So, let’s get on with it!
57
Joseph walks briskly up the gangplank, past a skinny boy in a ridiculous steward’s uniform, and heads towards the ship’s stern, keeping to the lower level. There’s a map screwed to the bulkhead at the foot of these stairs. Joseph looks it over. A ship’s toilets are supposed to be called heads, but here the stick-man-with-his-legs-spread sign will have to do. He finds the gents behind a heavy sprung door and, wow, that’s an aggressive lemony smell indeed. This cubicle here is empty. Joseph locks himself inside. Then he takes off everything but his trousers and shirt. That’s right, jacket, jumper, even his boxers, socks and boots. These, plus everything else, he stows inside not one, not two, but three heavy-duty rubbish bags, each of which he seals with a triple-looped elastic band.
Back out in the main bit of the bathroom he catches sight of his face in the mirror. Bristly. Plus the colour of porridge. Woah. Can he really go through with this?
Has to.
In a minute.
No, now.
Otherwise, the ship will sail.
Yes, but for now, just spend sixty seconds hanging on to this here sink.
At school they kept the porridge warm in big baking trays, then cut it out with cheese-wire to serve. It’s true: each serving was a little slab with straight edges. Square porridge!
Get a grip, man.
But he already has: an iron grip on the metal sink.
And his feet are buzzing on the equally metal floor.
Because? Is that deeper shuddering the engines kicking in?
Go, go, go.
Joseph slips out into the corridor and works his way swiftly to the ship’s stern, or as far back as he can get on this lowest level, right to where the last lifeboat is slung. Dockside lights bob and sway, and that’s a proper thick rich diesel smell, and there, he spots one, and another, and a third – the third being closest. Ladders, all bolted to the jetty wall, thirty or forty metres away, ladders he noticed while listening to the guy with the enormous nose drone on and on and …
Hold on.
He’s squinting hard at the nearest ladder and yes, no, yes, he sees that he’s right, the bottom rungs don’t quite reach down to the shifting blackness of the water. He doesn’t remember that detail. Due fucking diligence! Oh, Jesus. Possibly a tidal problem. Doesn’t matter: if he can’t reach the bottom ladder he’ll be shafted, meaning he’ll drown.
Think.
What he needs is a bit of rope.
He could have bought one. But he didn’t. What a complete fucking …
And yet, hang on, this is a ferry, with lifeboats, and in all probability, yes, back there, a lifebelt on the metal wall. For pulling-in rather than simply-bobbing-about purposes, it is fixed to a length of rope. Just wait for that couple, clearly having some sort of domestic, to reach the door and go back inside, before quickly liberating the lifebelt, which is more easily said than done, a right drown-while-you-wait-shaped fiddle in fact.
He gets it free just as the engine pitch shifts again.
Now, before anyone comes!
Really?
He’s actually going to do this?
Just get on with it!
Meaning: yes he is.
Ha! Soldier! Big Beast! Now!
Joseph ties one end of the rope to the neck of the bin bags. And quickly! That’ll do. Now he lowers it over the railing. Remember that thing on Dartmoor? With the cold lake. Hands like lobster claws. Well, keep a goddamn firm hold of the other end of the rope, now. And shimmy over the railings. Wow, the metal is cold. Hang on tight. Lean back. Can he see the bin bags on the rope end, bobbing below? Check! With the free end also reaching the water? Also check. Good! Now, hold both bits of looped rope super tight and lean back and step down, hanging on, not slipping, and Christ, this is hard, lowering himself evenly, one step and rope-hold at a time, but yes, that’s right, and again, and—
Woah!
One half of the rope gets away.
Meaning: Joseph falls.
58
Five months after it, it being what he did to the deserving baker, Joseph’s tour was over and nothing beyond the roasted children – everyone heard about the apples – had come to light. Joseph carried the day in his face, though. Needed fourteen stitches. The medic who put them in did a terrible job and the scar, a candy-pink swoosh below Joseph’s jawline, never entirely faded. They sent Reid and his shot-up shoulder home to recuperate. Joseph never saw him or the two women, Katja and Anis, again. He never found out if they knew what he had done, and anyway, even if they had, were they about to complain? As for Lancaster, well, he and Joseph didn’t speak about it again themselves because it hadn’t happened.
