Pieter Tritton - El Infierno

Gatos head snapped back We could make out the shots of several 9mms, a couple of 38s and one or two 45s. I hurled myself through the doorway and into the room. I didnt look back.

Caught in an Ecuador hotel room with 8kg of cocaine, Pieter Tritton was no mule or dupe. He had planned and organised everything. The consequence: a 12-year sentence inside one of the worlds deadliest prison systems, where gun fights, executions and riots are a part of everyday life. As a Brit banged up abroad, Pieter had to learn how to survive and fast because one wrong move would mean death.

This is the insider account of what its like to live in a place worse than hell and come out a changed man on the other side.

Pieter Tritton walked out of Wandsworth Prison on 26 August 2015, after serving the last two years of his sentence there. He has returned to his home town and with the help of a loving family and friends is building a new life.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother Joan Anderson and to all the friends who didnt make it home.

IM SITTING IN a garden in the blazing heat of a French summer, trying to recall all the events of the last decade or so. Eleven years have passed since I last sat at this table. Im a very different person to the one who left our house in France all those years ago. Im sick, for one thing, and I have a very different perspective on life. This is what happened, a story I could never have invented.

I arrived at the same house in the middle of France sometime in June 2005 after being smuggled out of Britain by the Turkish mafia in the boot of an old Mercedes car. Most of the people smuggling is in the opposite direction these days.

I had had to leave Britain in a hurry, as things were getting too hot for me. A few months earlier there had been a huge bust of an apartment in Edinburgh, in which the police had uncovered a cocaine laboratory. They had arrested two Colombians, and seized cocaine, precursor chemicals, mixing agents, a 15-ton floor-standing press and lots of other equipment, along with pieces of a tent groundsheet. This raid had hit the headlines big time. It was mentioned on all channels of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, and covered by nearly every national newspaper.

Following months and months of heavy surveillance, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA, had received various pieces of intelligence from all the informants in the case. The key informant had tipped them off that something was about to take place in Edinburgh. Two Colombians I knew arrived at a flat in Leith, the docks area of the city, in which I had been staying occasionally. I had left the flat having spotted two plain-clothes police officers in an unmarked car watching the building to the rear. I took a taxi to the Balmoral Hotel on Princes Street, leaving the white Transit van I had on hire parked directly across the road from the flat. I had told the Colombians I would call them in the morning, at 10am. I had a restless night, hardly able to sleep for worrying about what might be happening.

I awoke the following morning, ate breakfast, showered and packed my bag. At this point I called the Colombians to see how the job was progressing, but all their phones were off. My mouth began to dry up, a feeling of intense anxiety spreading through my body. They never turned their phones off. My instincts were screaming at me so loudly I thought the people in the next room might hear them.

The police were working hard to try to implicate me in this whole scenario and it had got to the point where I didnt feel like taking a chance. So I decided to disappear to France to sit it out and see what happened. I had to stop using all my phones, bank cards and any other electronics that could leave a trail.

I arrived in a cold, dank Calais where my Turkish couriers said goodbye and promised to sort me out with a car soon, as one of them owed me money. I decided to hire a French car to get by with until they turned up with a vehicle. After much wrangling, I persuaded the hire company to let me pay cash and leave cash deposits and I was mobile.

I arrived at our house, which my father had bought some 25 years previously, the next day and settled in, relieved to have at least put some distance between me and all the trouble. I called my girlfriend, Nicky, and asked her to collect a car the Turks now had ready for me, and to drive it over to France. I also asked if she could collect my clothes from the flat I had been living in behind my parents house. Once she had the car packed I told her to drive to Dover, bringing her daughter Emily with her, so they could have a holiday for a few days. I arranged to meet her in Paris and return the hire car to an office there at the same time. We would then all drive back south to the French house and have a week or so there, before she and Emily flew back to England from the local airport.

Nicky made it to Paris and checked into a hotel in a suburb in the north, and I arrived the following day. We chatted on the terrace of a cafe while watching Emily exploring a park next to the hotel. It was nice to be in their company once again.

The following day, we drove the Renault the Turks had provided all the way back to the house. Over the next few days I showed them round. Emily was quickly bored by the countryside and yearned to be back in Paris. After a few days she began to demand to go home or back to Paris or else she would run away. We asked her what she wanted to do, but it was always the same reply: Go home or go back to Paris.

Next morning when Nicky and I came down for breakfast there was no sign of Emily. She had done a runner. We started to panic at the thought of this pretty fifteen-year-old trying to hitch-hike her way to Paris, not speaking any French. We jumped in the car and started to search the area, passing through villages and towns asking anyone we saw if they had noticed a young girl of her description. No one had.

After driving around for several hours and calling her phone repeatedly to no avail, we decided to contact the police. Not exactly the people I most wanted to talk to, but we had no choice. We found a very friendly officer at a local police station who spoke reasonable English and made a full report of what had happened. It was getting dark by now and Nicky was distraught. The gendarmes took the situation very seriously and began searching the area. They told us to go home and wait. We made our way back to the house, hoping and praying she would be there. It was a terrible experience.

We pulled up outside the house to find lights on that hadnt been when we had departed. We raced into the house, calling Emilys name, and found her snuggled up in her bed asleep. We woke her up to make sure she was OK and to find out where she had gone. It turned out that she had just gone up to the village a quarter of a mile away and sat on the steps of the church, chatting to a young English boy who was there on holiday. She told us she had seen us driving past several times on our search for her. I was fairly mad with her. I called the police to let them know she was back. What seemed like minutes later a riot van full of gendarmes arrived at the house.

Great, I thought. Just what I bloody need! Im in hiding from the British police and now Ive got a houseful of French ones.