Tears began to run down my cheeks and I reached out to pick up the cold body. I held it in my arms and cried out against this inhumanity and unfairness. I cursed the gods for my treasure.”Two and a half years later, waiting to hang in Changi jail in Singapore for the murder of Gerald Lowe, a South African tourist whom he had killed in his air-conditioned hotel room, chopped up and wrapped in plastic bags, and then thrown into Singapore harbour, Scripps again cursed the gods, though not this time for the body wrapped up and discarded God, Scripps said, had betrayed him, the killer He also mused over inhumanity. But he couldn’t unwrap his treasure while he was dirty and sweaty. So he ran a hot bath and ordered up a bottle of chilled white wine Then he opened the parcel. She was a thin woman, and he could see from her face that “she had left something very valuable there”.

He waited for her to go and then frantically dug up the treasure she had buried, tearing his nails and flesh in the process. It was a package, wrapped in newspaper and tied with blue plastic string. As he lifted it up, a police car pulled round the corner, and the man threw himself into the shadows. When the police car had gone, the man started running and didn’t stop until he reached the main road and found a taxi to take him to his hotel Back in his room he laid the package on the bed. He was shocked by the poverty and smell and wanted to be in his air-conditioned hotel room with a glass of chilled white wine.

But then in the shadows he saw someone digging, surreptitiously burying something by a wall, and his mind “began to race with thoughts of treasure” He waited and eventually the digger left. The man narrating the story was walking through the slums on the way back to his hotel. We talked about the direction the story was taking and I encouraged him to complete it. I said if he did I would type it up for him.Over the next couple of weeks he worked on the story. We talked about it and I made a couple of suggestions, he finished it to his and my satisfaction, and then I typed it up It was titled “Buried Treasure”. It was a bit melodramatic, but quite powerful.”My nose and lungs were filled with the aromas of the ghetto: the aromas of coffee bubbling in clay pots and garbage rotting in the open sewers, all mixed up in the humid air to make that everlasting smell that eats into your nostrils like the flies and mosquitoes that were eating into my flesh, quenching their thirst with my blood.”I praised him and reassured him that the spelling didn’t matter, it was the content that counted.

I looked down at it and saw a mess of crossings out and peculiarly spelt words, some inspired, weird phonetic guesses, others simply incomprehensible It was pretty clear he was dyslexic. But reading slowly, with his help translating some of the words, I saw he was writing a story about a man walking through the slums in an unnamed South American city Tidied up, it wasn’t bad. Scripps would never have put them up; he considered himself a strong moralist.I don’t think he kept me at bay because he was hiding anything in there He hadn’t started chopping people up then But that cell was all he had that was his. In prison the enforced company of strangers can be as much a punishment as the separation from family and friends. Scripps had been inside for almost all the previous 10 years, serving two long sentences for drug trafficking, and this was the one place where he could shut the door and escape into his own privacy.In the chapel he handed me a scrappy piece of paper half-covered with writing.