Except that, well, it had.
And because it had, not four days after returning home, Joseph found himself making an appointment to see his commanding officer, Major Terry Riceman, or Very Nice Man as he was known. Riceman had decorated his office with his own photographs, most of which, Joseph noticed, as the Major made a good stab of welcoming him home, were black-and-white landscapes with fences prominent in the foreground and something small on the horizon. A barn in that one. Some horses there. A pylon. He was a small man with a paunch but he carried himself stiffly, like a Staffordshire terrier.
‘You as well?’ he said after Joseph had explained his plan.
‘Sir?’
‘I appreciate that it was a trying tour, but these things recede. You’ll see.’
‘It’s not Bosnia, sir. I enjoyed it. In fact, I’m not sure the army will give me another opportunity like that. Which is partly why it’s time for me to move on.’
‘Did you two rehearse this?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Those were more or less Lancaster’s words. Good gig, he called it, rewarding, but … blah blah blah … time for a fresh start.’
‘No, I didn’t know he …’
Major Riceman was inspecting his fingers. He picked up a letter opener and used it to scour the edge of a cuticle. Joseph watched. Why justify himself to this man? Behind the Major’s desk, through the window, a yellow rope was swishing lazily among the leafless branches of one of the base’s big beech trees. A chainsaw buzzed briefly, followed by the dull crack of a branch hitting tarmac.
‘And are you heading off in the same direction?’ Riceman asked at length.
‘What direction is that?’
‘When I pressed him, Lancaster revealed he intends to bat for the money men.’
His clipped diction was as phoney as his photographs. Joseph said nothing, waited for him to explain.
‘Mr Lancaster is selling his skills to something called a corporate security firm. Not quite mercenary work, but not much better. He probably thinks he’s going to be some sort of commercial spy, but I imagine it will mostly involve him drinking tea in prefab huts, patrolling light-industrial estates with a torch, that sort of thing.’
‘We haven’t discussed it.’
‘’Course you haven’t, but you must have a plan of your own, no?’
The rope flapped loosely among the branches again. Remember leaping from the lower branches of the big pine into those rhododendron bushes at school? Great fun, that. Joseph nodded and said, ‘Arboreal work, sir.’
‘Come again?’ Riceman narrowed his eyes.
‘I’m going to retrain as a tree surgeon.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘Sir?’
‘You’re an officer. To swap that for monkeying around with a saw, pruning things?’
Joseph thought of saying something about liking the outdoors and wanting to be his own boss, but, ‘Will that be all, sir?’ came out instead.
Riceman sat back, his shirt buttons tight across his stomach. The chainsaw revved once, twice, a third time, but he still didn’t cotton on. Joseph stood before him. Riceman puffed out his cheeks and shook his head and said, ‘I suppose so, yes.’
59
Splash.
The cold blackness hits Jos
eph from all sides at once. It swells within his clothes, which cling and balloon as he hauls himself upwards.
Jesus, that hurt.
Remember the time with the toaster, the stuck bagel, plus fork?
Well, this is like that: after the first, obliterating belt of electricity, every nerve shrieking.
He breaks the surface.
Breathe!
And tread water, lying back: work out which way’s which.
Something brushes his face. It’s the rope, which followed him over the rail.
He grabs hold of it and, keeping himself afloat with one hand and his egg-beater feet, reefs the rope in. The bags are still attached to it. Every time his ears dip below the surface, he hears the thin buzz of the ship’s engine.
Quick, get clear.
