by Jan Needle
Rosanna tutted.
‘Ach, he’s over-dramatising,’ she said. ‘The story’s not exactly dead, it’s just a wee bit dormant. I think when Pendlebury realised what he’d done by telling us, he got cold feet. He’s asked us to hang fire for a few more days. Until he’s told the Home Office, at least!’
‘Strange bedfellows,’ said Jackson, with a smile. ‘Sucking up to the Establishment now are we, Andy boy? Do you think it means he’ll give you a better cell, when you’re inside? Hot and cold running trusties, governor’s orders?’
‘He’s OK,’ said Forbes. ‘He’s still nervous, that’s all. McGregor hasn’t pulled anybody’s ears off yet, but it’s early days, and the buck stops at Pendlebury. He knows we’re sweating on it, though, he won’t let us down. It’ll only be another day or two.’
‘And the next step,’ said Rosanna, with a grin from ear to ear, ‘is a visit! When McGregor’s ready for it, the governor’s going to try and fix him to invite us in to talk. That would be a tale worth telling, eh?’
‘They killed my brother and locked me in a padded cell – the Animal speaks, exclusive!’ Forbes said. ‘Let them pick the bones from that, my friend!’
‘Yeah,’ said Jackson. ‘And you really think they’d let you tell it, do you? In our wonderful free press?’
Rosanna felt a small clutch of fear. She looked at Andrew, seeking reassurance.
‘Just let them try and stop us, mate,’ he said. ‘Just let them try.’
*
Queen Anne’s Gate. Sinclair, Fortyne, Judith.
The shocking news that the Animal was out of solitary confinement didn’t take long to reach Queen Anne’s Gate, whatever Pendlebury had hoped for. It came in a phone call from Chris Abbey, the Prison Officers’ Association official rep, and it shot Sinclair’s anger and anxiety almost into orbit.
Still not entirely himself despite some snatched sleep in his secret London flat, he had made it his first priority to hammer out his differences with Christian Fortyne. He’d spent some time at home with Mary, but it hadn’t been a howling success. He was certain he’d been screwed while in America, and he wasn’t interested in her life, or news, or worries.
Fortyne was unruffled and detached. His pale, clear eyes seemed to speculate on Sinclair’s grip, and he lifted his brows perceptibly when Sinclair insisted that Judith must be present at the meeting. Sinclair moved straight into attack.
‘Explain yourself,’ he said. ‘I know that something’s going on, and I think you’re part of it. When I went away you and I were totally in tune. Then suddenly I’m thrown out to the wolves. Why?’
The speculative gleam behind the glasses grew. Fortyne pushed them higher up his nose with a delicate and manicured finger. The ambiguous curve of his lips was slightly more pronounced.
‘I really do think you’re being…well…’ he said. ‘Donald, I promise you. It’s nothing like that at all, it’s—’
‘It’s what?’ snapped Sinclair. ‘I flew out of Heathrow as the golden boy in Turner’s eyes, and now it’s all my fault. I wasn’t even told that Bowscar was in trouble.’
‘I rang you,’ Fortyne began.
‘After the event! And told me not to worry. What I need to know is why I wasn’t warned.’
‘Of what?’ asked Fortyne. ‘There was nothing concrete. And what could you have done? Come back because I said Turner was maybe having second thoughts? Might possibly be planning a little bit of undermining? Nonsense.’
Judith looked straight into his eyes.
‘Or perhaps,’ she said, ‘you wanted to wait until a winning side emerged. Before deciding whom to back.’
Inwardly, Fortyne smiled at the accuracy of her thrust. His face remained serene however.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But I doubt it. Donald, consider this. There is going to be a fight, Judith’s right. But trust me, we can be the winning side. You really need to trust me.’
Chris Abbey’s call was put through then, with a red priority light flashing on the handset. Sinclair snatched it up prepared to shout, but the first words made him change his mind. Abbey pressed all the panic buttons.
The governor, he said, had removed McGregor from cellular confinement to the body of the prison, and put the lives of officers and inmates at risk. Consequently, the association were actively considering a work to rule. Coupled with the severe overcrowding and the state of mind of many of the inmates, brought about by the laxness of the governor and his reputation as a weakling, he and his fellow members considered that the situation in the jail was critical.
