The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 3

‘You can’t let them get to you, Davy. That’s the point. Whether it’s that bitch who put you in here, whether it’s the screws, or whether it’s the other cons, you’ve got to remember it’s your life, not theirs. And you’ve got to keep it that way.’

Just as he had done every night for the previous two weeks, David Swain lay on his back in the dark listening to the voice of Eddie Earle coming down to him from the bunk above his head, and, as always, he felt that same odd mixture of irritation and gratitude. Irritation because Eddie kept calling him Davy — a nickname that nobody else had ever used and that David really didn’t like — and because Eddie never seemed to stop telling him how to live his life. Gratitude because he gave David a sense of security that he’d been missing ever since he’d first arrived in prison following his arrest more than two years earlier.

It had got worse after his conviction — much worse. The judge had thrown away the key, had called him a coward, a knife-in-the-back murderer, and sent him down for life. And overnight David had become a number, an object to be moved around without explanation from cell to cell, from wing to wing, from gaol to gaol, until he’d ended up back where he’d started — in Oxford Prison. Days, months, years of terrible food and waiting in cold corridors, of boredom and claustrophobia banged up in tiny airless cells, had brought David full circle.

It didn’t surprise him that he’d ended up back in Oxford. Nothing much surprised him any more. Prison was cruel, and here, locked away in the centre of his own hometown, it was just a bit more painful than anywhere else. That’s all. A few hundred yards away on the other side of a thirty-foot brick wall surmounted with barbed wire, the world he’d left behind was going on without him, impervious to his absence. In the mornings he could hear the bells ringing in Magdalen Tower and in the afternoons he could see the tallest spires of the city’s churches from the prison exercise yard. So near and yet so far; the proximity of the world outside was an exquisite torture.

And he was very different now from the man he’d been when he’d begun his sentence, less and less able to cope with the despair that was eating him up from the inside. Physically, he had survived. There had been pushes, punches, even a few kicks along the way, but he had got through them. And it could have been worse. David knew all about the mindless violence that was always waiting as a possibility around the next corner — God knows he’d seen it often enough, but so far he had avoided the worst by keeping his head down, not answering back, not getting involved.

Spiritually and emotionally, however, it was a very different story. Over time he had learnt to accept the arbitrariness of prison life: the endless petty rules that existed only to be broken, the lack of choice. And he had tried to get used to the strange combination of noise and isolation, his twin companions through the endless long days and sleep-interrupted nights. But underneath he had lost hope and purpose. His personality, already fragile and damaged at the time of his arrest, had disintegrated under the stress of prison life, and the anger and despair that raged inside him were now only kept in check by fear. He longed for someone to cling to as he sank, for someone to hold him up, and then, entirely unexpectedly one day, a friend appeared. He was called Eddie Earle.

With a smile David remembered the day that his new cellmate had arrived. He’d been alone for over a week, ever since O’Brien, the previous occupant of the top bunk, had been transferred to the punishment block in D Wing for attacking another prisoner with a pool cue in the rec room. O’Brien had not been a bad cellmate. Tall, taciturn, and religious, with a permanent furrow etched across his massive brow, he’d actually gone so far as to give David a book called JESUS FOR PRISONERS. David hadn’t yet read more than the first paragraph but he appreciated the thought. Gifts weren’t a daily occurrence in HM Prison Oxford.

O’Brien’s problem was his temper. It was what had got him put away in the first place. And he had an enemy on B Wing who’d been goading him for weeks. Something about taking too much food in the canteen, something stupid, but still O’Brien shouldn’t have reacted. He only had himself to blame. And his departure had meant that David had had to start worrying again about who would be coming in next to share his ten-by-ten cell and stinking chamber pot. Not some crazy, he prayed after lights-out to a God he had no faith in whatsoever. Not some fucking crazy psychopath. But he needn’t have worried. Eddie Earle, Easy Eddie as he liked to be known among his friends, was nothing like that at all.

Eddie had self-respect. If David had had to name one quality that singled out his new cellmate, that would’ve been the one he picked. He refused to be a number; he refused to give in to the system. David thought at first that this would lead to endless problems with the screws, problems that he could do without. But that wasn’t how it worked out. Eddie had an easy way with him — it must have been how he’d got his nickname, and the screws laughed at his jokes and didn’t seem to pick on him like they did with the other prisoners. Almost immediately this started to bring benefits for David because Eddie seemed to be able to get hold of anything he put his mind to. Soft toilet tissue, fresh fruit, magazines, and even on one memorable occasion two cans of beer appeared like magic in the cell. The screws turned a blind eye, and Eddie shared everything he got with David. ‘Because that’s what cellmates do,’ he said.

