There was always a good piece of meat for Sampson in the canteen – not the shitty sort of gristle that always got dumped on Charlie’s plate – and the vegetables were always hot and there was a seat readily available, wherever he wanted to sit. Just as there was, always, in the recreation room, right in front of the television set, where Prudell and his boyfriend of the moment and the other landing chiefs had their reserved places, not where Charlie was always heaved and shunted, if he bothered to go at all, at the back, usually against the wall. If he hadn’t wanted it that way – for the protection – there wouldn’t have been a bloody seat anyway.
Sampson’s uniform jacket was altered, to fit, in the prison tailoring shop and in the second month he got one of the better jobs, in the prison hospital, not as cushy as the library but a damned sight better than the workrooms where they made the mail sacks and the street name signs and car registration plates.
Between them, in the cell, the first day hostility worsened, the attitude so obvious that Hickley and Butterworth were aware of it and spread the story along the landing, which enhanced Sampson further because it meant further harassment of Charlie.
Charlie was aware of the bulge beneath Sampson’s tunic as the man entered the cell, only a token effort made at concealment. Directly inside the door, the man took the bottle from the waistband of his trousers and put it openly on the table between them. It was whisky, single malt, in a proper bottle with the cap still sealed.
‘It is whisky, isn’t it?’ said Sampson.
‘Looks like it,’ said Charlie.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Sampson. ‘Whisky’s your drink, isn’t it?’
Charlie stared up at the man, suspiciously. ‘Who said?’
‘Prudell,’ replied the other man. ‘Told me that’s what got you put on restrictions, for having whisky here in the cell.’
‘So what?’
Sampson’s face tightened momentarily, but only momentarily. The smile that came was patronising. ‘So I thought you might like a drink.’
‘Why?’ demanded Charlie.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it might be a set up, that’s why not. Because it’s been six weeks since I’ve been on restrictions and the bastards haven’t been able to get me for any infringement and if they caught me again, with whisky in a mug, then this time the governor wouldn’t give me the benefit of any doubt.’
‘Which would make me a grass,’ said Sampson.
‘Isn’t that what you got thirty years for?’
‘I’m trying to cross bridges, Charlie. Like I tried to cross bridges the first day.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s bloody stupid not to,’ said Sampson. ‘OK, so outside you and I wouldn’t even be aware of each other’s existence. Want to be aware of it, even. But we’re not outside. We’re in a box, fourteen feet by fourteen feet and we’re going to be forced to live together for a long time. So why don’t we face the reality of the situation? I don’t like you any more than you like me but I’m prepared to make the effort, for life to be minimally tolerable.’
The man was right of course, Charlie realised, always objective. Like Hargrave had been right. They weren’t outside, with a choice. And he wasn’t able to sit in judgment, in his own individual idea of judgment, and despise this man for being a traitor, any more than he could despise Hargrave for being a murderer or Prudell for being a vicious homosexual thug who beat up old ladies and stole their purses. Trouble was, Sampson was the smarmy, self-assured sort of sod who’d always got right up his nose. ‘You’ve been pretty successful at adjusting to the reality of the situation, haven’t you?’
Sampson refused to react to the constant challenge and went on winning because of it. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘On that first day you told me to adjust and learn to conform. And you said I’d find it bloody awful. And you’re right, it is bloody awful. It’s the most awful situation in which I’ve ever been and because it is I’ve adjusted and learned to conform as fast as I can, to make it as bearable as I can. I’ve made my peace and my arrangements with the people who matter. No one bothers me Charlie. Because I don’t bother them. I don’t practise dumb insolence to little men like Hickley and Butterworth because that’s what it would be, in a place like this. Dumb. And I acknowledge that people like Prudell are masters of their territory, just like my father acknowledged that our gamekeeper knew the grouse moors better than he did.’
Prudell broke the metal seal on the bottle top, poured whisky into his mug and held the bottle out in invitation towards Charlie, who stared at it, hoping the longing wasn’t obvious on his face. He made no effort to accept it.