Further – as had been reported to the governor – metal objects, including knives, had been disappearing from the kitchens and the workshops. There was real fear, he said, that an officer or officers might soon be attacked, almost certainly with fatal consequences. There could be many deaths.
Sinclair came off the telephone shaking with rage. Fortyne, who had been listening on an extension, impassively motioned him to pick up the receiver again, and flicked a switch: the governor had been contacted and was waiting on the line. This time, the minister started at a shout.
‘But why, man, why, why why? Why, given all these appalling facts, did you defy me? Why did you free McGregor from confinement? Was this not an insane act? You leave me no alternative! I shall fire you!’
Richard Pendlebury did not raise his voice.
‘Fire away,’ he said. ‘Truly, minister, it’s a matter of complete indifference to me. Your department has consistently lied to me about McGregor, and the lie has been confirmed. He knows his brother is dead, and as far as he’s concerned it was not from natural causes.’
‘Who told you that? Who told him that? Where did this vile nonsense come from?’
Sinclair’s voice had changed in tone, and he forced himself to stop. Judith and Fortyne were watching, fascinated. Pendlebury’s voice remained quite calm.
‘The fact that James McGregor died at Buckie is indisputable,’ he said. ‘The lie comes from your department, in that they deliberately withheld it from me, however many times I raised the subject. I shall prepare my resignation letter immediately.’
Sinclair was thinking furiously. Too many chickens were looking for a roost.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ he snapped. ‘You will do nothing more until I tell you to. First, you will lock McGregor up again. This instant!’
‘It’s too late,’ said the governor. ‘You just don’t understand. In prison terms he’s a celebrated man. It would be far too dangerous to try. Apart from anything he might do himself, it would almost certainly spark a riot. He has charisma.’
‘Charisma! You’re talking about a common murderer!’
‘Yes, and Hitler was a mass one. I don’t suppose you’ll deny that he was charismatic, whatever else he was? McGregor is a figurehead. I can’t put him back in solitary. I won’t.’
Sinclair lifted his eyes to Judith’s, and read anxiety in her face. He realised that his own must look worse. He heard Pendlebury sigh.
‘Mr Sinclair. Please listen to me,’ he said. ‘The trouble that’s coming in Bowscar will not be caused by Angus McGregor, I assure you. I implore you to do something. Act! But for God’s sake don’t think repression is the answer. It is not.’
Sinclair, after that, brought the phone call swiftly to an end. He decided, instantly, that he would have to trust Fortyne, because he needed him. He faced them gravely.
‘Good God alive,’ he said. ‘This is appalling. No wonder Turner wanted me back in the firing line.’
Fortyne glinted.
‘I’m not sure that he knows just what’s on the cards,’ he said. ‘I rather think he just wants the security of having you around. In case anything does go wrong.’
‘To blame?’ said Judith.
‘To blame,’ said Christian Fortyne. ‘Any more trouble in the jails will be political death for someone, and if Bowscar goes there are others that are bound to follow. Turner’s preparing Donald’s grave.’
Sinclair slowly drank some beer.
‘The first thing is,’ he said, ‘to polish up our thoughts. Marshal them. Kick them into shape. Then I’ll go and hit the old devil between the eyes. I’m going to screw him.’
‘It won’t be an easy fight,’ said Fortyne. ‘I suspect Sir Gerald’s warned the PM that there could be gales ahead already. And about your dangerous tendency to softness...’
Judith, with decision, pulled a phone towards her.
‘So when do you want your appointment?’ she said. ‘For Round One?’
*
Bowscar. Invitation to a bloodbath.
Once Angus John McGregor had been released from solitary, the confirmation of his rumoured presence in the Scar spread like wildfire. It was exciting news, because as Pendlebury had told Sinclair, his name was charismatic, close to mythical.
Rumour had it, also, that the screws were scared of him, and would only handle him in threes. On the governor’s instructions he was put into a ‘neutral’ cell until he should express a preference, which privileged treatment upset and outraged the officers. Consequently, they placed him in a cell guaranteed, they thought, to drive him mad. At which point they could bung him back in solitary, preferably in chains.