‘You’ve got to take care of yourself. That’s the secret,’ Eddie announced on that memorable afternoon when they’d sat on David’s bunk and raised their cans of Special Brew in a toast to the poster of Elizabeth Taylor in a sultry, low-cut dress that Eddie had put up on the opposite wall.

‘Liz has to, you know,’ he went on musingly. ‘Imagine the time she spends every evening with her paint bottles and stuff getting ready to go out to one of them Hollywood parties. Monty Clift’s outside, walking up and down getting all sweaty and impatient, but, oh no, she’s got to get it right. Eyebrows, makeup, lipstick. Not a fucking hair out of place. And you know why, Davy? You know why?’

It was a rhetorical question and David sat sipping his beer, halfway to heaven with the taste of it, waiting for the answer.

‘Because she cares about herself. That’s why.’

‘Not that easy in here though, is it?’ said David, sounding a note of realism. It was a long way from HM Prison Oxford to Beverly Hills, California.

‘No, it ain’t,’ said Eddie, agreeing. ‘But I’ll tell you this much — looking after yourself when you’re inside is where it’s most important. Because in here is where they’re trying to take your pride away every minute of the day. I should know — I’ve been in prison enough times. The point is, Davy, it doesn’t matter where you are — Hollywood or Her Majesty’s pleasure. You’ve got to keep your head up. That’s what I do. And it’s what you’ll do if you’ve got any sense. Why do you think I’m working out down in the gym during association? Why do I try and eat proper food?’ said Eddie, jabbing his finger over at the two rows of apples and pears carefully arranged on the rickety shelves under Elizabeth Taylor’s poster.

‘I’ve noticed you spending a lot of time looking in the mirror, Eddie. I suppose that’s the same thing,’ said David, trying to inject a lighter note into the conversation. He didn’t really disagree with Eddie’s take on how to survive prison life but it was instinctive for him to rebel a little whenever he found himself being lectured about anything. And Eddie was indeed almost obsessive about his personal appearance. He spent ages every morning stooped in front of the broken piece of glass screwed to the wall at the back of the cell, combing his jet-black hair until the parting was razor straight, and he insisted on the barber who came round to shave the prisoners every morning taking extra care with the long sideburns that he’d grown in the style of Elvis Presley. David had learnt very early in their relationship that the two great loves of Eddie’s life were America and show business.

David regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Sipping his beer, he felt more warmly disposed to Eddie than ever before at that moment and he had no wish to rock the boat or give him offence. But he needn’t have worried. Eddie had a very thick skin.

‘Yes, taking care of what you look like’s important too. Of course it is, like I said before,’ said Eddie, refusing to be put out of his stride. ‘It’s like my old auntie used to say when I was a kid — take care of your skin if you want to feel comfortable in it.’

David had begun to notice in recent days how Eddie’s aunt, like Elizabeth Taylor, was becoming an increasingly frequent visitor to their conversations.

But it wasn’t all Eddie. He knew how to listen too, and perhaps it was this quality more than any other that drew David to his new cellmate. David had two years of anger and frustration built up inside him, and it helped to let some of it out. Or rather he thought it helped. Talking about Katya and Ethan had seemed like a relief to begin with. He’d not been able to talk to anyone about how he felt until now. People didn’t discuss personal stuff in prison. It was one of the unwritten rules. But Eddie was different. He wanted to know about what had happened, every last detail of it.

Lying on their bunks after lights-out, they had long, whispered conversation into the small hours. Their positions, one on top of each other, so close and yet invisible to each other, disembodied voices in the semi-darkness, made it easier to talk somehow. And so David had told Eddie his story, or his version of it at least — about how Katya had thrown him over and how that made him feel, about Ethan, and about Katya’s coming to court and reading out his letters one after the other, looking over at him in the dock with such hatred in her eyes.

And Eddie was sympathetic, so sympathetic in fact that his words of comfort made the pain worse, not better, turning David’s slow-burning anger into rage so that he couldn’t sleep at night for the thought of Katya and what she had done to him.