He sculls away on his back. There’s nobody leaning over the railing above him, no faces looking down. It doesn’t take long to reach the deeper darkness beneath the looming dock wall. There, to the left, the ladder. He drags himself along the slimy brickwork until he’s beneath it. And it’s a bloody good job the rope followed him because yes, the bottom rung is tantalisingly out of reach. He treads water in the shadow, feeling for the free end of the rope. Tying a knot in it is absurdly hard: he has to dip beneath the surface and bob up to breathe. And when he’s done, it’s no mean feat throwing it the measly few feet through the ladder. He tries, fails, takes in a lungful of water and drops beneath the surface to cough into the deep. Tries again, also fails. With each throw the leaden cold takes a firmer hold. When, finally, the knot drops back down to him through the bars, he’s just about spent. But he still has to tie the rope to itself and haul himself clear of the water, before the cold saps the last of his strength.
Lara.
Zac.
Naomi.
He’s hanging onto the rope now, but he’s still in the water, letting it take his weight, gathering himself.
Gather quickly!
His fingers are frozen hooks.
Back and shoulders? Also locking stiff.
Possibly: give up?
Wow, that’s a delicious, lemon meringue pie prospect.
No, no, no.
Lar-ac-omi.
His head dips beneath the surface again and as it does he hears a fierce shift in the engine whine. Jesus! Get on with it! He regains the surface just in time to hear a mighty horn blast, and the – wow – blind panic is quite something: up he goes, all in a surge, onto the bottom rung.
60
The bottom rung: that’s where you’ll start.
Very Nice Man. He said that. Sent for Joseph a few days before he was due to leave the army for good, sat him down, cupped his little paunch, leaned back in his chair and revealed, trying not to sound like it had kept him up at night, that he’d been thinking about Joseph’s ‘idea about the trees’. Wasn’t it a young man’s game? Not that Joseph, at twenty-four, was old, but still: such a job as tree surgery had a shelf life, didn’t it, and well, had Joseph considered any other avenues? Because unless he built himself a lopping and pruning empire in which younger men did the actual monkeying, he’d possibly regret the decision come what, forty-three or forty-four?
When Joseph conceded that he wasn’t in fact dead set on arboreal work, Riceman sat forward in his chair.
‘Have you given the City any thought?’ he asked.
Joseph hadn’t.
‘Specifically, banking.’
‘I know nothing about money.’
‘Apparently, you don’t have to. It’s a well-trodden path on leaving the regiment. To tell you the truth, I thought about it myself back in the day. Still … you’re open to the idea?’
Joseph shrugged.
There and then Riceman picked up the phone and put in a call to Airdeen’s head of recruitment. They’d been at school together. Joseph was thinking how banking at least ticked the something-his-dad-would-not-have-approved-of box. Meanwhile Riceman was spouting phrases so banal – ‘leg up’, ‘show him the ropes’, ‘safe pair of hands’ – Joseph almost wondered whether the whole thing was a wind-up. But it wasn’t. And a month later there he was, walking into the bank’s foyer, five minutes early for his induction day, tailored suit trousers breaking over polished toecaps, with a brand new Aspinal briefcase at his side, because if you’re going to do business, look like you mean it, yes?
He’d fought in two wars but his mouth was very dry.
Also, his briefcase was empty.
There he was anyway, a brogue on the …
61
Bottom rung.
As at Airdeen Clore, once on the ladder Joseph wastes no time in climbing up it. Despite his bin-bag luggage, he reaches the top without difficulty, but there he pauses, dripping, just below the level of the dock, face pressed to the wall in the dark as the ferry sounds its horn again, performs a nautical three-point turn, and slews away into the night. There’s a saltwater smell in the rotten concrete close up. Remember that harbour wall in Pembrokeshire? Jumping in and climbing out. Yes, but that was a summer’s afternoon; now he’s shaking with the cold, which is called ___.
Damn gap is understandable, given the headache, but ___?
That’s it: shivering.
When the right word comes, he peers over the top. There, to his left, is the Portakabin in which, some eight months ago, he was offered a plate of Jammy Dodgers and custard creams to go with the coffee in a plastic cup while the bloke with the big nose talked about the steps his team had taken to reduce costs. Who was that guy? Why was he, Joseph Ashcroft, Big Beast, even required to talk to him? Well, he was. By bigger beasts. Such things exist? Admit that? Yes, and now he’s required to make a dash for it, and work his way into that gap between the makeshift buildings.
