The King of Diamonds (7 page)

‘Why do you want a gun?’ asked Eddie as they completed another circuit of the exercise yard. Several hours had gone by since they had reached their agreement to escape, but they were both still in a state of unnatural excitement.

‘Because that bastard Claes had one,’ said David. ‘On the night I didn’t kill Ethan Mendel. You remember.’

‘So you’re going back there?’

‘Yeah, but not for long. You don’t have to take me if you don’t want to.’

‘No, I’ll take you. It’s on the way out of Oxford. But what you do in there’s your business.’

‘Fine.’

Here, in the exercise yard, they were in the very centre of the prison and the high walls of the wing buildings surrounding them formed a barrier against the wind that was blowing hard across the city outside, but they still wore the collars of their jackets turned up high against the unseasonable cold, leaning their heads close together when they spoke to hear what the other was saying. Halfway round each circuit, David glanced up at the top of the rec room block on the other side of the yard. It seemed impossibly high to come down from, but at least the roof was reasonably flat so there was less risk of slipping down the tiles on the other side and breaking one’s neck on the ground below.

And Eddie had been right about the scaffolding. A gang of workmen had just been finishing carrying the poles in through the door to the gymnasium on the ground floor when they’d come out for afternoon exercise, and now David could see their heads moving across the barred rec room windows up at the top of the building as they assembled the scaffold.

‘How are we going to get in there? The rec room’s going to be out of bounds while they’re painting it,’ he asked, leaning toward Eddie again and pointing across the yard.

‘Yeah, but not the gym,’ said Eddie. ‘They’re painting the rec room first and then the gym. That’s what I heard and it makes sense if you think about it. One’s on top of the other, and they don’t want both out of use at the same time; otherwise, what are they going to do with us? So all we’ve got to do is slip up the stairs from the gym during evening association and then wait until everyone’s back in their cells.’

‘Except us! How the hell are we going to get past the head count?’ asked David, suddenly raising his voice so that several prisoners nearby turned and looked over at them with curiosity. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of this before. The screws went round the cells, landing by landing, every evening before lights-out counting the prisoners, making sure they were all there. Except that he and Eddie wouldn’t be; they’d be hiding under a dust sheet over in the rec room, waiting to be caught. Like sitting ducks.

‘Keep your fucking voice down, can’t you?’ said Eddie angrily, pulling David over toward a set of steps leading up to B Wing, where they sat down. ‘People have ears, you know. Of course I’ve thought about the count. Do you think I’m an idiot? We’ll make dummies and put them in our beds, and then we’ll go at the weekend when they’re understaffed. Association’s later on Fridays and Saturdays and they do a lot less checking.’

‘Yeah, but what happens if they talk to us, ask us something?’ asked David, refusing to be reassured.

‘Well, we’ll be asleep with the lights out and we’ll just have to hope they don’t. Like I told you before, you need some luck to succeed with something like this.’

David sighed, thinking about the succession of events that had brought him to where he was now. If there was one thing he wasn’t, it was lucky.

Uncharacteristically, Eddie went to sleep early that night, but David tossed and turned in his bunk, thinking of Katya. Now that he had allowed himself to start thinking of escaping his prison walls, David’s obsession with the girl who had betrayed him had returned in full force. Once again the vision of her locked in naked embrace with that Belgian bastard returned to haunt him. The thin, hawkeyed prosecutor at his trial hadn’t known that he’d looked in at them through the grimy boathouse window; he’d only guessed. But it had been a bull’s-eye guess. David had lied at his trial – said he’d never seen them together. How could he have done otherwise? But he couldn’t hide behind the lie now. The memory of that spring afternoon returned in Technicolor to haunt him, and he saw them again, coupling like a pair of beasts on the ground. Two or three seconds he’d looked. No more than that, but it was enough for the memory to last a lifetime.

