Death's Jest-Book Read online

  But it’s funny how sensitive you can get about things like a prison record. These days I know that some ex-cons make a very profitable profession out of being ex-cons. That must really piss you and your colleagues off. But I’m not like that. All I want to do is forget about my time inside and get on with my life, cultivate my garden, so to speak.

  Which is what I was doing quite successfully, and ultimately literally, till you came bursting through the hedge I’d built for protection and privacy.

  Not once, not twice, but three times.

  First with suspicion that I was harassing your dear wife!

  Next with allegation that I was stalking your good self!!

  And finally with accusation that I was involved in a series of brutal murders!!!

  Which is the main reason I’m writing to you. The time has come, I think, for some straight talking between us, not in any spirit of recrimination but just so that when we’re done, we can both continue our lives, you in the certainty that neither you nor those you love need fear any harm from me, and myself with the assurance that, now my life has taken such a strong turn for the better, I needn’t concern myself with the possibility that once again the tender seedlings in my garden shall feel the weight of your trampling feet.

  All we need, it seems to me, is total openness, a return to that childlike honesty we all possess before the shades of the prison house begin to close, and perhaps then I can persuade you that during my time in Yorkshire’s answer to the Bastille, Chapel Syke Prison, I never once fantasized about taking revenge on my dear old friends, Mr Dalziel and Mr Pascoe. Revenge I have studied, certainly, but only in literature under the tutelage of my wise mentor and beloved friend, Sam Johnson.

  As you know, he’s dead now, Sam, and so, God damn his soul, is the man who killed him. Unless of course you pay any heed to Charley Penn. Doubting Charley! Who trusts nobody and believes nothing.

  But even Charley can’t deny that Sam’s dead. He’s dead.

  When thou know’st this, thou know’st how dry a cinder this world is.

  I miss him every day, and all the more because his death has contributed so much to the dramatic upturn in my life. Strange, isn’t it, how tragedy can be the progenitor of triumph? In this case, two tragedies. If that poor student of Sam’s hadn’t overdosed in Sheffield last summer, Sam would never have moved to Mid-Yorkshire. And if Sam hadn’t moved to Mid-Yorkshire, then he wouldn’t have become one of the monstrous Wordman’s victims. And if that hadn’t happened, I would not be basking in the glow of present luxury and promised success here in God’s (which, I gather, is how the illuminati refer to St Godric’s!)

  But back to you and your fat friend.

  I’m not saying that I felt any deep affection for the pair of you or gratitude for what you’d done to me. If I thought of you at all it was in conventional terms, good cop, bad cop; the knee in the balls, the shoulder to cry on, both of you monsters, of course, but the kind that no stable society can do without, for you are the beasts that guard our gates and let us sleep safe in our beds.

  Except when we’re in prison. Then you cannot protect us.

  Mr Dalziel, the ball-crushing knee, would probably say that we have foregone your protection.

  But not you, dear Mr Pascoe, the damp shoulder. What I’ve heard and seen of you over the years since our first encounter makes me think you are more than just a role-player.

  I’d guess you’ve got doubts about the penal system as it stands. In fact I suspect you’ve got doubts about many aspects of this creaky old society of ours, but of course being a career policeman makes it difficult for you to speak out. Doesn’t stop your good lady, though, dear Mrs Pascoe, Ms Soper as she was in those long lost days when I was a young and fancy-free student at Holm Coultram College. How delighted I was to hear that you’d got married! News like that brings a little warmth and colour seeping through even the damp grey walls of Chapel Syke. Some unions seem to be made in heaven, don’t they? Like Marilyn and Arthur; Woody and Mia; Chas and Di …

  All right, can’t win ’em all, can we? But at the time each of those marriages had that things-are-looking-up feel-good quality and, in terms of survival, yours looks like it could be the exception that proves the rule. Well done!

  But, as I was saying, within those walls not even the nice worrying cops like you can do much to protect the rights of young and vulnerable cons like me.

  So even if I’d wanted to plan revenge, I wouldn’t have had time to do it.

