The King of Diamonds (8 page)

‘Now maybe you can see the point of why I work out in the gym every day,’ said Eddie with a self-satisfied smile as he pulled and lifted David up onto the top level. He seemed to have forgotten his earlier ill humour now that he’d found the clip and they were under way with the escape.

‘What about keeping a lookout?’ asked David.

‘No point. If anyone comes up here, we’ve had it anyway. Unless you can think of an explanation of why we’re making a bloody great hole in the rec room ceiling after lights-out, of course,’ Eddie added with a grin.

Now, lifting the clip above his head, Eddie punched it up into the ceiling, and David joined in beside him using the wooden paint brush handle that he’d brought from the cell. Almost immediately a great cloud of white plaster mixed up with horsehair fell on their heads, half-blinding them. Wiping the dust from their eyes, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

A pair of snowmen up to no good, that’s what we are
, thought David. The adrenaline coursed through his veins and he suddenly felt absurdly happy.

Bit by bit the plaster came away, and soon the hole above their heads was large enough for them to see through to the roof space above.

‘I’m going up to take a look,’ said Eddie. ‘I won’t be long.’

Standing on David’s hands, he hauled himself up through the opening onto the rafters above, and for a moment all David could see from below was the beam of Eddie’s pocket torch travelling across the timber underside of the roof. It seemed a long way away.

But Eddie had lost none of his confidence when he came back down.

‘It’ll work,’ he said. ‘There are a couple of planks across the beams where we can stand. We’re lucky it’s a flat roof. It’s going to make it a lot easier. You finish off the hole. I’m going down to get the dust sheets and the chair.’

‘What chair?’

‘The one over there in the corner. The one for the grapple, remember?’ said Eddie, pointing down to a cheap swivel chair behind the door. It was missing one of its wheels, and David was surprised it hadn’t been thrown away.

Clambering up and down the scaffold like a human monkey, Eddie brought the gym mat and four of the dust sheets up from below, and then tied a last one around the base of the chair and pulled it up to the top, where he positioned it under the hole in the ceiling that David had just finished widening.

‘Right, you first. I’ll hand you the stuff once you’re up there,’ said Eddie, holding the chair steady as David got on it and put his head up into the dark roof space above, feeling with his hands for the rafters on either side so he could lever himself up. But then he froze. Down below, someone, it had to be a screw, was rattling the handle of the gymnasium door.

For what seemed an eternity but was in fact less than a minute, David stood motionless on the swivel chair, his feet and legs in the rec room, his head and upper body in the roof space above.

What an idiot
, he thought to himself.
What an idiot I was to think we could get away with something as harebrained as this
. He’d not yet done any time in the punishment block, but he’d heard enough about it to feel sick to his stomach at the prospect.

But then Eddie’s voice came from below his feet.

‘It’s all right, he’s gone. Just some screw doing his rounds, checking the doors are locked. That’s all.’

Relief flooded through David, leaving him weak at the knees, and he had to use all his strength to haul himself up through the hole. But there was no time to relax as Eddie started handing him up the mat and the dust sheets straightaway before following himself, pulling the swivel chair up after him by the dust-sheet rope to which it remained attached.

‘I thought we’d had it,’ said David, wiping the sweat from his brow. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.

‘Yeah, well, you were wrong. You need to calm down, keep your nerve. That’s what you need to do. Because up there we’re going to have to be even more careful,’ said Eddie, shining his torch over the underside of the roof above their heads. ‘We can’t risk even one of those slates falling off. You hear me?’

‘Yeah, I hear you,’ said David, breathing deeply in a vain attempt to slow his racing heartbeat.

What helped was work, and soon they set to again, punching up through the timber frame of the roof and prising away the tiles one by one. It was harder work than it had been with the ceiling down below, and David felt mentally and physically exhausted when they finally got up onto the roof an hour later. But the evening air revived him. He inhaled it deep into his lungs and felt the excitement rekindling in his chest as he looked out over the lights of the city. Nearby, the thick stone walls of St George’s Tower, the ancient keep of Oxford Castle, loomed out of the shadows, and above them the moon hung high in the eastern sky, shedding a pale light on the prison buildings down below. On one side was the exercise yard from which they’d come, on the other an open courtyard with buildings on three sides, and beyond that the two high walls that stood between them and freedom.

