Death's Jest-Book (3 page)

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.

Letter
1 cont.

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!)

Professor Duerden and most of his
luggage have now finally disappeared into his bedroom. If he intends
a complete unpacking, he may be some time, so I shall continue.

Where was I? Oh yes, in the midst
of what looks dangerously like becoming a rather tedious
philosophical digression, so let me get back to straight narrative.

The following day, I played
Polchard to a draw. I think I could have beaten him, but I wouldn't
like to swear to it. Anyway, a draw seemed best for starters.

After that we played every day.
At first he always had white but after our third draw he turned the
board round and thereafter we alternated. The sixth game I won. There
was a moment of cenotaph silence in the room, only more in
anticipation of sacrifice than remembrance of it, and as I made my
way back to my cell, men who'd become quite friendly over the past
couple of weeks drew away from me. I paid no heed. They were thinking
of Polchard as . King Rat, I was thinking of him as Grand Master.
There's no fun playing someone not good enough to beat you, and less
in playing someone who's good enough but too scared. My long-term
survival plan depended on establishing equality.

That was my
thinking, but I knew I could be wrong. I dreamt that night I was in
that scene in Bergman's
Seventh Seal
where the Knight plays
Death at chess. I woke up in a muck sweat, thinking I'd made a
terrible mistake.

But next day he was sitting with
the board set up and I knew I had been right.

Now all I had to do was find a
way of letting him beat me without him spotting it.

But not straight off, I thought.
That would be too obvious, and for him to catch me losing would be
worse than constantly winning. So I played my normal game and planned
ahead. Then Polchard made a move three times quicker than usual, and
when I studied the board I realized I didn't need to worry. All that
solitary exercise had turned him into a fine defensive player. Well,
it's bound to when you're resisting attacking gambits you've devised
yourself. But the bastard had been soaking up the details of the way
I played and suddenly he'd gone into full attacking mode and I was in
trouble.

It would have been easy to fold
up before his onslaught, but I didn't. I twisted and turned and
weaved and ducked, and when I finally knocked over my king, we both
knew he'd beaten me fair and square.

He smiled as he re-set the
pieces. Like a ripple on a dark pool.

'Chess, war, job,' he said. 'All
the same. Get them thinking one way, go the other.'

Not a bad game plan I suppose if
you're a career criminal.

After that I stopped worrying
about results.

Now everyone was my friend again
but I played it cool. I wanted to be accepted as an equal not envied
as a favourite. I knew as long as I played my cards, and my pieces,
right, I'd got a fully paid-up ticket to ride my stretch as
comfortably as I could hope.

But make yourself as comfortable
as you like in a noisy stinking overcrowded iron-barred
nineteenth-century prison and it's still a fucking jail.

Time to turn my energies to my
next project, which was to get myself an exeat.

You can see why I didn't have any
time for the luxury of plotting revenge! I had a delicate balancing
act to perform, staying .Polchard's friend and at the same time
getting myself a sufficient reputation as a reformed character to get
a transfer to a nice open prison. Despite all evidence to the
contrary, the Powers That Be still have a touching belief in a
correlation between education and virtue, so I did an Open University
degree, opting for a strong sociological element on the grounds that
this would give me the best opportunity to impress the PTB with my
revitalized sense of civic responsibility. Also it's the easiest
stuff imaginable. Anyone with half a mind can suss out in ten minutes
flat which buttons to press to get your tutors cooing over your
essays. Whisk up a froth of soft left sentiments with a stiffening of
social deprivation statistics and you're home and dry, or home and
wet as the old unreconstructed Thatcherites would see it. With that
out of the way, I started on an MA course on the same lines. My
dissertation was on the theme of Crime and Punishment, which gave me
the chance to really strut my born-again-citizen stuff. But it was so
deadly dull!