David remembered how he’d fallen back from the windowsill and run blindly down to the lakeside, fallen on his knees, and vomited his lunch down into the grey water. There they were behind him in the boathouse intertwined, interlocked. In the same place where Katya had met with him the year before. But they hadn’t writhed on the floor like animals. Kissing, holding hands, but nothing like that. It wasn’t an act of love; it was an act of hate. That’s what it was. A way of saying he didn’t exist. And it was the same hate she’d shown him in the courtroom when she’d read out his letters with such contempt, when she smiled at him after he got his sentence and was led off to the cells like a dog. He hated her himself now; with every fibre of his being he hated her, just as much as he’d loved her before. She’d trampled on him, robbed him of everything he had, and now she was going to have to look him in the face and tell him why. Suddenly still, David closed his eyes tight shut, clenching his body in anticipation of that moment.

Two nights later, working by torchlight in the darkness, they started work on the dummy heads. Eddie had been busy in the interim purloining what he needed, and, not for the first time, David was impressed by his cellmate’s resourcefulness. He had got carrots and flour from the kitchens and a spare prison-issue blue-and-white shirt from the laundry, which he had torn into small pieces.

‘That’s for the inside of the heads when I’ve got the outsides ready,’ said Eddie, who was standing over the sink in the corner mixing his ingredients. Page by page, he was tearing up O’Brien’s
Jesus for Prisoners
and adding it with practised hands to the flour and water mush to make papier-mâché.

‘What are the carrots for then?’ asked David curiously.

‘To give the heads some flesh colour.’

‘What about hair?’

‘Paintbrushes! I got two out of the rec room last night. The workmen leave them behind when they go home,’ said Eddie, looking even more pleased with himself than usual as he pulled back his mattress to reveal his ill-gotten gains. ‘You can start pulling the bristles out while I’m doing this.’

‘How was it over there?’ David asked. They’d been working steadily for a little while and David had now finished with the first paintbrush and started work on the second.

‘Great,’ said Eddie, breaking off from humming a discordant version of Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ as he looked up from the sink. ‘They’ve got all the dust sheets we need in there, which helps because we can’t use the sheets in here – we’ll need them for covering the dummies. The scaffolding’s up near the ceiling, just where we want it, and there’s an old half-broken tubular chair in a corner that’ll work perfectly for a grapple. You know, to get over that first wall. It’s looking good, Davy, really good.’

An hour later Eddie was ready with the first head. He’d sculpted out a crude nose and ears and now he used a tube of glue that he’d stolen from God knows where to add bristles from David’s pile to make hair and eyebrows.

‘It’ll do,’ he said, turning the head from side to side. ‘We can use a pen to touch them up at the end after they’ve dried.’

‘How long’ll that take?’

‘Twenty-four, thirty-six hours maybe. Don’t worry. We’ve got time. It’s the screws finding them that bothers me. We’ll have to keep them under the bunks and hope there isn’t a cell search. That’s all.’

‘Hope we’re lucky, you mean?’

‘Yeah, and stop sounding like a doubting Thomas all the time, okay? It’s getting on my nerves.’

It was unlike Eddie to sound so irritated for no reason. The tension must be getting to him too, David realized.

They went as planned on the Saturday night. When the cell doors were opened for evening association, Eddie had the dummies ready in the bunks. They’d broken up their two wooden chairs and covered them with their jackets and bunched up bedclothes to simulate their bodies, and then they’d laid the papier-mâché heads in profile on the pillows. The effect was better than David had anticipated, but Eddie, eyeing his handiwork with a professional detachment, was less confident.

‘They’ll work okay if the screws are just doing a quick check through the Judas hole, but if they come in here, we’ve had it,’ he said, giving the dummies a final dissatisfied look before they left the cell for what they hoped would be the last time. David’s heart was beating so fast he felt it would burst.