‘Okay, we need to get back down out of sight,’ said Eddie after a moment, looking at his watch. ‘We’ve got two hours to wait before they’re here. And I hope to God there’s some cloud cover when we go. We’ll be sitting ducks if we have to cross that yard in this light,’ he added with an angry backward glance at the moon.

The waiting was awful, worse than anything that had gone before. Sitting, perched precariously on a crossbeam in the semi-darkness, David watched as Eddie worked and reworked the knots in the two dust-sheet ropes.

‘There must be easier ways of doing this,’ he said, adjusting his position for the hundredth time. He’d never felt more uncomfortable.

‘There are,’ said Eddie, nodding. ‘Impersonation’s the best if you can get away with it, but you need a lot of luck. Johnny Allen, the mad parson, was the best. You must’ve heard of him. He was in all the papers a few years back.’

David shook his head.

‘It was brilliant. He was a strangler, one of those ones that can’t help themselves, and so they put him in Broadmoor, you know the loony bin for the criminally insane. High security though – guards round the clock and all that. Well, he was a bit of a song-and-dance man Johnny was, and he used to entertain the crazies on Saturday evenings with a vicar routine, dressed up in an old black suit and a stock and dog collar. And this went on for nine or ten years until one Sunday morning he got out of bed, got into his outfit, and just walked out. Simple as that. Screws didn’t recognize him and thought he’d been holding a service or something. Bye-bye maximum security, hello London,’ Eddie added with a grin.

Above their heads the church bells out in the city tolled three times, and Eddie glanced at his watch, looking suddenly serious.

‘Quarter to twelve,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Time to go.’

Moving carefully, they climbed back up onto the roof, hauling their equipment after them. The moon was just as bright as before and Eddie shook his fist at it half-heartedly.

‘Well, I suppose at least we’ll be able to see what we’re doing. Even if half the prison can too,’ he said, sounding resigned.

Slowly, laboriously, Eddie paid out the first of his dust-sheet ropes until the bottom hung three or four feet above the ground.

‘Are you sure it’ll hold?’ asked David, looking over doubtfully at the nearby drainpipe to which Eddie had tied the top end.

‘Yeah, and I’ll be holding on to it too. I’m the one who should be worried. It’ll just be me and that drainpipe when I go down. Now get on with it. We haven’t got all day.’

Halfway down the wall, David stopped, hanging on to the rope for dear life. He remembered his first swimming lesson and his father telling him how nothing was as bad as it looked. Well, he was wrong, he thought. Halfway down the rope it looked a lot worse than it had done from on top. He had too much imagination. That was the problem. He could feel his bones shatter on the concrete down below even while he was still hanging here in mid-air. Eddie’s voice, hissing down at him from above, broke through his panic.

‘Listen, Davy, keep going or I’m letting go. You hear me, you fucking idiot?’

David heard. Half-grabbing, half-falling down the dust sheet, he hit the ground a second later, shaken, bruised, but with nothing broken as far as he could tell.

There was no time to recover. Eddie was already lowering the swivel chair on the end of the second dust sheet. It turned quicker and quicker as it made its descent, knocking several times against the windowless wall of the gymnasium, but eventually David had it in his hands, and Eddie let go of the rope, letting it fall to the ground. Quickly he followed, coming hand over hand down the dust sheet on which David had hung suspended a minute earlier, waiting to die. He had the small gym mat folded up inside his shirt.

‘What the fuck happened back there?’ he asked in an angry whisper as soon as he reached the ground. ‘Are you trying to get us caught?’

‘No, of course not. I panicked. That’s all. I’m not a climber like you.’ David sounded as if he was about to cry.

‘All right, all right. I’m sorry,’ said Eddie, swallowing his annoyance as he realized that it wasn’t helping anyone. ‘Look, the wall over there’s a lot lower than this one. It’s only the wire we’ve got to worry about and that just hurts, it’s not scary.’