Sometimes, waking up in the pale light of day, David did draw breath and wonder why Eddie seemed to care so much, but then Eddie himself provided the explanation. David’s experience with Katya fitted in with Eddie’s whole view of the opposite sex. It was another proof for his well-developed theory that women were the root of all evil. He made an exception for his dead aunt and a screen goddess or two, but the rest of them were all the same. They teased men with their tight skirts and their painted faces, promising paradise with a look of the eye or a turn of the hip, and then, once they had their victims hooked, they turned them loose just to watch their pain.

‘For the fun of it, just for the fucking fun of it,’ said Eddie, whose first experience of evil women had been his tart of a mother who had abandoned him at his grandmother’s so she could carry on with the life of debauchery that her pregnancy had briefly interrupted. And then the grandmother had not been much better, beating Eddie with her stick whenever he came home late from school and dosing him with horrible homemade medications to keep his insides clean. Only his great aunt, his grandmother’s younger sister, had shown him a little kindness, but that was only when the old woman’s back was turned, and it hadn’t been enough to stop him running away at the first opportunity. He’d gone to his mother but she wouldn’t have him. And from there he’d begun a series of relationships that all ended in disaster, culminating in marriage to a cook in one of the colleges, who’d turned him in to the police when she found out he was using the basement of the matrimonial home as a warehouse for fencing stolen goods.

‘Fucking bitch. The only thing I miss about her is her apple pie,’ said Eddie, who then promptly turned and spat out the unwanted memory into a corner of the exercise yard. The night was over, giving way to a cold, miserable morning with the sun lost behind a thick blanket of grey clouds, and the prisoners of A Wing had been turfed out into the open after an unappetizing breakfast of overcooked porridge and dried toast. David shivered, wishing he’d brought his coat from the cell.

‘Visit; visit for Earle!’

One of the screws was shouting down at them from the top of the staircase leading up to the new building over beyond B Wing, the one housing the rec room and the gym.

‘Aren’t you the lucky one? That’s your second in a week,’ said David, unable to keep the envy out of his voice. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a visit. His mother was too ashamed to come and his friends all seemed to have forgotten him. Out of sight; out of mind.

‘It’s business, Davy. I told you that before,’ said Eddie, clapping David on the shoulder as he turned to go. ‘Just because I’m banged up in here doesn’t mean I ain’t got things going on on the outside; things I need to hear about from time to time.’

Left on his own to make a final circuit of the yard, David lit his last cigarette and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs in an effort to blot out his frustration. Eddie had business on the outside because he was going to be getting out in a year or two. He had something to look forward to, unlike David, who had a lifetime of barbed wire and prison walls in front of him. Like being buried alive, he thought bitterly.

On the way back to A Wing he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned round to find his ex-cellmate, O’Brien, towering above his head. He looked thinner than before and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. D Block had clearly not agreed with him.

‘You got a new cellmate, I hear,’ said O’Brien as they approached the white wrought-iron stairs leading up to the landings above.

‘Yeah, Earle; Eddie Earle. He’s all right,’ said David defensively. It wasn’t his fault O’Brien had had to move out.

‘No, he’s not all right. I know him. He’d sell your bloody grandmother if he had the chance,’ said O’Brien. There was an urgency in his voice and a wild look in his eye that David found alarming.

O’Brien moved away as they reached his landing, but, turning round, had time for one last warning before he went into his cell: ‘You watch your back, Swain, you hear me. Or he’ll have you.’

Back in his own cell, David felt unnerved by his encounter. O’Brien did seem a little crazy, but then again why should he be so worried about Eddie? The question gnawed at David for the rest of the afternoon, partly because he too had his doubts about his new cellmate. Why was he so friendly? Why was he so interested in David’s life story? Why did he seem to care so much? David needed answers. And the only way of getting them was to ask Eddie himself.

‘Good visit?’ asked David, looking up from jesus for prisoners as Eddie was let back into the cell an hour later.

‘Yeah, all right. What you been doing?’

‘Nothing much. Talking to O’Brien.’

‘Who?’

‘Irish guy who was in here before you. Big guy, into Jesus, got a temper. He doesn’t like you.’ ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, says I ought to watch my back.’

‘And so you should, Davy. So you should. Anyone who doesn’t do that in here’s a fucking idiot.’

David couldn’t see Eddie’s expression. He had his back to the bunks, doing something over by the shelves.

‘Do you know him?’ David asked

‘Yeah, I think I know who you mean, if it’s the same guy. Jesus Joe he was called when I last saw him. Down in Winchester nick a couple of years back. We’ve crossed paths once or twice. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him. That’s all. Nothing to write home about.’

