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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.
‘Stop! Come back now!’ someone was shouting at them from down below, but his voice was drowned out by the noise of dogs barking and running feet. David didn’t wait. He was already halfway down the ladder on the other side when the prison alarm bells started to go off. He’d never heard anything like it. It was a noise like the end of the world, and the bells were still ringing in his ears when he got to the ground and jumped in through the open back door of the waiting car.
CHAPTER 6
Immediately the car screamed into motion, throwing David back in his seat as it hurtled down the street and around the corner.
‘We did it; we did it!’ shouted Eddie, punching his hand up into the roof of the car in celebration. It must have hurt but Eddie didn’t seem to notice. He was wild with delight. But the driver, the man who’d saved them, showed no emotion. He sat hunched over the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.
David felt numb, but looking down, he saw that his hands were trembling uncontrollably. He couldn’t believe they’d actually escaped – it had been such a close-run thing. He could still hear the shouting and the barking and the alarm bells reverberating in his ears, and he kept looking back over his shoulder expecting to see police cars in pursuit.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Eddie, catching his eye. ‘They won’t have seen our number plates. The wall was in the way. And thank God for my torch, eh? I thought you’d had it there for a moment when that screw was pulling on the end of your ladder. But then Corporal Crackshot here takes aim and hits the bastard right on the nose.’
David smiled weakly. As always, Eddie was at his happiest when he was singing his own praises, but David didn’t begrudge his friend his moment of triumph. He knew that without Eddie he’d be rotting back in gaol, one more day into his life sentence, whereas now he was free, free to go where he chose, and he knew where he was going. The outside air rushed against his face through the open window as they sped down New Inn Hall Street, and he clenched his fists, breathing in deeply as he thought of Katya and what lay ahead.
They parked in the station car park. The driver of their car had still said nothing and Eddie had made no effort at introductions. Sitting behind him in the back seat, David had not even seen the man’s face. Now, without turning around, he reached in the pocket of his coat and took out a set of keys, which he handed to Eddie.
‘Which one?’ Eddie asked. It was curious the way Eddie and the driver seemed to have so little to say to each other, thought David.
‘The red Triumph. The one over there,’ said the man, pointing to his right. ‘It’s got a full tank.’
‘Thanks. Come on, Davy,’ said Eddie, opening his door and beckoning David to follow. ‘We need to get a move on.’
Shutting the door, David looked back through the car window, anxious to get at least one look at this stranger who had done so much to help him escape, but it was as if the man had read his mind. In the minute since he’d parked, he’d turned the collar of his coat up around his ears and pulled his hat down over his forehead so that all David got to see was a flash of the man’s black beard before he was gone, driving back down to the road and picking up speed as he went around the corner and disappeared from sight. But the man’s voice stayed in David’s head. It had been high-pitched, effeminate sounding, not at all what he would have expected from one of Eddie’s friends.
‘Who was that?’ asked David, getting into the Triumph beside Eddie, who already had the engine on.
‘You don’t need to know,’ said Eddie in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘Do you still want to go to this Blackwater Hall place?’
‘Yes. That was the deal, remember. You promised me, Eddie,’ said David. There was an edge of panic to his voice, as if he was about to lose his self-control.
‘All right, all right, I remember. There’s no need to get all crazy about it. Just try and relax, okay?’
Eddie drove out of the city over Magdalen Bridge and headed out on the Cowley Road at a precise thirty miles per hour. David still kept looking over his shoulder, scanning the night for police cars.
‘Can’t you go any faster?’ he asked impatiently.
‘And get caught for speeding after all we’ve been through? No way. That’s a sucker’s game.’
David leaned forward, drumming his fingers on the dashboard.
‘Where’s the gun?’ he asked feverishly. ‘You promised me a gun.’
‘In there under your fucking fingers. And can’t you stop doing that? It’s driving me crazy.’
‘Sorry,’ said David, opening the glove compartment and taking out the nickel-plated revolver that was lying inside.
‘Christ, there’s a whole lot of money in here too,’ he said, holding up a see-through bag containing a large bundle of banknotes.
‘What the hell?’ said Eddie, sounding angry suddenly. ‘That’s not supposed to be in there.’
‘Where’s it supposed to be then?’
‘With our clothes in the back, away from the gun,’ said Eddie, keeping his eyes on the road as he jerked his thumb behind his head toward a small suitcase lying on the back seat. ‘The gun’s loaded, so be careful, okay?’
David nodded, barely listening. A strange calm had settled down on him since he’d taken hold of the small snub-nosed revolver that he now held cradled in the palm of his hand. Having it made him feel different inside. It meant the end of being told what to do; he could give the orders now. He thought of Claes’s scarred, waxy face, and his hand clenched involuntarily around the handle of the gun. The polished wood felt smooth and hard. It would be different this time.
They passed the Morris car factory on the left, its blue towers illuminated by the moonlight, and David remembered how the bottom of the Cowley Road used to be full of bicycles at five o’clock as the workers swarmed out of the factory on their way home. Like India, or how he imagined India anyway. But now the road was deserted and they were all alone in the night. Under a bridge and past a few straggling houses and they were out in the open countryside. David felt his heart hammering inside his chest: Katya was out there in the darkness only a mile or two away with no idea of what was coming her way.
