Borstal Slags (8 page)

From behind him came a tight, clipped, richly Scottish voice. ‘A dramatic entrance, gentlemen. Ill mannered, unprofessional – but dramatic, I’ll grant you.’

Sam and Gene turned to see a proud, stiff-backed warder standing in the open doorway. His black uniform was immaculate. At his waist hung two chains, a silver one bearing keys, and a gold one attached to a showy fob watch he kept tucked into his pocket. For some reason, that watch caught Sam’s attention. He felt a cold shudder run through his body.

Mr Fellowes cleared got to his feet and said, ‘This is our head warder, House Master McClintock.’

So this is McClintock,
thought Sam.
He’s not an inmate at all: he’s the head warder. Is this the man I need to be watching? Was Barton right to tell me to keep my eye on him?

McClintock stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. And, again, Sam found himself peering at the gold fob watch at his waist. What was its significance? Why did it demand his attention like this?

‘And to what do we owe the pleasure of your company, gentlemen?’ McClintock asked, eyeing them both suspiciously.

‘We’ve just been fishing one of your lads out of a crushing machine,’ announced Gene, eyeing McClintock right back. ‘Andy Coren. Handy Andy. Name ring a bell?’

Fellowes and McClintock shot a glance at each other.

‘It does indeed ring a bell,’ said Fellowes. ‘I regret to admit that we … slipped up recently and permitted Andrew Coren an opportunity to escape. We were rather hoping we’d pick him up again without too much of a fuss. He’s not violent, just slippery.’

‘We have an excellent record here for security,’ said McClintock in his clipped tones. ‘None of us wish to see it besmirched.’

Gene shrugged. ‘Your reputation might not be besmirched, Jimmy, but Andy Coren certainly is. Well and truly besmirched all over a load of old ovens in a great big crusher. Right old mess it was. Squashed, flattened, half his internal organs squirtin’ out his arse. I can go into more details if you like.’

Fellowes sat down slowly and laid his hands on his desk. ‘So. He got out inside one of the ovens. It’s as we thought.’

‘It won’t happen again,’ declared McClintock. ‘I have implemented tighter security.’

Fellowes looked up at Gene and Sam, said, ‘Thank you for coming out here to inform me of this tragedy – though I can’t see why it took two experienced officers to come here in person, when a phone call would have sufficed.’

‘We came here, Mr Fellowes, because of certain irregularities associated with Coren’s death,’ said Sam.

‘What sort of irregularities?’

Sam found himself glancing nervously at McClintock, although the House Master was motionless and silent, his blank face unreadable.

I don’t like that man. There’s something wrong about him.

‘Well, Detective Inspector? What sort of irregularities?’

‘Hard to say at present,’ said Sam, forcing his attention away from McClintock and back to Fellowes. ‘Ongoing intelligence. We’re in receipt of – scraps of information. We very much want to make sense of these scraps.’

Fellowes looked searchingly at McClintock, then shrugged.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We’ll help you all we can –
if
we can.’

‘Your kitchen block and boiler house,’ said Sam. ‘They’re being demolished. Why is that?’

‘They were unsafe,’ said Fellowes. ‘The boilers were ancient and simply had to go. And the kitchen had been in a dire state for years. We’d struggled on with it, but then there was a terrible accident with one of the gas ovens. It went up like a bomb.’

‘A boy was killed, am I right?’ asked Sam.

‘I’m afraid you are. After that, the Home Office had no choice but to allocate us funds for a refit. Perhaps you’d like to see our brand-new kitchens?’

‘I’d love to see your new kitchens more than words can say,’ growled Gene. ‘But, before you thrill me and my colleague with that particular emotional roller coaster, I want to know more about this boy what got barbecued. What kind of lad was he?’

Fellowes fumbled for something to say, but it was McClintock who answered. ‘He was a young man by the name of Craig Tulse. Nasty little rogue he was. A lot of backchat. Insubordinate. A constant source of trouble to me and my warders.’

‘So – a relief to be rid of him?’ Gene said. His manner was confrontational.

McClintock gave him a very cold stare. ‘The boy died. Burned. Horribly.’

‘I’ll bet. And what about this other lad, the one who topped himself a couple of weeks back? What’s his name again, Tyler?’

‘Tunning, Guv.’

‘Aye, Tunning. What’s the story with him, eh?’

