The Greatest Traitor (41 page)

Randle could sense Bourke’s apprehension. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked him.

‘Well, my friend, let me put it this way – I’ve seen better days. But yes, I’m all right, and I’m now on my way.’

‘Good luck,’ Randle said.

‘Thank you,’ replied Bourke. ‘I’ll need it. Goodbye.’

He then walked up Highlever Road, turned left into Barlby Road, down Wood Lane, and then into Du Cane Road for a final reconnaissance of the area around the prison. Fortunately, the sky was overcast and the weather turning to drizzle. Rain would discourage people from loitering in the streets, and it would also reduce visibility within the prison perimeter when Blake made his dash for the wall. As Bourke walked past the prison wall on the opposite pavement, he saw the familiar faces of a couple of warders heading to work, but if they noticed him at all, neither gave him a second glance.

At just after 5 p.m., he walked purposefully back to his car to ready himself for the evening’s exploits. Once there, he had time to buy some more chrysanthemums – this time a pot, as the cut flowers had sold out – at the florists where he had become a well-known face in recent weeks. Perhaps too familiar. He placed the pink flowers beside him on the passenger seat, and turned on the car radio for some light
music to calm his nerves. Then, after just a few minutes, he switched on the ignition and set off towards Artillery Road.

Inside D wing, just before 3.30, prisoner Derek Madren was making his way down from the fourth landing for tea, the last meal of the day: ‘As I got to the last flight of stairs just before I started to come down, another prisoner dashed out of No. 8 cell [Blake’s] rather excitedly, looking flushed. He then dashed up the stairs, nearly knocking the cup out of my hand. He said “Sorry”, and I continued down.’ Madren had unknowingly stumbled upon the Blake ‘team’ at work.

At about 4.30 p.m., after tea had finished, 210 prisoners from D wing were escorted to the recreation hut for the evening’s film. That left only 108 in the hall and in their cells, under the supervision of two officers. It was the quietest time of the week.

One of the few prisoners who knew what was about to take place was Kenneth Hugh De Courcy, otherwise known as ‘The Baron’. At fifty-six, he was one of the oldest men in the Scrubs and, in a jail full of characters, perhaps the most exotic of them all. In the 1930s, he had moved in the shadowy passageways of power, his roles including those of publisher, intelligence officer, secretary of the Imperial Policy Group (bent on the appeasement of the fascists), confidant of several Cabinet ministers and unofficial adviser to the Duke of Windsor. In wartime, Stalin himself took umbrage at some of De Courcy’s virulent anti-Communist tracts and demanded that the British government take action. After the war, De Courcy, rich but eccentric, seemed to slip permanently into fantasy. He bought a flat in the Empire State building and had his Rolls-Royce waterproofed for underwater driving. When a scheme to build a garden city in Rhodesia failed, he was unable to return a million pounds put up by the investors and resorted to forgery, perjury and fraud. In 1963, he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Given his extreme right-wing views, it might have been assumed that De Courcy and Blake would have little time for each other but, in fact, the two got on famously, De Courcy particularly appreciating the
interest Blake took in his tortuous financial affairs. As a result, when, in May 1966, a covert letter from Bourke to Blake accidentally fell into De Courcy’s hands – the Baron was conducting his own secret correspondence via Bourke, and the letters had got mixed up – he became fully aware of the escape plot. He could have given Blake away, and earned rewards for doing so. Instead he told him: ‘I won’t say a word to anyone. I promise you that. Only, in return, keep me informed how things are going.’ De Courcy proved as good as his word. Conspiracies were his lifeblood, and he relished the opportunity to strike a blow at the Establishment that had unjustly – in his eyes – deprived him of his freedom.

At about 5 p.m., he set off for his final meeting with Blake: ‘I went down to his cell and said I must say goodbye. He said, “I’ve now got a bit of an ordeal ahead of me. I’m going downstairs to have a very hot shower.” He said he’d like to give me a keepsake, so he handed me his Koran. We shook hands, he put a towel round his neck and walked out of the door.’

As Blake made his way along the landing, Thomas Culling, one of the ‘Red’ bands, exchanged a few words with him. ‘I asked him about some onions because he was in charge of the canteen, and he laughed and said, “Leave it to me.”’