‘Left, left,’ he shouted at the last moment as the turn to Blackwater came into view, but Eddie seemed to know already, and soon they were climbing the hill that David remembered so well. Past the church and out of the village until they came to the bend in the road and the fence beside the path that led up to Osman’s boathouse; the last place that he’d been as a free man.
‘All right, turn off here,’ said David. ‘You can park under the trees. If you keep your lights off no one’ll see you from the road.’
‘Unless they’re looking,’ said Eddie. ‘I’m waiting here half an hour, okay, like we agreed. Until five past one. Provided no one comes. If you’re longer than that, it’s your lookout because I’m out of here.’
‘Fair enough,’ said David. ‘But then I’ll need this too.’
Reaching into the glove compartment, he opened the bag with the money and helped himself to a wad of notes. Looking at Eddie defiantly, he stuffed them in his pocket.
‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’
But he never saw Eddie again as a free man.
David was grateful for the moonlight, but still there was little risk of his getting lost. He’d been down the path to the boathouse many times. Always the boathouse, never the house, he reflected bitterly, except on that one occasion when Katya had had the place to herself and even then she was as nervous as a cat. Because her uncle didn’t think he was good enough, didn’t like the fact that he didn’t go to the university and had a common name like Swain. Not like that bastard, Ethan. To the manor born he was, until he got that knife in his back. Just there. Standing outside the boathouse, David looked down to the water’s edge, to where Ethan’s body had lain, and then beyond to where the moon was shining silver ripples down onto the black surface of the lake. Everything was quiet. There was no wind in the trees, just the sound of the dark water gently lapping against the dock. It was an evil place, David thought. Beautiful but evil. Like Katya.
Gripping the gun in his hand, David turned away from the lake, heading into the woods. He picked his way carefully, but it wasn’t long before he came out into the open and paused, looking across the lawn toward the side of the house. There were no lights on in the windows that he could see, and there was no sound either. The mermaid fountain in the front courtyard must have been switched off for the night. This was the best place to cross the lawn, but still David hesitated, hating to risk himself out in the open, imagining unseen eyes watching from the shadows. But he had no choice. He knew that. He’d come too far to stop now. And so, steeling himself, he burst from the trees, running with his head down across the moonlit grass. He made it to the other side, but in his haste he’d forgotten about the rosebushes growing under the windows. They tore into his prison shirt and trousers and he had to bite his lip hard to stop crying out as he disentangled himself from the thorns.
He was outside the window of Osman’s study. He tried opening the sash without success – he could see it was fastened by a catch in the centre. But if he could just reach his hand through the pane above, he could open it. One blow would surely break the glass, and if everyone was asleep upstairs, and the door was shut, then maybe no one would hear. He had to take the chance. The first time he hit the pane with the butt end of the gun it only cracked, but the next time the glass shattered. David stood motionless in the darkness, waiting for lights, waiting for shouts, but nothing happened. Somewhere out in the trees an owl hooted, but otherwise the silence was as complete as before. Nothing stirred. Quickly he knocked the rest of the broken glass out of the pane and then, wrapping his hand in the sleeve of his torn shirt, he reached through the opening and turned the clasp, pulling the bottom half of the window gently up toward him.
Carefully, he climbed inside and then extended his arms in front of him, moving gingerly forward like a blind man. Katya had shown him the room when she gave him a tour of the house on that day when her uncle was away, and he thought he remembered a reading lamp on the corner of the desk. Seconds later he felt its shade and pressed down, searching for the switch. It clicked and suddenly the study was bathed in a pale green light. David blinked, getting his bearings. There was a big painting over the mantelpiece above the fireplace, some biblical scene it looked like. Probably valuable like everything else Osman owned, David thought bitterly, taking in the rich luxury all around him – the thick Axminster carpet, the rows of leather-bound books with golden titles on their spines, the silk curtains. David remembered his damp, dark, evil-smelling cell back in Oxford Prison and the contrast between the two rooms made him angry, made him want to smash something. But that wasn’t why he was here. He needed a torch, some light to guide him through the house. But there was nothing on the desk apart from the lamp and a telephone, and the drawers were just full of useless papers except for the top one in the centre that was locked. Stealthily, David ventured out into the corridor, leaving the door open behind him to give a little light, enough to see the shape of the long oval table in the room opposite. And on the table were candles, a whole line of them: tall white candles in high silver candlesticks. More suited to an altar than Osman’s dining table, David thought inconsequentially as he felt in his pocket for his matches.
Now, with the light, everything was easier. With a candle held aloft in one hand and the gun gripped in the other, he walked slowly down the corridor to the front hall, and stopped suddenly stock still at the foot of the wide ornamental staircase, gazing up into the luminous green eyes of a black cat sitting in the middle of the fourth stair up, barring his way. The animal seemed disembodied, indivisible from the surrounding darkness. For a moment they stared at each other without moving, but then David sensed the cat’s back beginning to arch as if it was about to spring, and instinctively raised the gun and candlestick in front of his face to ward off its attack, but instead it ran past him down the stairs. He felt its fur against his leg before it disappeared behind him into the shadows on the other side of the hall.