‘Tunning hanged himself in his cell,’ said Fellowes. ‘Unfortunately, these things do happen. But may I point out that our suicide rate is lower than the state prison average.’

‘We’re not casting aspersions, Mr Fellowes,’ said Sam.

‘Well, we
might
be,’ growled Gene.

‘No we’re
not
,’ Sam cut across him. ‘We’re just trying to make sense of all things. Mr Fellowes, is there any connection that you can think of between Tunning’s suicide and Andy Coren’s death?’

Fellowes shrugged and looked to McClintock for support.

‘They were both inmates at this facility,’ McClintock said flatly. ‘What more connection could there be?’

‘So – two deaths in two weeks is just a coincidence?’ said Sam. ‘Not to mention Tulse’s death a month or so before?’

McClintock sighed. ‘Faulty stoves which have been replaced. A suicide. A bungled escape attempt. That, gentlemen, is the whole story.’

‘Are you sure of that?’ Sam asked.

‘You said just now that you were not casting aspersions, Detective Inspector,’ McClintock said. ‘Your tone suggests the contrary.’

‘And
your
tone suggests you’re hiding something,’ snarled Gene, glaring at him. ‘What’s in the sporran, McTavish? Something nasty you don’t want the world to see?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector, I strongly suspect that you said that for no better reason than to get a rise out of me.’

‘You’re right. I’ve got this thing about Jocks. As soon as I come across one I just
have
to get a rise.’

‘Then may I save you the bother of doing so by informing you now that you will get no such pleasure from
me
?’

‘Any institution housing criminals will have its share of accidents and suicides and escape attempts,’ put in Fellowes, keen to calm the tightening atmosphere. ‘We do our level best to keep such things to a minimum, but you appreciate that we cannot prevent them entirely.’

‘I recently spoke to an ex-inmate of yours,’ said Sam. ‘He suggested there were … irregularities here. What do you think he might have been referring to?’

‘I’m very surprised at you, Detective Inspector,’ said McClintock. ‘A man of your experience, giving credence to convicts’ tittle-tattle. The inmates will always cry “foul”. It is in the nature of inmates to do so.’

‘True,’ said Sam. ‘But sometimes they have a point.’

‘Not here, they don’t,’ McClintock said firmly. ‘There is a system in place here.
The
System. And the boys within these walls will abide by that System. No negotiations. No compromises. The System is everything, and that’s an end.’

‘Perhaps a spot of negotiation and compromise is exactly what these boys need,’ Sam suggested. ‘
Treat
them like adults and maybe they’ll start
behaving
like adults.’

Mr McClintock fixed him with an implacable look. ‘Whether you like it or not, young Detective Inspector, the boys here cannot escape the System. They can run, kid themselves, score a few petty victories, tell themselves they’ll win in the end …’

Sam frowned. He’d heard these words before. But where?

‘But it’s not so,’ McClintock went on, pulling out his fob watch and polishing its shiny casing with a pristine white handkerchief. ‘Everything here is fixed, set in place, unchangeable – like the passing of time itself. You can more easily rearrange the hours of the day, Detective Inspector Tyler, than alter the System.’

I’ve heard that little speech before – in a dream – in a dream about stars and the cosmos and—

For a moment, Sam felt his head spinning, his thoughts reeling.

I’m just a copper – and I’ve got a job to do.

His gaze was drawn back to the gold fob watch in McClintock’s waist pocket. Its polished surface glinted, and Sam felt a powerful, almost giddying compulsion to reach out and grab it by the chain.

He forced himself to stay focused.

‘What can you tell me about this?’ Sam asked, controlling his breathing as he placed the letter from Andy Coren on Fellowes’s desk.

Fellowes peered at it, shrugged, and handed it to McClintock.

‘Well?’ Sam prompted.

‘All correspondences between inmates and the outside world pass by my desk,’ McClintock said proudly. ‘This letter bears my personal stamp. Thus, I approved it.’

‘It was written by Andrew Coren and sent to his brother Derek, correct?’

‘No, Detective Inspector,
not
correct.’

Gene’s ears pricked up. ‘Explain what you mean by that, Jimmy.’

‘Like many inmates, Coren’s literary abilities did not stretch to the writing of even a simple letter such as this one,’ said McClintock.

‘He was illiterate?’ asked Sam.

