cocaine habit, no dishonesty or violence. If I am going to get through this I am going to have to play my cards very carefully.
    Not only am I banged up with Andrew Davies; I look straight across from me and there is Leslie Camilleri, the infamous Bega-schoolgirl murderer. Camilleri, while on an amphetamine-fuelled binge that went for some days, abducted, raped and murdered two schoolgirls, Lauren Barry, aged fourteen, and Nicole Collins, sixteen, who were hitchhiking home from school. Camilleri and a co-offender who gave evidence against Camilleri took the girls, held them hostage for days and tortured them. Camilleri and his co-accused Lindsay Beckett ultimately killed them. He was sentenced by His Honour Mr Justice Vincent to life with no minimum – that is, never to be released.
    For some reason, when I first met Camilleri in Sirius East, he immediately took a dislike to me. I did not know the bloke from a bar of soap and had never met him. The very next morning he walked up to me at the nuts and bolts table, chested me and said “You’re a cunt and I’m fucking well going to kill you.” Here we go. Day one and I have already copped a death threat – terrific! Welcome to the nick!
    At first I found this comment somewhat off-putting, but I soon realised just what sort of bloke Camilleri was. He is a big man, but unfortunately for him he has a brain and a heart the size of a split pea. Every night Camilleri thought it was hilarious to fart on muster. Of course, that means everyone has to wait until muster is completed without being interrupted. He is dumb, stupid, and petulant and is prone to throw what you would describe, if he was a child, as a tantrum. The difference is that, with a child, you tell them to get on with it. In jail Camilleri throws a tantrum and everyone runs around trying to calm him down. The whole performance is attention seeking. Personally, if he threatened to neck himself in front of me I would give him the rope. The reason for the panic by the screws is the amount of paperwork they need to complete if there is a death in custody, and work is the natural enemy of screws! They may also have to answer a lot of awkward questions when the coppers investigate these deaths.
    Camilleri was a keen painter and whenever he spat the dummy, the first thing he did, in an act of petulance, was to throw all his paints in the rubbish bin. Given that nobody ever visits this man and he has no money apart from what he earns in jail, to throw away his paints like that was a huge statement but it also indicated that the bloke was an idiot who didn’t think things through. That’s probably what landed him in jail. Why anybody bothered to help to retrieve his paints, I do not know. But I soon saw that for all his bluff and bravado he had no dash at all. It was for that reason, and that reason alone, that he was only capable of torturing and killing defenceless young girls.
    One day I did in fact see Camilleri have a go at a bloke out in the garden with the prison’s pitchfork. He couldn’t even do that properly and the other bloke, who was fairly handy with his fists, turned around and decked him. The screws did nothing about that. Nobody ever asked how this evil bloke got hold of the fork, which was supposed to have been under lock and key at the time.
    After Camilleri threatened to knock me the first day in Sirius East I gave him a wide berth because, while I wasn’t scared of him, he was unpredictable and therefore capable of the odd bit of rash behaviour. The only other time I had a problem with him was towards the end of my time in Sirius East when, just before the final muster for the day, he appeared at my cell door holding a jug of boiling water which, he announced, he was going