Eddie had been right: There were less screws on duty than usual – just one out in the yard and another at a desk in the corner reading a newspaper, nowhere near the doorway at the other end of the gym that opened onto the darkened stairs leading up to the rec room above. And there’d been no head count going in, which made it a lot less likely there’d be one going out. But these positive developments didn’t help David calm down, and he soon began to find the waiting almost unbearable. Eddie had been adamant that they should stay downstairs until almost the last minute since there would be far less chance of their being missed that way, and he seemed to have no problem passing the time chatting to the other prisoners and joining in a game of basketball down the other end of the gym, but David couldn’t take his eyes off the clock on the wall. Time seemed to have stopped; the minute hand didn’t move at all, and he kept looking toward the stairs and then over at Eddie, waiting for him to give the signal for them to go.

At quarter past seven, fifteen minutes before the end of association, Eddie came over. He looked furious.

‘What the hell are you doing, Davy?’ he asked in an angry whisper. ‘Hopping from one leg to the other gazing up at the bloody clock – you might as well go and tell that screw over there exactly what we’re planning. Do something for Christ’s sake. Anything. Just stop looking shifty.’

Eddie moved away before David could answer, and for the next ten minutes David walked the perimeter of the gym, keeping his head down, only glancing up occasionally at Eddie, never at the stairs. Until, at twenty-five past seven, he felt a tap on his shoulder and, seconds later, saw Eddie slip through the doorway and up the stairs. No one seemed to have noticed, and a minute or two later, he followed.

Eddie was at the top of the stairs holding a small half-sized gym mat folded up in his hand.

‘What do you want that for?’ David asked.

‘You’ll see.’

The door to the rec room was locked, but Eddie seemed to have expected that. He took a thin piece of wire from out of his pocket, fiddled inside the keyhole for a moment, and then opened the door with a gentle push.

‘Piece of cake,’ he whispered before beckoning David to follow him inside. The rec room looked very different from when David had last seen it. Dust sheets covered the furniture, the pool and the ping-pong tables, and a scaffold on wheels stood in the corner, leaning up against the far wall. There were no ladders. The workmen must have taken them with them when they left for the day. Outside the windows the sun had almost set over the exercise yard, leaving the big room in an eerie twilight.

Through the open door they heard the guard’s whistle down below, signalling the end of association, and then came the sound of the prisoners spilling out into the exercise yard and crossing over to A Wing, until finally the door of the gym shut with a bang, a guard’s voice shouted ‘goodnight’, and they were left alone in sudden silence.

‘All right. Let’s get to work,’ said Eddie, crossing over to the scaffold with a determined look on his face. ‘Come on; give us a hand, Davy. We need to move this. We don’t want to be visible through the windows, do we?’

Gently, they trundled the scaffold over to the centre of the wall and then, once Eddie was satisfied with its position, he started clambering up its side toward the top. Halfway up he stopped, bent down, picked something up from one of the planks, and then let out a suppressed whoop of delight. He had something metal in his hand, but in the half-light David couldn’t make out what it was.

‘We’re in luck,’ said Eddie, waving the thing in the air like it was some kind of trophy, his face creased with a wide smile.

‘What is it?’ asked David from below, irritated by his own incomprehension.

‘A scaffolding clip, you idiot. They must have had one over that they didn’t use.’

‘How does it help us?’

‘For making a hole so we can get up through there,’ said Eddie, pointing at the ceiling. ‘It’s going to have a bit more weight behind it than our paint brush handles, isn’t it?’

David nodded. He resented being spoken to like he was some bottom-of-the-class schoolboy, but he could see the point. The clip would help; it was a good omen.

Once he was up on the top of the scaffold, Eddie beckoned down to David to follow. It was a high room and the ceiling suddenly seemed impossibly far away, and David cursed the workmen under his breath for taking away their ladders. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was a far less skilful climber than his cellmate. He lacked the strength in his upper arms to haul himself up between the bars and he found it hard to balance on the narrow footholds. Two-thirds of the way up, he got stranded, unable to go up or down, and Eddie had to come down and help him the rest of the way.