There was a casual note in Eddie’s voice that sounded forced somehow. It was like he knew more than he was saying.

‘Why doesn’t he like you?’ asked David, persisting with his questions.

‘I don’t know. He’s stupid and I’m not. I nick stuff and he listens to the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,’ said Eddie, imitating O’Brien’s deep Irish voice surprisingly well. ‘You know what I mean.’

Turning round, Eddie stood looking down at his cellmate for a moment and then came and sat down beside him on the bottom bunk.

‘Got you worried, has he, this Irish bloke?’ he asked, looking David in the eye.

‘No, not really. It’s not that. It’s just, well, it’s just I don’t get why you’re so interested in me, why you keep asking me all these questions, why you’re nice to me. I mean other cons aren’t like that. Some of them are all right, but…’

‘They’re not like me?’ said Eddie, finishing David’s question for him.

‘Yes.’

David felt good and bad all at the same time. Good because he’d got out the question that he needed to ask. Bad because he didn’t want to give Eddie offence, and he hoped he hadn’t. Eddie was the only friend he’d got in this God-forsaken place and he didn’t want to lose him.

‘So, if I say I’m nice out of the goodness of my heart, it won’t do for you?’ asked Eddie with a smile.

David shook his head, feeling relieved. At least Eddie didn’t seem to be taking it the wrong way.

Eddie eyed David meditatively for a moment. He looked like a bookmaker weighing up the odds. And then, as if making a decision, he leaned over and clapped David on the shoulder.

‘All right, Davy, I’ll tell you why I’m nice. But don’t you go blabbing if you don’t like what I say.’

He put his forefinger up to his lips, and David nodded.

‘Okay. I’m nice to you because I like you, but it’s also because I need you.’

‘Need me!’ David sounded shocked. It was the last thing he’d expected to hear. Eddie was the resourceful one, able to get almost anything he wanted from God knows where. What could he possibly need David Swain for?

‘To escape,’ said Eddie, answering the question.

Escape. It was the thought that was always at the outer edge of David’s consciousness, that he wouldn’t let in because he knew there was no way out of this hell and thinking about it would send him crazy. And yet here it was, spoken aloud as if it was something possible, something that could actually happen. David felt his heart beating like a hammer inside his chest; he put out his hand and held on hard to the metal ladder leading up to the top bunk as if to prevent himself falling, even though he was sitting with his feet on the ground.

‘I need you because it’ll take two of us to get out of here, and I think you want it as much as I do. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that you’ve got to want to escape more than anything else in the whole world if you’re going to have any chance of success. Do you want it that much, Davy? Do you?’

David didn’t answer and so Eddie went back on the attack.

‘Don’t you want to see that Katya woman one more time and tell her what you think, tell her how you feel? Or maybe you’re happy to let her sit there in that great fine house of hers laughing at you while you rot away in here?’

Eddie looked at his cellmate expectantly. David swallowed hard but he still didn’t respond. And yet Eddie knew he’d found his mark. There was a fire in David’s eyes. They were wider open than they’d been since his arrest. He’d been thinking of the world outside — of air and water and trees and grass, but now he thought of Katya and his mouth twisted in a grimace. Eddie was right. She had these things every minute of the day. Fuck her, he thought savagely. Fuck her.

‘Yes, I want out of here,’ he said. ‘I want it so much it hurts.’

‘All right,’ said Eddie, looking pleased. ‘That’s what I thought. But you’ll have to do as I say. It won’t be easy. Escaping’s no piece of cake.’

David nodded and then looked up instinctively at the tiny window set high in the back wall of the cell. It was tiny, far too small for a man to fit through, even if he could find a way of sawing through the three thick metal bars cemented inside the frame. There was a ventilation shaft in the ceiling above the window, but that too was a hopeless cause. The aperture was a third the size of the window. And the cell door was three inches of solid steel that couldn’t be unlocked from the inside. The only opening in it was a spy hole near the top, the so-called Judas hole, through which the screws could watch their charges without being seen themselves.

Not easy! Getting out of here was downright impossible. It was stupid to even think about it.

Eddie smiled. He knew what David was thinking. He’d watched his cellmate’s expression change from hope to despair as his eyes travelled around the cell.

‘Don’t worry, Davy,’ he said. ‘It’s not this cell we’re getting out of. It’d take more than a year to dig your way out of here. Even if we had the tools, which we don’t.’