After his shower, Blake wandered through into D Hall, where a large group of prisoners were shouting and cheering at the wrestling on television. The programme was not due to finish until 6 p.m. and would thus provide a welcome, noisy distraction during the feat to come. Blake chatted briefly to prison officer William Fletcher at just after 5.30, giving him his opinion that wrestling was a farce and that the bouts were all fixed. He then brewed a cup of tea, and was making his way across the hall when he encountered prisoner Eric Tucker, who was making pancakes. ‘That smells good,’ he remarked to Tucker, who offered him some. He then went back to his cell. Everything he did had to appear normal and unremarkable.

He knew he had about twenty minutes before the plan was put
into action. While drinking his tea, he read
The Times,
taking in the appalling events at the Welsh village of Aberfan, where a colliery spoil tip had collapsed onto Pantglas Junior School. After a while, he put the paper down and slipped on a pair of gym shoes, placing his walkie-talkie under his sweater, and headed up to Phil Morris’s cell on the fourth landing. It was now just after 6 p.m.

It was a few, tense minutes before Bourke called up. He apologised because he had been caught in a traffic jam and asked Blake if he was ready to proceed. ‘Yes, I am all ready,’ he replied. ‘Our mutual friend has kindly agreed to attend to the window for me. He is standing here with the jack in his hand. Can I tell him to go ahead? Over.’ Bourke agreed, and Phil Morris strode out of the cell and down to the second-floor landing. He was back in a matter of minutes, the bar on the window having been broken two days earlier and, although temporarily taped up, extremely easy to dislodge this time. Blake immediately reported back to Bourke that both bar and window were now satisfactorily removed. ‘What, already?’ came back the surprised reply. ‘Yes, you can come now, I am ready for you.’

The decisive moment had arrived. Blake shook hands with Morris and said goodbye, tucked the walkie-talkie into his waistband and underneath his sweater, and walked down two sets of stairways to the window on the second-floor landing. As he approached his escape route, the sound of animated conversation came drifting in through the centre hall: the prisoners were returning unexpectedly early from the film show. He needed to get moving.

The two panes of the glass window measured 12 by 18 inches, just large enough for a man of Blake’s build to squeeze through. In fact nothing had been left to chance: Blake had made a wooden frame the same size and practised squirming through it in his cell. He would be starting off 22 feet above the ground, and the weather made matters hazardous: ‘I slid through the opening in the window and felt with my feet for the roof of the passageway. I carefully let myself down the tiles, slippery from the rain which was pouring down. I got hold of the
edge of the gutter, hung on to it, and dropped easily to the ground. I found myself now in a small recess formed by the passageway and the jutting turret at the corner of the hall. Pressed against the wall, it was unlikely that any passing patrol could see me, even if the weather was not driving them to shelter in a porch.’

Blake was now just a 15-yard dash from the prison wall. That night it was being patrolled by two officers but Bourke and Blake had calculated that the patrols passed any given point along the wall roughly every twenty minutes, which allowed plenty of time between one appearance and the next for the escape to be completed. For Blake, everything so far had gone according to plan. But as he waited under cover for the signal to head for the wall, Bourke was having unexpected difficulties on the other side.

He had been about to radio Blake to tell him to run to the wall when a pair of bright headlights turned into Artillery Road, lighting up the whole area. It was a van driven by a patrolman who had come to lock up Wormwood Scrubs Park for the night. All Bourke could do was wait so he radioed Blake to tell him to sit tight and not to worry. Five minutes later, Bourke saw the headlights reappear and watched as the man secured the barrier with padlock and chain. To Bourke’s dismay, the van crawled very slowly past his car and came to a halt. The driver got out, mumbled a few words in the direction of the back of the vehicle, and then stood just a few yards away with a large Alsatian dog on a short chain beside him. Bourke, realising his loitering had attracted attention, had no option but to drive away. ‘As I turned left into Du Cane Road I felt sure the escape had failed – not just for tonight, but for all time,’ he reflected bitterly. ‘But what else was there to do? That patrolman must now surely call the police, or at least lie in wait until I came back.’

But his resolve did not waver. When the lights went green at Wood Lane, instead of turning left towards Highlever Road, Bourke turned right and then quickly drove down Westway. A right into Old Oak Common Road, then another right into Du Cane Road again, and he was back at the prison. It was now 6.35 – time was running out.