‘What is it with you, Charlie?’ said Sampson, putting the bottle back on the table. ‘Pride? Arrogance? Where do you get this attitude that you can fight the world and win?’
‘I always have,’ said Charlie, carelessly.
Sampson laughed outright at him. ‘Have you?’ he jeered, gesturing around the claustrophobic cell. ‘Have you? You call this winning! You might have been good once, Charlie. I know you were good once. I’ve had the lectures about your expertise more times than I can remember. But you lost it. I don’t care whether you consider yourself a traitor or what you think you are. It doesn’t matter. OK, so maybe you were set up. It happens, in the business. Our business. And maybe you taught them a lesson. Which doesn’t often happen in the business. But they won in the end, Charlie. The establishment always does. That’s why it’s called the establishment.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Charlie, unable to think of anything better but wishing he could.
‘It isn’t bollocks. It’s reality. That’s one of the things they used to say about you: that you were a realist, able to adjust and manoeuvre faster than anyone else. What’s happened to the reality now?’
Right again, Charlie accepted, not wanting but having to. He knew it and everyone else knew it so why the hell couldn’t he accept it? Because it meant giving in! he told himself desperately. He knew all the prison rules – the written and the unwritten – and all the dodges and all the shortcuts: like objectivity, it was a necessity for survival. And he could play the part – if they’d only let him – but if it stopped being that, becoming unthinking obedience and conformity instead of an act, then it would mean he had given up. ‘I’ll settle it my way,’ he said, still careless.
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Sampson, jeering still. ‘I thought you were good! I really did. I listened to all the stories and somehow you became a legend and when I learned I was coming here and that you were here I actually wanted to meet you! But you’re not clever or smart, not any more. You go through this bullshit routine about refusing to become institutionalised but that’s exactly what you’ve become, just like those grey-faced, shuffling zombies who’ve been here for more years than they can remember. You know what prison has made you, Charlie Muffin? It’s made you fucking stupid.’
He even swore better, the word natural and easy now, not forced, thought Charlie. He said, ‘You want a boyfriend, why not go and live with Prudell? You’ve got enough pull with the screws to make the change.’ Charlie swung away from the direct confrontation, in the familiar avoidance pose of lying out on his bunk with his hands behind his head, staring towards the noughts and crosses window pattern and hoping the movement would appear what he intended it to be, a nonchalant dismissal of boredom.
‘Twelve years, four months and four days,’ said Sampson, from the other bunk. ‘Three days if you subtract today, even though it isn’t fully over.’
Charlie swallowed, refusing to respond.
‘I know all about the calendar,’ said Sampson, ‘I know about the régime you’ve tried to establish. How you count every day off. Seen you do it, when you didn’t think I’d notice. The instructors would be proud, if they knew how well you’d remembered.’
Still Charlie gave no reaction.
‘I’m going to have another drink,’ said Sampson. ‘Sure you won’t join me?’
�
�Go fuck yourself,’ said Charlie, gripped by a feeling of helplessness. The feeling worsened when he remembered that was how he had ended their last big argument.
It was a week later when Hickley came to the library, fifteen minutes before it closed. The doorway was blocked from Charlie’s view by a shelf; he was aware of some conversation and of some half-hearted, flustered warning from Hargrave but didn’t realise what it was until the prison officer appeared at the opening into the book-lined corridor.
‘Cosy here,’ said Hickley.
‘Can I help you, Mr Hickley?’ said Charlie, cautiously. He’d done nothing so they couldn’t put him on restriction. Not unless it was a phoney charge.
‘I don’t think you can help me,’ said the prison officer. ‘I don’t think you can help anyone, Muffin. You can’t even help yourself.’
Charlie avoided looking directly at the man, careful of any accusation of unspoken insolence. There was nothing he could say to that, so not replying wouldn’t be insubordination.
‘Cosy,’ said Hickley again. ‘You like it here, Muffin?’