The cell was occupied by Mickie White, the garrulous old drunk, and a London boy with learning difficulties who had tried to burn down his half-way hostel when the warden seduced him over bed-time cocoa. To the disappointment of the officers, McGregor found neither the ramblings of one nor the unhappy sniffings of the other annoying, and stayed infuriatingly calm and stable.
Brian Rogers, naturally, heard the news before most inmates, and made his moves immediately. On the morning McGregor moved he broached the subject with Charles Lister, and they worked on its implications with Hughes, Jerrold and Masters later the same day. The argument for recruiting him was unanswerable, but when they met him they were all slightly disturbed. Small, pale, quiet – was this really the Animal?
He didn’t seem excited by the plan, either. He listened carefully, asking quietly for certain points to be gone over several times, then wanted to know how it was an escape plan, rather than the blueprint for a bloodbath. The key was hostage-taking, Rogers explained – with threats of execution only if doors were not unlocked immediately. That was fine, McGregor said, but threats of execution meant nothing, unless the people making them were capable of carrying them out. And he would want a gun.
Lister and Rogers smiled as they presented their credentials. Then Rogers listed his team to the small, quiet Scot. Billy Ford, Tom Amory, Pat Parkinson, Mike Shaw – need he go on? They’d not only kill anyone who stood between them and their liberty, they’d bloody love it. And naturally, they said, the Animal would have a gun. He’d have a fucking choice!
McGregor, strangely, laid down one condition. The governor, Mr Richard Pendlebury, was under his personal protection. He was not to be a hostage, nor was he to be killed or even injured, he was to be left alone. Only Alan Hughes seemed interested. As Rogers said, there was already a safe list, for favours done or services rendered, while there were other men whose lives weren’t worth a panda’s fart.
But Hughes, who loved to know what made men tick, talked to McGregor for hours in the following days, and shared his own experiences and feelings. When McGregor learned that he vaguely knew Sir Gerald Turner, it revealed an obsessive streak in the Scot. He wanted details of the man, his life, his personality. Hughes reiterated that he had only been a neighbour, many years before, and had hardly known him or his wife and daughter except to nod to in the street, but McGregor always wanted more. He was a criminal who was fascinated by his own and others’ crimes. Like Pendlebury before him, Hughes thought he could discern a deep and deeply troubled man below the surface.
‘What you in for, Alan?’ McGregor asked him at one point. ‘They say you killed two women. Two wives. Is that a fact?’
They were alone, leaning on the rail. Below them, through the netting, they could see other men, leaning, talking, walking. It was rather like the inside of an anthill, Hughes often thought, except more aimless. Ants were busy, they were workers. In Bowscar there was not a lot to do, despite the loonie dreams of some Home Secretaries.
‘It’s what I was convicted of,’ he said. ‘There was only one body, though. The second wife. She fell downstairs and broke her neck. The first one was never found. She disappeared.’
‘So did you kill them? They’re all fucking bitches, women. I’d’ve topped my wife if I’d ever married her. She fucked off.’
‘The judge was a fan of Oscar Wilde,’ said Hughes. ‘To lose one wife could be classed as misfortune, but to lose two sounded too much like carelessness. Certainly I didn’t care much when they sent me down, I’d had enough. You’re right you know, Angus. I prefer wet dreams myself. You meet a better class of person.’
Two of Abbey’s men, Burnett and Simon Petter, were approaching, with the clear intention of separating them. To forestall their pleasure McGregor pushed himself away from the railing and turned towards his cell.
‘You could kill the judge,’ he said. ‘We could go together. First Mr Justice Whatsisface, then Turner. Think about it.’
He was back to his obsession.
*
Kensington. The Scar.
The American associates of Charles Lister arrived in England on three separate days and by four separate points of entry, having fed false information to the corrupt Dutch Customs officer to make sure their tracks were covered. They were two white men, Pete Delano and AI Pruchak, one black man, Sidney Gibbin, and a white woman, Syvil Hollis. Hollis reached England via Belfast City Airport and Blackpool, Gibbin ‘returned’ on a charter flight from Barbados, Delano came by ferry from Zeebrugge, and Pruchak caught a weekend flight from Jersey to Manchester. They stayed in separate small hotels among the visiting hordes of Kensington, and met in pubs, at night. Although by this time Lister had given them a contact name and number in London, they decided not to use it.