  I was too busy looking for a route to survival.

  I needed help, of course, for one thing I quickly worked out.

  You can’t survive alone in prison.

  As you well know, I’m not defenceless. My tongue is my chief weapon, and given room to wield it in, I reckon I can nimble my way out of most predicaments.

  But if one nasty con is twisting your arms up your back while another’s sticking his cock in your mouth, wagging your tongue tends to be counter-productive.

  This was the likely fate a guy I got banged up with on remand took some pleasure in mapping out for me if I got sent down to the Syke. Good-looking, blond, blue-eyed boy with a nice slim figure would be made very welcome there, he assured me, adding with a bitter laugh that he used to be a good-looking blond blue-eyed boy himself.

  Looking at his scarred, hollow-cheeked, broken-nosed, ochre-toothed face, I found it hard to believe, but something in his voice carried conviction. Something in his judge’s too, and next time we met was when we arrived at Chapel Syke together.

  He was an old hand at this and though I soon sussed out that he was far too far down the pecking order to have any value as a protector, I squeezed every last detail I could get out of him about how the place worked as we went about our new-boy task of cleaning the bogs.

  The main man was a ten-year con called Polchard, first name Matthew, known to his intimates as Mate, though not because of any innate amiability. He wasn’t much to look at, being scrawny, bald, and so white faced it was like seeing the skull beneath the skin. But his standing was confirmed by the fact that during ‘association’ he always had a table to himself in the crowded ‘parlour’ which is what they called the association room. There he sat, scowling down at a chessboard (Mate: gerrit?) and studying a little book in which he occasionally made notes before moving a piece. From time to time someone would bring him a mug of tea. If anyone wanted to talk to him, they stood patiently by, a couple of feet from the table, till he deigned to notice them. And on rare occasions if what they said was of particular interest, they’d be invited to pull up a chair and sit down.

  Polchard himself didn’t do sex, my ‘friend’ informed me, but his lieutenants were always on the lookout for new talent and if he gave them the go-ahead, I might as well touch my toes and think of England.

  But in the short term, he went on to say, I was most at risk from a freelancer like Brillo Bright. You may have encountered him and his twin brother, Dendo. God knows where their names came from, though I have heard it suggested that Brillo got his after spending some time in a padded cell (Brillo Pad, OK?) At some point Brillo had decided that having a spread eagle tattooed across his bald pate and beetling brow with its talons wrapped around his eye sockets was a good way of improving his facial beauty. He might have been right. What it certainly must have improved was the odds on his being recognized whenever he pursued his chosen profession of armed robbery, which possibly explained why he’d spent half of his thirty-odd years in jail. Brother Dendo was by comparison an intellectual, but only by comparison, being an unpredictably vicious thug. The Brights were the only cons to have an existence independent of Polchard. On the surface they were all chums together, but in fact they were far too unstable for Polchard to risk the hassle of a confrontation. So they existed like the Isle of Man, offshore, closely related to the mainland, but in many ways a law unto themselves.

  And helping themselves to a tasty newcomer would be a way for Brillo and Dendo to affirm their independence wit
hout risking any real provocation of the main man.

  To survive I had to find a way of getting myself under Polchard’s protection which didn’t involve getting under one of his boys. Not that I’ve got any serious objection to a close same sex relationship, but I knew from anecdote and observation that letting yourself become a centre-fold spread in prison means you’re pinned down at the bottom of the heap just as surely as if you’d got a staple through your belly button.

  First off, I had to show I wasn’t to be messed with. So I laid my plans.

  A couple of days later I waited till I saw Dendo and Brillo go into the shower room, and I followed them.

  Brillo looked at me like a fox who’s just seen a chicken come strolling into his earth.

  I hung my towel up and stepped under the shower, plastic shampoo bottle in hand.

  Brillo said something to his brother who laughed, then he moved towards me. He wasn’t all that well hung for such a big man, but what there was certainly had a strong sense of anticipation.

  ‘Hello, girlie,’ he said. ‘Like someone to do your back?’