David felt his legs trembling underneath him and breathed deeply several times, exhaling his fear into the darkness before he steeled himself to the task ahead and began slowly to climb the stairs. Pictures and portraits lined the walls, but David looked neither to his right nor his left, concentrating all his attention instead on the ground beneath his feet, taking each step as if it might be his last. He knew where he was going. Katya had taken him to her room on that day when she had shown him the house. It was halfway down the top-floor corridor on the left. You had to lean down when you went inside because there was a slope in the ceiling. He remembered lying on her narrow bed; he remembered the taste of her kisses on his mouth. Her nervousness about him being there, about her uncle coming home and finding them, had made the afternoon more exciting than any of their previous encounters. His heart had pounded inside his chest like it was going to burst. Just like now.
Walking down the corridor almost on tiptoe, he thought he heard something – a rustling or a movement behind him. He turned, hesitating whether to go forward or back. Perhaps it was someone sleeping behind one of the closed and half-closed doors that he had passed. He had no idea who else slept up here. But now all was quiet again. Softly, he moved forward, coming to a halt outside Katya’s door.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
The words of the old nursery rhyme came unbidden into his head, and he smiled as he placed the candlestick carefully on the floor, put out his hand, and opened the door.
CHAPTER 7
Detective Inspector Trave woke with a start. He’d been deeply asleep, fighting the noise of the telephone ringing insistently beside his bed.
‘What is it?’ he asked blearily, still half-inhabiting the dream he’d been having: a bad dream that had been recurring lately in which shapeless shadows were coming toward him on a cliff’s edge and there was nowhere left to hide. His Dunkirk dream he called it, remembering 1940, when the world had gone up in flames. Who was to know if it wouldn’t happen again?
‘Sorry to wake you, sir,’ said a young, brisk voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s a murder: young female shot in the head. At a place called Blackwater Hall. It’s outside Blackwater village on the London Road.’
‘Blackwater Hall,’ Trave repeated, coming fully awake.
‘Yes, that’s right. Do you want directions? I’ve got them here.’
‘No, I know Blackwater Hall. Get hold of Adam Clayton for me, will you? Tell him to meet me there.’
‘He’s already on his way, sir. He was on night duty when we got the call.’
‘Good. Thanks,’ said Trave, replacing the receiver.
Homicide at Blackwater Hall. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard those words. And people aren’t murdered in the same place twice for no reason, he thought as he got dressed, made himself a triple-strength cup of coffee, drank it in three gulps, and went out into the night.
Trave drove quickly through the empty streets and out into the dark countryside while his mind raced, remembering people and events that he’d been trying for a long time to forget. It was like the door of a lumber room had finally given way under the weight of what was stacked up behind it. Images from the past passed quickly in front of his mind’s eye like a succession of ghosts – Ethan Mendel lying dead, with the lake water lapping around his dark hair and his outstretched arms; David Swain’s hollow face collapsing in on itself as the jury foreman announced the guilty verdict; Titus Osman’s smug eyes twinkling behind his manicured beard as he entertained his guests at that dinner party after the trial, with Vanessa sitting on his left, listening to the bastard’s tall tales with such rapt attention.
Why had he taken Vanessa that night? Trave asked himself the same useless question for the thousandth time. Useless because he knew the answer. He hadn’t wanted to go. The Mendel case had left him feeling obscurely dissatisfied, a viewpoint evidently not shared by the jurors, who had taken less than two hours to convict. But Creswell, his boss, had insisted, and Trave had taken Vanessa with him to Blackwater Hall because he didn’t want to go on his own and because he felt guilty that she never went out; that he’d not been able to help her at all through those long, hard months and years after their son, Joe, died. Trave had had his job to fall back on, but she’d had nothing. Just him, and he’d been no support, worse than no support in fact. They’d grieved soundlessly and separately, trying to avoid each other in the passages and corridors of their empty house until their marriage withered away and died. Not with a shout; not even with a whimper. In a cold and weary silence.
He and Vanessa were finished long before the night that he took her to Osman’s to celebrate the end of another successful case. He realized that now. And yet she had looked so delicate, so fragile, that evening in a white dress that she hadn’t worn in years. He remembered her laughing in the bedroom before they left, saying that perhaps losing weight wasn’t such a bad thing after all, and he remembered how she’d bent her head to allow him to fasten the faux pearl necklace that he’d bought her as a present twenty years earlier, after Joe was born. His hands on her neck replaced by Osman’s hands – Osman, who could afford to pay more for a necklace than Trave earned in a year. Trave shuddered, braking hard to avoid the line of police cars with flashing lights parked in a line on the road up ahead. They must be searching the woods, he thought, as he turned through the open gate and drove up between the tall, moonlit trees to Osman’s house.