Wow, his heartbeat is ridiculous. Ah, that time the washing machine skipped off its bearings or axle or whatever. Well, much the same spin-cycle whoosh-clatter fills Joseph’s ears now.
And his fingers are at best semi-functional: he has a terrible time getting his wet T-shirt off, doesn’t even bother to undo the bin bags, just claws his way through to the dry clothes inside. These he yanks on damply, everything: hoodie, jacket, boots. Trousers-wise, he’ll have to make do wet. At least he’s out of the wind here. He pulls his hood up. And gradually, by holding hard to himself and bouncing on his toes, he starts to feel himself again, not as in ‘feel like his old self’, but more ‘feel the bits that have gone numb, like trunk, arms, and head’.
What’s he doing?
Waiting, that’s what.
The ship will be well out into the Channel now. Nothing else is sailing or docking until the morning: he checked. The car-hire concessions will have shut for the night. Porters gone home, plus whoever else there is, or was. Yes, by now there’ll be practically nobody about. What’s the phrase? Something to do with something in a cupboard? He nails it: skeleton staff.
And look at that cat sauntering past, its shadow swelling on the chain-links. Joseph isn’t sure how long he would have waited for just the right moment to throw his bag over the fence and hup himself over it, had it not been for that cat turning up. It was a sign. Saying: I, a cat, am relaxed enough to stroll on by, because the coast, quite literally, is clear.
So get on with it.
He does.
He climbs the fence and drops down on the other side in a car park full of white vans, one of which he immediately ducks beside, thinking: ice floes. He’s like a polar bear, swimming between them, making his way towards the continental shelf or whatever it is. Actually, it’s the exit. There’s a kiosk, but he can’t spot anyone in it, and a barrier, but that’s to stop vehicles entering, not people getting out. He can just walk round it. Even so, best do that unobserved. So let’s wait here between this refrigerated truck and that transit van until the lone car drifting by has gone and then, as in now, walk as nonchalantly as possible out of the car park, bag over shoulder, pretending to look at a something in his hand, a mobile phone, perhaps.
And keep walking.
Along this service road. Over the junction. Past these raised flowerbeds, which appear overrun with weeds. And on and on, all the way into town. Where it’s well, well past closing time. There’s vomit on the pavement there, watch out. What day is it, anyway? Joseph has no idea. Does it matter? No. All that matters is that he has pulled it off! Probably. A minicab slows beside him but he turns his face to the shop window. An estate agent. Wow, the houses, they’re practically giving them away down here. With his next bonus he could no doubt buy that one with the sea view. Probably. Still, he’s done a far better thing.
Hasn’t he?
Only if it was successful.
Look: they’ll bite on the ticket transaction and see that he boarded the ship and the search will skip sideways to France. There’ll be no record of a passport check at the French border, which will suggest either that he gave the border police the slip, which is possible, what with his skill set, or that he jumped overboard, opting for a burial at sea, which is also possible, given his predicament. They’re not about to imagine he swam home, are they? Because that would be like swimming back towards the shark, Lancaster, which would be, purple, porous …
Huh.
Preposterous.
62
Most people at the bank seemed to think that a bit of sleep deprivation was macho, but if you’ve spent a week on rations in a ditch, staying up for a couple of nights in a warm office, eating takeaways and doing things to spreadsheets, things Joseph soon discovered he was actually pretty good at, is hardly a terrifying prospect. The only thing that Joseph had to muscle through was Naomi’s disappointment when he cancelled things they’d arranged to do: dinners, trips to the cinema, weekend breaks (he could afford them!), et cetera. Fact was, she hadn’t been as delighted to have him leave the army as he’d hoped she would be.
‘A banker now?’ was what she said when he told her.
Escape and Evasion Page 14