  I unscrewed the top of my shampoo bottle and said, ‘Have you got that chicken sitting on your head so everyone will know you’ve got scrambled egg for brains?’

  It took him a moment to work this out, then his eyes bulged in fury, which was fine as it doubled my target area.

  As he lunged towards me, I raised the bottle and squeezed and sent a jet of the lavatory cleaning bleach I’d filled it with straight into his eyes.

  He screamed and started to knuckle at his eyes and I gave the skinned end of his rampant dick another quick burst. Now he didn’t know what to do with his hands. I stooped, hooked his left ankle from under him, then stood back as he tumbled over, hitting his head against the wall with such force that he cracked a tile.

  All this in the space of a few seconds. Dendo meanwhile had been standing there in sheer disbelief but now he began to advance. I waved the shampoo bottle towards him and he halted.

  I said, ‘Either get bird-brain here to a medic or buy him a white stick.’

  Then I picked up my towel and retreated.

  You see how I’m putting myself in your hands, my dear Mr Pascoe. A confession to assault and grievous bodily harm occasioning death. For it turned out that Brillo had a surprisingly thin skull for so thick a man, and there was damage which led to a tardily diagnosed meningeal problem which led to his demise. You could probably get an investigation going even after all this time. Not that I think the authorities at the Syke would applaud you. They went through the motions at the time, but brother Dendo who couldn’t bring himself to co-operate with the Law even in circumstances like these, lost it when one of the screws dissed his dead brother and broke his jaw.

  That got him out of the way for which I was mightily relieved. Of course all the cons knew what had happened, but in the Syke no one grassed without Polchard’s say-so, and as there was a touch of negligence in Brillo’s death, the screws were glad to bury him and the affair, very few questions were asked.

  That was stage one. Polchard too probably wasn’t sorry to see the back of the Brights, but there were plenty of people around who would be happy to do Dendo a favour, so I still needed the top man’s protection.

  So to stage two.

  At the next period in the parlour, I approached his table and stood at what I’d worked out was the appropriate petitioning distance.

  He ignored me completely, not even glancing up under his bushy eyebrows. Conversation and activity went on elsewhere in the room but it had that hushed unreal quality you get when people are simply going through the motions.

  I studied the chessboard as he worked out his next move. He’d obviously started with an orthodox Queen’s Pawn opening and countered it with a variation on the Slav defence. Playing yourself is a form of exercise by which the top-flight chess-player can keep his basic skills honed, but the only real test, of course, lies in pitting them against the unpredictability of an equal or superior player.

  Finally after what must have been twenty minutes and with only another five of the association period left, he made his move.

  Then, still without looking up, he said, ‘What?’

  I stepped forward, picked up the black bishop and took his knight.

  The room went completely silent.

  Leaving the knight open to the bishop was a trap, of course. One which he’d laid for himself and would therefore not have fallen into. But I had. What he needed to know now was, had I done it out of sheer incompetence, or did I have an agenda of my own?

  At least that’s what I hoped he needed to know.

  After a long minute, still without looking up, he said, ‘Chair.’

  A chair was thrust against the back of my legs and I sat down.

  He spent the remaining period of association studying the board.

  When the bell went to summon us back to our cells he looked me in the face for the first time and said, ‘Tomorrow.’

  And thus I moved out of the first, which is the most dangerous, stage of my prison career, Mr Pascoe. If I’d just sat around rehearsing revenge on yourself, I would by this point probably have been raped, possibly mutilated, certainly established as everyone’s yellow dog, to be kicked and humiliated at will. No, I had to be pragmatic, deal with the existing situation as best I could. Which is what I’m doing now. I make no bones about it. I no longer want to be constantly glancing back over my shoulder, fearful that you are out there, driven to pursue me by your own fears.

  Perhaps one day we may both come to recognize that flying from a thing we dread is not so very different from pursuing a thing we love. If and when that day comes, then I hope, dear Mr Pascoe, that I may see your face and take your outstretched hand and hear you say,

  Jesus bloody Christ!’ said Peter Pascoe.