‘And then?’ asked David, looking over at the wall beyond, the perimeter wall of the prison. It was way higher than the first; higher than the wall he’d just come down.

‘There’ll be ladders. I already told you that. But we’ve got to get there at twelve,’ said Eddie, glancing anxiously at his watch. ‘That’s the time they said they’d put them over, and they can’t leave them hanging there for long or someone’ll see them. So come on, let’s go. Follow me and keep your head down, for Christ’s sake.’

‘What about this?’ asked David, tapping the end of the rope they’d just come down.

‘It’ll just have to stay there. I know. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we’ve got no choice. With any luck, we’ll be out of here before anyone sees it.’

And so, leaving the dust-sheet rope hanging down from the roof behind them, a hostage to fortune, they took off round the edges of the courtyard, staying in the shadow of the buildings and doubling down almost to their hands and knees as they passed underneath lighted windows. One was open and they could hear voices inside laughing, but somehow they got past it without incident until finally they crossed open ground to the wall they had to climb. Eddie ran along the side of it a little way, looking for the place they’d be least exposed. Then, once he’d made his decision, he got up on David’s shoulders, raised the swivel chair above his head while David held the dust-sheet rope to which it was attached, took several practice swings, and then threw the chair up and over the wire on the top of the wall. The noise of its impact on the other side was louder than they’d expected and they froze for a moment in a strange eight-foot tableau of man on man, but nothing happened, and Eddie dropped back down to the ground.

‘Okay, start praying,’ said Eddie in a whisper as he took the rope from David and started gently pulling the invisible chair back toward him. At the top of the wall it wobbled and then caught in the wire. Eddie pulled it harder but it didn’t move; it was secure. Silently he pumped his fist, and drew a deep sigh of relief. Still no one seemed to have heard them.

‘All right, I’m going up first, and I’m going to put this down on the wire. It’ll make it easier to get over,’ he whispered, pointing to the folded-up gym mat inside his shirt. ‘Don’t worry, okay. Just do what I say, and you’ll be fine.’

Whatever the reason, whether it was Eddie’s words of encouragement for which he felt absurdly grateful, or whether it was that he found going up easier than going down, David got up to the top of the wall without a problem. And then the moonlight helped with finding a place to stand on the mat while Eddie switched the dust-sheet rope to the other side of the wall. The barbs tore into David’s shirt and trousers, digging into his skin as he began his descent, but he hardly noticed the pain as he concentrated on lowering himself down to the ground.

And then, standing under the wall at the bottom, he suddenly felt hope surge again inside his chest. The prison was out of sight behind his back and they were so close to freedom now that he felt he could almost touch it with his hand. Never in all his life had David been through so many mood swings in such a short space of time.

But Eddie seemed more worried, not less. He kept walking up and down, looking up at the wall above them and then glancing at his watch.

‘Five past bloody midnight,’ he burst out. ‘Where the hell is he? That’s why we waited, so as not to have to sit here in the fucking sterile area waiting to be caught.’

‘Sterile area?’

‘Yeah, sterile. No prisoners allowed. Just screws, walking up and down with fucking guard dogs. God, I hate dogs. Come on, come on,’ he said, hopping from one leg to the other, gazing up at the wall.

And suddenly, as if in direct answer to Eddie’s call, a man appeared in the moonlight above them and threw down two rope ladders toward them.

‘Okay, go, go!’ shouted Eddie.

David didn’t know why he suddenly shouted when he’d been always whispering up to now. Perhaps he’d already seen the guard and the dog coming round the corner, but David was only a little way up when he heard the mad barking just beneath his feet. There was the sound of a whistle and people were calling, screaming, crying out, but he couldn’t make out the words. All he knew was that he had to climb. Near the top he felt someone, it had to be the screw, pulling at the rope from down below and he was half-blinded as a searchlight beam swung round and picked him out. He looked up and there was Eddie taking aim with his pocket torch in his hand. It came down past his head and it must have hit its mark because David heard a cry and suddenly felt the tugging stop. He climbed two rungs, three rungs, forcing his feet forward up the ladder and then suddenly Eddie’s hands were around his wrists pulling him up on to the top of the wall where the man had put down a piece of old carpet to cover the wire.