‘How then?’

‘You know they’re going to be painting the gym and the rec room over in the new block next week?’

‘No.’

‘Well, they are. They’re putting up scaffolding tomorrow on the top floor. They need it because the ceilings are so high.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A little bird told me. It doesn’t matter how I know. What matters is they’re doing it,’ said Eddie impatiently.

‘Sorry.’

‘The point is, Davy, the scaffolding’s an opportunity for us. And opportunities are your best chance. Not tunnelling away for a year and a half just to find yourself moved to another wing when you’re still chiselling away in the small hours.’

‘How’s it an opportunity?’

‘Because we can use it to get at the rec room ceiling, punch a hole in that, and climb out onto the roof. And then down into the rear yard.’

‘But that’s thirty feet. More maybe.’

‘Twenty-eight I reckon. We’ll use dust sheets. They put down plenty of them when they painted the canteen last month, and they’re bigger than the sheets we have in the cells.’

‘How do we get out of the rear yard?’ asked David, growing more sceptical by the minute. ‘There are two bloody great walls to go over once you’re out there. If you get out there. And the perimeter one’s more than thirty feet. I know it is. I’ve seen the top of it over the roof of the new block from the back of the exercise yard, so it’s got to be higher than the rec room. How do we go thirty feet up in the air, Eddie? I doubt the builders left too many footholds.’

‘We don’t need any footholds. There’ll be a rope ladder and a car on the other side. I’ve got connections, or have you forgotten that?’

‘So why do you need me if you’ve got connections?’

‘Because they’re on the outside, not in here,’ said Eddie, sounding as if he was running out of patience. ‘Until we get to the perimeter wall we’re on our own. And so I’ll need you to keep a lookout and help me over the first wall. I’m a lot more worried about that one than the other one, to be honest.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’ve got to find a way to get up it without a ladder. Down’s easy, it’s up that’s the problem. But don’t worry. I’m working on it,’ said Eddie, tapping the top of his head with his forefinger.

David sat back heavily, resting his head on the wall behind him, trying to digest the information he’d been given. He felt like he’d been put through a wringer, catapulted from one conflicting emotion to another with no time to catch his breath and think. He’d felt excitement at first as he dared to think about escape for the first time as a real possibility, then doubt and anger too that he had let down his defences and allowed himself to be suckered into believing in miracles, and then the beginning of a new thought — that maybe Eddie did know what he was talking about, that maybe he could get them out of here.

‘How do you know about all this escaping stuff?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ve done it before.’

‘What? Got out?’

‘Once yes, twice no. You need some luck too, you know. And I don’t use violence. Not like your religious friend,’ said Eddie, pointing over at David’s discarded copy of jesus for prisoners.

‘Does violence help?’

‘Sometimes, but it’s hard to get weapons in from the outside. You can fake them, of course. Dillinger got the better of fifteen Indiana state troopers back in the Thirties. Used a dummy gun he’d made in the carpentry shop; whittled it out of wood and blackened it with shoe polish. But I prefer not to be seen on the way out if I can help it.’

‘Why do you do it?’

‘Escape, you mean? Because it gives you hope, keeps you alive. It’s easy to lose yourself in here. Why do you think they have those suicide nets hanging under the landings out there? And this time it’s also because I need to. I’ve got debts I couldn’t collect before I got sentenced and now I’m running out of time.’

Eddie got up and went and stood under the window, looking down at his cellmate. He took a shilling coin from his pocket and passed it up and down between the fingers of his hand several times before he broke the silence.

‘So, are you in?’ he asked. ‘I need to know, Davy, because that scaffolding’s not going to be there forever and I need to make my plans. And if it’s not you I’m going with, I’ll need to find someone else.’

David didn’t answer at first. Part of him still didn’t believe escape was possible. This prison was like a bloody fortress even if it was in the middle of the town. But then again, what did he have to lose? So what if he got a few more years added on to his life sentence. He’d be an old man anyway if he ever got out, way past his sell-by date.

‘All right, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘But once we’re out, I want money and a gun. Not a fake one like that American bloke’s. A real one with bullets inside. Can you get that for me?’

Eddie looked hard at his cellmate, pursing his lips. Once again David was reminded of a bookmaker weighing up the odds. And then all at once Eddie seemed to make up his mind. He nodded, walked over to David, and held out his hand to seal their agreement.