Death's Jest-Book (2 page)

 

 

St
Godric’s College

Cambridge

Fri
Dec 14th The Quaestor's Lodging

Dear
Mr Pascoe,

Cambridge!
St Godric's College! The Quaestor's Lodging!

Ain't I the swell then? Ain't I a
Home Office commercial for the rehabilitating powers of the British
penal system?

But who am I? you must be
wondering. Or has that sensitive intuition for which you are justly
famous told you already?

Whatever, let me end speculation
and save you the bother of looking to the end of what could be a long
letter.

I was born in a village called
Hope, and it used to be my little joke that if I happened to die by
drowning in Lake Disappointment in Australia, my cruciform headstone
could read

Here lies

Francis Xavier Roote

Born in

HOPE

Died in

DISAPPOINTMENT

Yes, it's me, Mr Pascoe, and
guessing what could be your natural reaction to getting mail from a
man you banged up for what some might call the best years of his
life, let me hasten to reassure you:

THIS ISN'T A THREATENING LETTER!

On the contrary, it's a
REASSURING letter.

And not one I would have dreamt
of writing if events over the past year hadn't made it clear how much
you need reassurance. Me too, especially since my life has taken such
an unexpected turn for the better. Instead of grubbing away in my
squalid little flat, here I am relaxing in the luxury of the
Quaestor's Lodging. And in case you think I must have broken in, I
enclose the annual conference programme of the Romantic and Gothic
Studies Association (RAGS for short!). There's my name among the list
of delegates. And if you look at nine o'clock on Saturday morning,
there you will see it again. Suddenly I have a future; I have
friends; out of Despair I have found my way back to Hope and it's
starting to look as if after all I may not be heading for the cold
waters of Disappointment!

Incidentally, I shared my macabre
little jest with one of my new friends, Linda Lupin MEP, when she
took me to meet another, Frère Jacques, the founder of the
Third Thought Movement.

What brought it to mind was we
were standing in the grounds of the Abbaye du Saint Graal, the
Cornelian monastery of which Jacques is such a distinguished member.
The grounds opened with no barrier other than a meandering stream
choked with cresses on to a World War One military cemetery whose
rows of white crosses ran away from us up a shallow rise, getting
smaller and smaller till the most distant looked no larger than the
half-inch ones Linda and I carried on silver chains round our necks.

Linda laughed loudly. Appearances
can deceive (who knows that better than you?) and finding Linda
possessed of a great sense of humour has been a large step in our
relationship. Jacques grinned too. Only Frère Dierick, who has
attached himself to Jacques as a sort of amanuensis with pretensions
to Boswellian status, pursed his lips in disapproval of such
out-of-place levity. His slight and fleshless figure makes him look
like Death in a cowl, but in fact he's stuffed to the chops with
Flemish phlegm. Jacques happily, despite being tall, blond and in the
gorgeous ski-instructor mould, has much more of Gallic air and fire
in him, plus he is unrepentantly Anglophile.

Linda said, 'Let's see if we
can't dispose of you a bit further south in Australia, Fran. There's
a Lake Grace, I believe. Died in Grace, that's what Third Thought's
all about, right, Brother?'

This reduction of the movement to
a jest really got up Dierick's bony nose but before he could speak,
Jacques smiled and said, ‘This I love so much about the
English. You make a joke of everything. The more serious it is, the
more you make the jokes. It is deliriously childish. No, that is not
the word. Childlike. You are the most childlike of all the nations of
Europe. That is your strength and can be your salvation. Your great
poet Wordsworth knew that childhood is a state of grace. Shades of
the prison house begin to close about the growing boy. It is the
child alone who understands the holiness of the heart's affections.'

Getting your Romantics mixed
there, Jacques, old frère, I thought, at the same time trying
to work out if the bit about shades of the prison house was a crack.
But I don't think so. By all accounts Jacques' own background is too
colourful for him to be judgmental about others, and anyway he's not
that kind of guy.

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 without 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.