‘Look what they did for Chuck,’ said Syvil Hollis.
‘And that was only one guy. With four of us, they could screw us up four times. What the hell we need them for, anyway? Once we get him out of the pen, we’ll have Lister back stateside in fifteen hours. Screw the Brits. They’re hopeless.’
Delano, who had done the hard work on the ground in Holland and Belgium, agreed. He had brought five guns across, and innumerable documents. They had airline tickets, false ID, passports in various names and nations. The next task was to get some cars, go to Staffordshire, suss the prison out.
The whole op, with any luck, would be simple, clean, efficient. With their map books out, for God’s sake, they even looked like tourists. People said to them, in that mocking British way, when they left pubs, ‘Have a nice day!’ Well, they intended to.
The ‘inefficient Brits’ had managed to do something right, as the Americans later learned in a coded phone call to a Rotterdam safe house. Three days after Sarah Williams had thrust the bag of pistols through the car window in Abel’s Lane, another sanctioned interview had taken place in Bowscar Prison between Charles Lister and two bulky, quiet men from London. Despite their pleas for caution, he had thrust the four pistols contemptuously down the front of his trousers, the cold barrel of the long Ruger hard against his pubic bone. The belly of his shirt camouflaged the butts, and he carried a jumper, which hid the ammunition.
The hardware had arrived.
SEVENTEEN
Queen Anne’s Gate. Sir Gerald, Sinclair, Aides.
It did not take Sinclair long to realise he was being screwed. By the end of his interview with Sir Gerald Turner – Round One – the thinness of their mutual smiles barely concealed their teeth. The Home Secretary had offered him two options – to prepare a press communiqué which negated his publicly stated approach to the problems he’d been appointed to resolve – or to quit.
Sir Gerald, who had ‘fitted in’ Donald at 6.15 pm for fifteen whole minutes, had been
affability itself. Drinks had been poured, even a selection of canapés. The scene had reeked of insincerity.
‘Donald,’ he had said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t see you any sooner, because I understand you feel there are urgent matters to discuss. Of course, there have been some untoward events while you were abroad, but we managed to deal with them without too much discomfort. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve kept my finger on the pulse. Try not to be too anxious, laddie.’
Sinclair rode the insult with a smile. Pretended, in effect, it had not been offered. Then he outlined the call from Chris Abbey and the one to Pendlebury, and their implications. Turner’s eyes widened slightly at the news that Angus McGregor had been freed, and that he knew about his brother’s death. He sipped whisky.
‘Mm,’ he said. ‘So there might be trouble in the air? But he always was a panic merchant, Pendlebury. It won’t happen, will it? So what do you propose?’
It was a response so extraordinary that Sinclair was almost rendered speechless. Gerald Turner, it appeared, was going to discount the evidence. Involuntarily, he and Fortyne exchanged glances.
‘My proposal,’ he said, at last, ‘is to do something about it, and very, very fast. For a start-off Pendlebury must go, because his officers won’t back him any more. But we’ve got to take notice of what he’s said, as well. Which is mainly to take the pressure off by cutting down the numbers in the jail, and employing more officers, immediately. Morale at Bowscar’s through the floor, they’re going to work to rule. We’ve got to go in fast and sort the place out, root and branch, we’ve got to be firm but fair.’
Sir Gerald stood and walked over to the drinks table. He splashed some more spirit into his glass and topped it off with mineral water.
‘You call that fair?’ he said. ‘It sounds like gutlessness to me. Why sack the governor? He might be a pain, but the POA are far worse, surely? They’re greedy, boorish, blinkered. No, Pendlebury shall not go, that would be appeasement, pure and simple. I have to say this, Donald, although it pains me. Like all the other ideas you’ve outlined since I appointed you, this smacks of funk. Not analysis, not thought, not referring back to precedent, but sheer old-fashioned funk. I hoped for better things. Like some solutions.’