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Hickley,’ said Charlie. The enforced politeness was like a sour-tasting lump, in that part of his throat from which he couldn’t swallow to lose it.
‘Pity,’ said the officer, with lead-footed sarcasm. ‘Terrible pity.’
Nothing to say to that, either, Charlie realised. Just as he realised something else. Bastards, he thought: absolute bastards.
‘Time you were transferred,’ said Hickley. ‘Bad policy to keep someone in the same job for too long. Can even be dangerous. And you didn’t come here for a rest cure, after all, did you Muffin? You came here because you’re a shitty little spy who’s got to be punished. You know what we did to spies in the war, Muffin?’
‘Yes, Mr Hickley,’ said Charlie.
‘Tell me what we did to spies in the war.’
‘Shot them,’ said Charlie.
‘Shot them what?’ pounced the bully, at once.
‘Shot them, Mr Hickley,’ said Charlie.
‘Still should,’ said the man. ‘Don’t you think spies should still be shot, Muffin?’
Sampson included? wondered Charlie. He said, ‘Yes, Mr Hickley.’
‘Vacancy in the registration plant workshop just right for you,’ said Hickley. ‘You’re transferring tomorrow.’
The most dangerous place, thought Charlie: there was a small furnace and an indentation press and hammers and files and chisels and caustic solutions used in the spraying and the painting. A hundred different ways he could be attacked and hurt.
To the hovering Hargrave, Hickley said, for no other reason than to prolong his goading of Charlie, ‘Taking him away isn’t going to wreck the administration of the library, is it?’
‘No, Mr Hickley,’ said the prison librarian.
‘You’ll get on well with the new man,’ promised Hickley. He began talking directly to Hargrave but finished turning back to Charlie, to savour the moment fully. ‘Everyone does,’ he said ‘Sampson’s a good man. Knows the way things are supposed to work.’
‘Bastard!’ shouted Charlie, thirty minutes later, standing over Sampson in their shared cell.
The other man smiled up from his bedspace, appearing unconcerned at Charlie’s fury. ‘I didn’t fix it.’
‘Fucking liar!’
‘A state registered male nurse got sentenced for gross indecency: the hospital was the obvious place for him. So I had to be moved on.’
‘I could hurt you,’ said Charlie, striving for control. ‘I could knock shit out of you and put you in so much pain you’d wish you’d never been born.’
Sampson frowned up at Charlie’s bulged, sagging figure and then down at himself. Sampson never appeared to do any proper physical exercise but he was tautly thin, his body hard and muscle-ridged and Charlie wondered if it were a threat he could carry out.
‘Maybe you could and there again, maybe you couldn’t,’ said Sampson, stretching back challengingly to expose himself to any attack Charlie might make. ‘But I’ve made friends here. Friends who might decide that if I get hurt they have to try to even the score for me. You thought about that?’
Defeated, Charlie slumped back on to his own bunk. ‘Bastard,’ he said, emptily.
‘A lot of institutionalised prisoners do that,’ said Sampson. ‘Talk to themselves, I mean.’
General Valery Kalenin was a career intelligence officer, a man who entered the Soviet system – although fortunately from the safely protected distance in the early years from Georgia – when it was known as the NKVD and under the direction of Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, and risen to the rank of chairman of what is now known as the Komitet Gusudarstvennoy Bezo-pasnosti, the KGB, by the combination of outstanding ability and unfailing political awareness. Kalenin was a man who enjoyed his job and the power and privileges it gave him and more than any previous chairman personally involved himself in the workings and running of the agency’s myriad divisions. Kalenin, whose devotion to the service precluded marriage, even casual, passing affairs, all hobbies except the history of tank warfare and the enjoyment of a wide circle of friends, recognised that his refusal to delegate could be construed as a fault. But it was a fault he could not – despite some half-hearted efforts – correct. He was the controller and he needed completely to feel that he was in control.