  ‘Yes, I know it’s that time of year,’ said Ellie Pascoe who was sitting at the other side of the breakfast table looking without enthusiasm at a scatter of envelopes clearly containing Christmas cards. ‘But is it fair to blame a radical Jewish agitator for the way western capitalism has chosen to make a fast buck from his alleged birthday?’

  ‘The cheeky sod!’ exclaimed Pascoe.

  ‘Ah, it’s a guessing game,’ said Ellie. ‘OK. It’s from the palace saying the Queen is minded to make you a duchess in the New Year’s Honours list. No? OK, I give up.’

  ‘It’s from bloody Roote. He’s in Cambridge, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Bloody Roote? You mean Franny Roote? The student? The short story writer?’

  ‘No, I mean Roote the ex-con. The psycho criminal.’

  ‘Oh, that Roote. So what’s he say?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think the bastard’s forgiving me.’

  ‘Well that’s nice,’ yawned Ellie. ‘At least it’s more interesting than these sodding cards. What’s he doing in Cambridge?’

  ‘He’s at a conference on Romantic Studies in the early nineteenth century,’ said Pascoe, looking at the programme enclosed with the letter.

  ‘Good for him,’ said Ellie. ‘He must be doing well.’

  ‘He’s only there because of Sam Johnson,’ said Pascoe dismissively. ‘Here we are. Nine o’clock this morning. Mr Francis Roote MA will read the late Dr Sam Johnson’s paper entitled Looking for the laughs in Death’s Jest-Book. That sounds a bundle of fun. What the hell does it mean?’

  ‘Death’s Jest-Book? You remember Samuel Lovell Beddoes, whose life Sam was working on when he died? Well, Death’s Jest-Book is this play that Beddoes worked at all his life. I’ve not read it but I gather it’s pretty Gothic. And it’s a revenge tragedy.’

  ‘Revenge. Aha.’

  ‘Don’t make connections which aren’t there, Peter. Let’s have a look at the letter.’

  ‘I’m not finished yet. There’s reams of the bloody thing.’

  ‘Well, give us the bit you’ve read. And don’t take too long reading the rest. Time and our daughter wait for no man.’

/>   There had been a time when an off-duty Saturday meant a long lie in with the possibility of breakfast or, if he was very lucky, even tastier goodies in bed. But this was before his daughter Rosie had discovered she was musical.

  Whether any competent authority was going to confirm this discovery, Pascoe didn’t know. While not having a tin ear, his musical judgment wasn’t sufficiently refined to work out whether the faltering and scrannel notes he could even now hear issuing from her clarinet were much the same as those produced by a pre-pubescent Benny Goodman, or whether this was as good as it got.

  But while he was waiting to find out, Rosie had to have lessons from the best available teacher, viz. Ms Alicia Wintershine of the Mid-Yorkshire Sinfonietta, whose excellence was evidenced by the fact that the only session she had available (and that only because another budding virtuosa had discovered ponies) was nine o’clock on Saturday morning.

  So goodbye to breakfast in bed, and all that.

  But a man is still master in his own head if not his own house, and Pascoe buttered himself another piece of toast and settled down to the rest of Roote’s letter.

  Sorry about the hiatus!

  I was interrupted by the entrance of a train of porters carrying enough luggage to keep the Queen of Sheba going for a long state visit. Behind them was a small lean athletic man with a shock of blond hair which looked almost white against his deeply tanned skin, whom I recognized instantly from his dust-jacket photos as Professor Dwight S. Duerden of Santa Apollonia University, California (or St Poll Uni, CA, as he expressed it). He seemed a little put out to find himself sharing the Quaestor’s Lodging with me, even though I had modestly chosen the smaller bedroom.

  (You will already, I’m sure, have worked out that I’m not the Quaestor – whatever that is – of God’s, but merely a temporary occupant of his rooms during the conference. The Quaestor himself is, I gather, conducting a party of Hellenophiles around the Aegean on a luxury cruise liner. This is a line of work that interests me strangely!)