‘No, not at all. Just unhandy with the written word. This letter, gentleman – and I know this from the handwriting – was written by a lad by the name of Donner. He’s an inmate here, although he shouldn’t be, not with the quality of the brain between his ears. He’s too intelligent to be indulging in crime. Perhaps he will mature in time and grow out of these criminal compulsions.’

‘So, this lad Donner,’ said Gene. ‘It’s him what wrote this letter on Coren’s behalf?’

‘It’s a service Donner supplies,’ said McClintock, passing the letter back to them. ‘Many of the boys here make use of him. No doubt they repay the favour in kind. Do you wish to speak to him?’

‘Yes, Mr McClintock, we do,’ said Sam.

‘With your leave, then, Mr Fellowes?’

‘I have no objections, Mr McClintock,’ said Fellowes, shuffling papers in his desk drawers. ‘But if you might excuse me, I have a great deal to get on with. An escaped inmate is a headache. A dead one is a migraine.’

‘But the company of an uptight Jock is always a joy!’ grinned Gene, looming over McClintock. ‘Lead on, MacFanny.’

McClintock narrowed his eyes. ‘It will do you good to see the System at work. And as luck would have it, Donner’s on work duty in the new kitchen block. You can interview him
and
cast your eyes over our new facilities at the same time.’

‘Stone me, I’ve just shat meself,’ intoned Gene.

McClintock led the way, striding trimly ahead of them, a straight-backed, jet-black figure in shiny shoes and sharp-peaked cap who carried himself with the self-assurance of Napoleon.

I don’t like him,
thought Sam, watching McClintock as he followed him.
The man’s a jumped up, self-important control freak. I’ll bet he’s a bully, too – a tin-pot commandant strutting about his private empire, playing God with the inmates. And yet – it’s not his personality that’s getting to me. There’s something else, something that turns my stomach.

His eye was caught by a glint of light flashing across the gold fob watch at McClintock’s waist. For some reason, Sam’s attention kept coming back to it.

What the hell is it about that watch that’s bugging me? And what was all that he was saying just now, all that talk about never being able to change the system? Didn’t I hear all that in a dream not so long ago? Or am I losing my grip altogether?

No, he wasn’t losing his grip. He knew, all too well, that there was something out there, something dark and mean and unspeakably evil, and that bit by bit it was closing in. Whatever it was, it had its sights fixed remorselessly on Annie, and yet it was attempting to reach her through Sam. It found ways of manifesting itself, ways of materializing in Sam’s world, over and over; and every guise it took was a step closer, a step nearer, until, one day, one day soon …

One day soon we’ll meet face to face.

A voice echoed though his memory:
‘I make it my business to know my rivals. I’ll keep coming at you, you cheating bastard. I’ll keep coming at you until I’ve got my wife back –
my
wife –
mine
.’

Sam clenched his fists.
We’ll see, you little shit. We’ll see.

As he and Gene turned into another corridor, they were suddenly confronted by words in bright-red paint, three feet high, stencilled boldly along the wall.

‘Now
that
,’ announced Gene, stopping and staring at it, ‘is exactly what I never get from my staff.’

‘And it’s precisely what
I
expect from every single inmate in this establishment,’ said McClintock. ‘Without fail.’

‘So you write it on the wall,’ said Sam.

‘And the boys see it every day. Perhaps, in time, these virtues might sink into their criminal minds.’

‘Slogans on wall? Don’t you think it’s a bit Orwellian?’

Gene gave Sam a look of total incomprehension mixed with utter contempt. ‘Doesn’t he think it’s a bit
what
?’

‘It’s like
Nineteen Eighty-Four
,’ Sam said. And then, in an aside to Gene, ‘It’s a famous book, Guv.’

‘I know what it is,’ Gene snapped.

With a curt, controlled gesture, McClintock indicated at the red letters dominating the wall. ‘Every boy here must learn silence, for it is golden. Then he must learn respect – respect for the warders, for his fellow inmates, for himself, and most of all for the System. And then – perhaps – he might start to grasp the concept of duty.’

McClintock touched the gold chain at his waist, running his fingers along it until they reached the fob watch in its little pocket. He patted it.

That watch – I bloody hate it!
Sam thought.
Why? Why do I want to rip the damn thing out of his pocket and smash it to pieces?