'The name's Nailtes,' said the man, 'and I'm from the Ipford Evening News and'
The Governor slammed the phone down and turned on Blaggs. 'A bloody fine mess you've landed us in,' he shouted. 'That was the Evening News wanting to know if there's been an escape.'
Chief Warder Blaggs looked dutifully abashed. 'I'm sorry if there's been some mistake...' he began and brought a fresh torrent of abuse on his head.
'Mistake? Mistake?' yelled the Governor. 'Some maniac rings up with some fucking cock-and-bull story about an escape and you have to poison...' But further discussion was interrupted by news of a fresh crisis. Three safe-breakers, who had been transferred from a cell designed to hold one Victorian convict to another occupied by four Grievous Bodily Harm merchants from Glasgow, known as the Gay Gorbals, had begun to fulfil Wilt's prophesy by escaping and demanding to be closeted with some heterosexual murderers for protection.
The Governor found them arguing their case with warders in B Block. 'We're not going in with a load of arse-bandits and that's a fact,' said the spokesman.
'It's only a temporary move,' said the Governor, himself temporizing. 'In the morning'
'We'll be suffering from AIDS,' said the safebreaker.
'Aids?'
'Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. We want some good, clean murderer, not those filthy swine with anal herpes. A stretch is one thing and so's a bang to rights but not the sort of stretch those Scotch sods would give us and we're fucked if we're going to be banged to wrong. This is supposed to be a prison, not Dotheboys Hall.'
By the time the Governor had pacified them and sent them back to their own cell, he was beginning to have his doubts about the place himself. In his opinion, the prison felt more like a mad-house. His next visit, this time to Top Security, made an even worse impression. A sepulchral silence hung over the floodlit building and, as the Governor passed from cell to cell, he had the illusion of being in a charnel-house. Wherever he looked, men who in other circumstances he would happily have seen dead, looked as though they were. Only the occasional ghastly snore suggested otherwise. For the rest, the inmates hung over the sides of their beds or lay grotesquely supine on the floor in attitudes that seemed to indicate that rigor mortis had already set in.
'Just let me find the swine who started this little lot,' he muttered. 'I'll...I'll...I'll...' He gave up. There was nothing in the book of legal punishments that would fit the crime.
Chapter 7
By the time Wilt left The Glassblowers' Arms, his desperation had been alleviated by beer and his inability to get anywhere near the phone. He'd moved onto beer after three whiskies, and the change had made it difficult for him to be in two places at the same time, a prerequisite, it seemed, for finding the phone unoccupied. For the first half hour, a girl had been engaged in an intense conversation on reversed charges, and when Wilt had returned from the toilet, her place had been taken by an aggressive youth who had told him to bugger off. After that, there seemed to be some conspiracy to keep him away from the phone. A succession of people had used it and Wilt had ended up sitting at the bar and drinking, and generally arriving at the conclusion that things weren't so bad after all, even if he did have to walk home instead of driving.
'The bastard's in prison,' he told himself as he left the pub. 'And what's more, he's not coming out for twenty years, so what have I got to worry about? Can't hurt me, can he?'
All the same, as he made his way along the narrow streets towards the river, he kept glancing over his shoulder and wondering if he was being followed. But apart from a man with a small dog and a couple who passed him on bicycles, he was alone and could find no evidence of menace. Doubtless that would come later. Wilt tried to figure out a scenario. Presumably, McCullum had given him the piece of paper as a token message, an indication that he was to be some sort of link-man. Well, there was an easy way out of that one; he wouldn't go near the bloody prison again. Might make things awkward as far as Eva was concerned though. He'd just have to make himself scarce on Monday nights and pretend he was still teaching the loathsome McCullum. Shouldn't be too difficult and anyway, Eva was so engrossed in the quads and their so-called development, she hardly noticed what he was doing. The main thing was that he still had the airbase job and that brought the real money in.
But in the meantime, he had more immediate problems to deal with. Like what to tell Eva when he got home. He looked at his watch and saw that it was midnight. After midnight and without the car. Eva would certainly demand an explanation. What a bloody world it was, where he spent his days dealing with idiotic bureaucrats who interfered at the Tech, and was threatened by maniacs in prison, and after all that, came home to be bullied into lying by a wife who didn't believe he'd done a stroke of work all day. And in a bloody world, only the bloody-minded made any mark. The bloody-minded and the cunning. People with drive and determination. Wilt stopped under a street light and looked at the heathers and azaleas in Mr Sands' garden for the second time that day, but this time with a resurgence of those dangerous drives and determinations which beer and the world's irrationality induced in him. He would assert himself. He would do something to distinguish himself from the mass of dull, stupid people who accepted what life handed out to him and then passed on probably into oblivion (Wilt was never sure about that) without leaving more than the fallacious memories of their children and the fading snapshots in the family album. Wilt would be...well, anyway, Wilt would be Wilt, whatever that was. He'd have to give the matter some thought in the morning.
In the meantime, he'd deal with Eva. He wasn't going to stand any nonsense about where have you been? or what have you been up to this time? He'd tell her to mind her own...No, that wouldn't do. It was the sort of challenge the damned woman was waiting for and would only provoke her into keeping him awake half the night discussing what was wrong with their marriage. Wilt knew what was wrong with their marriage; it had been going on for twenty years and Eva had had quads instead of having one at a time. Which was typical of her. Talk about never doing things by halves. But that was beside the point. Or was it? Perhaps she'd had quads to compensate in some ghastly deterministic and genetical way for marrying only half a man. Wilt's mind shot off on a tangent once again as he considered the fact, if it was one, that after wars the birthrate of males shot up as if nature with a capital N was automatically compensating for their shortage. If Nature was that intelligent, it ought to have known better than to make him attractive to Eva, and vice versa. He was driven from this line of thought by another attribute of Nature. This time its call. Well, he wasn't peeing in a rose bush again. Once was enough.
He hurried up the street and was presently letting himself surreptitiously into 45 Oakhurst Avenue with the resolve that if Eva was awake he would say the car had broken down and he'd taken it to a garage. It was better to be cunning than bloody-minded after all. In the event, there was no need to be anything more than quiet. Eva, who had spent the evening mending the quads' clothes and who had discovered that they had cut imitation flies in their knickers as a blow for sexual equality, was fast asleep. Wilt climbed carefully into bed beside her and lay in the darkness thinking about drive and determination.
Drive and determination were very much in the air at the police station. Lord Lynchknowle's phone call to the Chief Constable, and the news that the Home Secretary had promised Scotland Yard's assistance, had put the skids under the Superintendent and had jerked him from his chair in front of the telly and back to the station for an urgent conference.