As Bourke once more turned into Artillery Road, to his relief he saw no sign of the van, though to his horror, another car was parked in its place. It was occupied by a courting couple, who showed no intention of going anywhere quickly: ‘I
had
to get rid of them. One way or another, I just
had
to get rid of them. I got out of the car, leaned against the door, and just stood there in the rain staring.’ It worked. Perhaps they thought Bourke was a policeman, or a security guard from the hospital. Maybe he was a pervert. In any event, the girl sat up, the man straightened himself out, they exchanged a few words and then the car did a three-point turn before pulling away.

By 6.40, Blake had been standing in the recess of the passageway for twenty minutes, and was feeling desperate: ‘I had called repeatedly but got no reply. Had he got into trouble and made a rapid getaway? Or had he got cold feet at the last moment? There was little time left before they would discover I was missing. I began to get visions of Parkhurst.’

Then Bourke’s voice came through on the radio: ‘Fox Michael calling Baker Charlie. Come in, please. Over.’ Huge relief swept through Blake. He replied: ‘Baker Charlie to Fox Michael. Receiving you loud and clear. I cannot delay here any longer. They’re on their way back from the cinema. I must come out now. No time for explanations. Over.’

Because of the unexpected hitches and delays, it had reached the time of the evening when the final tranche of relatives and friends started to pour in for the last hour’s visiting at the hospital. Two more cars pulled into Artillery Road, parking next to the wall. Bourke waited until the occupants had left the vehicles, but realised the road was now unlikely to be completely clear. At 6.55, he heard Blake’s voice coming through the radio in a state of great panic: ‘Fox Michael! You MUST throw the ladder now, you simply must. There is no more time! Throw it now, Fox Michael! Are you still there? Come in, please.’ Bourke responded: ‘Fox Michael to Baker Charlie. The ladder is coming over now. No matter what the consequences are, the ladder is coming over now. Over.’

Bourke got out of the car, lifted the boot and took out the rope
ladder. He then stepped on to the roof and, gripping the thick rope with his left hand, holding the folded rungs in his right, he prepared to swing. When he made the throw, the ladder successfully flew over the top of the wall, dropping down neatly on the inside with a thud. Bourke leapt down from the car, then jerked the ladder a few yards to the right to ensure that when Blake made his jump, he would not land on the top of the car. Then he waited.

In the sweeping light of the arc lamps, Blake saw the tangle of rope fly over the wall. Stooping low, with his walkie-talkie tucked inside his sweater, he raced over to the wall, grabbed the ladder, and started to climb upwards. The knitting needles had done their job and it was a surprisingly easy ascent: ‘In a moment, unseen by the officers in the observation booths at the end of the wall but watched, I am sure, by several pairs of eyes bursting with excitement from the cell windows, I reached the top of the wall.’

At the top, Blake realised that Bourke had overlooked one thing: he had not attached a metal hook to the ladder so that it could be planted on the wall and used to descend on the other side. Instead, he was going to have to make the drop. As Blake peered down with a quizzical expression on his face, he saw Bourke looking anxiously up at him. ‘Come on, man, come on,’ he shouted. Blake shifted along the wall a few yards to be sure he would not hit the car, and then lowered himself until he was hanging from both hands. He let go.

In the corner of his eye, he saw Bourke make a move underneath as if to try and help break his 20ft fall. Blake, not wanting to injure his rescuer, tried to twist in mid-air to avoid the collision. Bourke stepped aside, but Blake still glanced off him as he dropped, landing badly. His head hit the gravelled road with a thump, and he felt a searing pain in his left arm. Momentarily he was dazed, perhaps even unconscious. Blood poured down his face.

Bourke bent down, grasped Blake under the arms and dragged him along the gravel until he reached the car. As he pushed him onto the
back seat, another car drove past with its headlights on. If the occupants had arrived a few moments earlier, they would have witnessed the leap from the wall.

The rope ladder had to be left dangling.

Bourke got behind the wheel, and drove away. Narrowly avoiding a man, woman and girl who stood in the middle of Artillery Road, he turned right into the main flow of traffic on Du Cane Road.