Which was why the monitoring of the messages from the British embassy had come so early to his attention, rather than be filtered and relayed through a deputy, who might have waited for their cryptologists to break the code before bringing it forward. That might, Kalenin reflected, have been better anyway because at the moment all he had was an unintelligible jumble that he knew to be a coded message, was obviously therefore important but without the slightest indication of what it might be. Or what the dangers were that it might represent.
Kalenin stood at the window of his sparse office, gazing down upon the memorial to the network’s founder in Dzerzhinsky Square. First, months before, the warning that there was a spy within their service. Now this, a new code, so far defying all attempts at deciphering. Kalenin didn’t need it to be deciphered to know it was confirmation of the earlier intelligence.
He turned back to his desk and the telephone. The conversation with the code-breaking department was sharp and demanding, no instructions further than he’d already given, the call simply to let them know the transmissions had the personal attention of the chairman himself and were therefore important.
‘I don’t think that man’s human at all,’ protested the head of the analysts’ department, a mathematician named Malik. ‘I think he was made by a team of engineers and scientists in a damned laboratory somewhere.’
‘Then they made a mistake,’ said his assistant, not looking up from the message they were unsuccessfully trying to understand. They over-tuned his engine.’
Chapter Five
They didn’t hurry. They didn’t have to. They knew and Charlie knew they could play with him as long as they liked, a communal cat with a captive mouse: a mouse, reflected Charlie bitterly, that didn’t have a hole to run to.
The workshop in which the registration plates were made was a hot, chemical-smelling, metal-clattering shell of a place, L-shaped with the furnace that caused the heat and made the metal malleable at one end, feeding out on to a conveyor belt lined either side by the indentation punches and continuing on to the bend in the L, where the spraying was done before the final sequence, the baking on of the paint in a small series of ovens almost as hot as the furnace at the other end. And every step of the process and cranny of the workshop a potential for attack, Charlie recognised, professionally. He drew on that professionalism, desperate to remember every trick and hint, trying to get a workspot on the outer section of the conveyor, where the wall was to his back and not in the middle corridor, the main walkway where people would always be behind him, straining to identify the main danger points in a roomful of danger. The furnace was the most obvious. It was gas-h
eated and the protection doors were always being opened and closed, for temperature checks, with frequent opportunities for him to be pushed forward, so the outstretched hand to save himself would go instead into the flames. And directly beyond, as well. The plates came out glowing, soft and ready for the numbered imprint, hot enough to take the skin off if they came into contact with an unprotected part of his body. The tidy-up section was the safest, Charlie decided: the plates were cool enough to handle here, beyond the impression stamp that could have crushed his hand from his arm if it were suddenly thrust into it. In the tidy-up section two banks of men, either side of the belt, honed off with rough chisels the unnecessary metal chips and edges from the stamping process and rejected any plate that had been badly printed, clipping it back into the return half of the belt for recycling. Charlie’s apprehension rose, further on. Here the plates were sprayed, under-coat first, then top-coat, men encased in protective clothing and helmeted and masked by filtering headgear, armed with spray guns that only needed the slightest redirection not to cover the intended plate but squirt instead a blinding stream into his eyes. And the apprehension remained at the drying ovens, where the danger of being thrust into the flames was even greater than at the furnace because they were open ended, the plates in continuous and slow moving procession through the banks of fire.
Although they didn’t hurry they did play. The first day, when Charlie was assigned to direct the dangerously hot metal towards the stamp and was concentrating on not getting burned and caught in the press, one of the chisellers, someone Charlie didn’t know, feigned a mistake, carrying the rasp on from the edge of a plate so that it grooved across the back of Charlie’s hand, stripping the skin. And at the end of that week, when he was posted by the drying ovens, vents which should always have been positioned to throw the heat away from the benches were suddenly reversed, blasting a searing gust towards him. It was obviously fixed and timed, because when it happened only Charlie was where the blast came, everyone else miraculously clear at the precise moment.
The Blind Run Page 4