Kicking Off

by Jan Needle

  ‘The bigger the lie, eh? But I think it means we’ll get away with it, don’t you?’

  They were drinking bottled Beck’s when Sir Gerald Turner came through on the hotline with his urgent plan. Sinclair agreed, very properly, that he would put it to the PM for him, personally.

  *

  On the road. Forbes and Rosanna

  Despite the gravity of what Jackson had told them, Forbes and Rosanna played out the first part of the trip to Bowscar as a road movie. Once beyond the grind of London’s traffic in their hired Golf, they found some country music and acted stupid. The day was fine and Rosanna hitched her skirt up to show her knickers, while Andrew played the horny-handed cowboy with the inside of her thigh. They listened to the radio, however. Constant rolling news.

  The angles altered slowly, and remained downbeat. By midday it was admitted that there’d been a riot, but a very minor one. There’d been a fair amount of damage done, but no dangerous people had escaped. They knew that this was untrue, and it intrigued them. If Lister – who was very dangerous indeed – was out, who else might be? Nearly ten miles from the prison, also, they saw a roadblock up ahead. They pulled into the side of the road.

  ‘God,’ said Rosanna. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Forbes glanced over his shoulder, and did a U-turn.

  ‘Search me. We’re miles away yet. But if Peter’s right, we don’t want our collars feeling, do we? Let’s try another way.’

  It took them half an hour to work out that Bowscar was a no-go area for casual visitors, but they still tried to ignore the implications. When Rosanna rang the prison there was no tone of any sort, the line was dead. She suggested, dubiously, they should try the governor at home.

  ‘Well, you’ve got the number,’ Andrew said. ‘But he’s not going to be there, is he?’

  ‘Not the number, stupid. We’ll go there. This is a road movie, remember? We’ll go and talk to Eileen, the lovely, mysterious daughter. You’ll be expected to sleep with her, in the genre.’ She assumed her Bonnie Parker role, although with noticeably little heart. ‘But I’m warning you, bo – I got a real mean little shooter down my stocking top.’

  As they neared Pendlebury’s house, which was detached mock Tudor in a half an acre, the last traces of their mood had gone. They rang the door bell feeling rather hollow, hoping probably that Eileen was not at home. But she opened the door, pale and calm, her eyes red rimmed from crying, and insisted they come in. Her father had spoken about them, she said, and she wanted to talk. She added, wanly, that she was desperate to.

  Rosanna and Andrew listened with rising horror to her story. Whatever the radio disseminated, she said, her father was in the prison with dozens of other hostages, and she didn’t even know if he was still alive. There had been a major break-out, many deaths, and total devastation of the building. She’d been told these things, she added bitterly, only because of her insistence, and because she was covered by the Official Secrets Act. She’d probably go to prison for talking to them.

  Eileen cried quietly then, quietly but hopelessly, while Forbes went to put the kettle on and Rosanna cuddled her. When he returned with three mugs of tea he watched them for a while.

  ‘A major break-out,’ he said, half to himself. ‘That means McGregor’s got to be involved. What a carve-up.’

  Rosanna’s eyes were large over the rim of her mug.

  ‘He probably started it,’ she said. ‘That bastard Sinclair’s got a lot to answer for.’ She glanced sideways. ‘Excuse the language.’

  Eileen almost laughed.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I know all about Donald Sinclair, I’d call him worse than that. It was so sad when he got the job, because Dad really thought they might have put a good man in at last.’ She made a face. ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell him, it’s a part of my murky past. Dad warned me off politics long ago, but I used to have some good friends on the fringes. If he only knew!’

  She wiped her eyes and sniffed, hard. She pulled her shoulders back, and Rosanna moved slightly away, to give her space. Andrew waited.

  ‘Am I allowed to ask you what you mean?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I’m a nosy prat.’

  ‘You’re a journalist,’ she said. Then she shrugged.

  ‘OK. I can’t see that it’ll do any harm. It wasn’t even me he messed about, it was a friend of mine, one of my uni circle who went in as an intern. It was just the usual thing in politics, all very boring and predictable. Carole never made much of a drama out of it, but she ended up as Sinclair’s mistress, that’s all. He dropped her when a younger model came along, but she was in love.’ She blew sharply through her nostrils. ‘He’s just a normal sort of bastard, I suppose, but now he’s screwed my Dad as well, hasn’t he?’

  She made the noise again, a kind of laugh.

  ‘The only funny thing was that Carole’s father ended up as Sinclair’s boss. Sir Gerald Turner. I imagine that was the attraction for Donald: an influential father. She married someone else afterwards, but it didn’t last. Carole Rochester. I still see her sometimes but she lives in Leicester, although she’s got a caravan somewhere else I think. Goes there every minute when she’s free.’

  ‘What, a tourer?’

  ‘No, a static,’ Eileen said. ‘Somewhere in North Wales. She’s crazy about gardening, she grows vegetables. One thing Sinclair did do, considering what a raver she was when she was young. He beat the wildness out of her, that’s for sure.’

  *

  World’s End. Jackson and de Sallis

  Having no official power to take part in the arrest, Peter Jackson and his American oppo had been silent in the unmarked vehicle for about ten minutes when they heard the shots. There were ten or twelve of them, but they came in short bursts, rather than one fusillade. A flights of rooks rose, cawing, over Liberty Wood, but the normal country sounds had soon returned.

  De Sallis, who was smoking, threw his cigarette end onto the gravel driveway leading to Pratt’s Farm, which was not visible from where they sat.

  ‘These clever ones,’ he said, laconically. ‘It makes you wonder sometimes, I dunno. Chuck Lister must have called these guys to come and see him in this God forsaken hole, he must have told them where to find the fucking place. Didn’t it occur to him he’d just killed their buddies? Did he think they were going to fix him up a nice flight out?’

  ‘This is England,’ Jackson replied. ‘Nobody understands our secret services, least of all a foreigner. Lister probably thought he’d killed two muggers.’

  ‘Horseshit. He probably thought his friends’d do anything for the green, just like him. One sixty million out there on the ocean is the buzz. I wonder who’ll be playing for it now?’

  They could hear the crunching of feet on gravel. Two of the detectives came into sight, their faces grave. The first one said, to John de Sallis: ‘Look, I’m sorry mate, there’s been an accident.’

  The second spoke to Peter Jackson.

  ‘What’s your angle on capital punishment in the Customs these days?’ he asked. ‘Do you agree with it? Because I think it’s just come back.’

  The two policemen glanced at each other. Their faces split. They both gave shouts of laughter.

  TWENTY ONE

  Cynthia’s Beam. Sarah, Brian Rogers

  When Sarah woke up in the morning, she found it hard to believe that she was still alive, let alone that she had slept. She was naked, and tied tightly hand and foot, but she remembered that the man beside her had forced her to drink a half a pint of whisky. He had abused her so much, both physically and mentally, that she had gone beyond exhaustion, beyond the point of feeling anything, any sort of pain or anguish. When she woke her head was like a split rock, her mouth was dry and foul.

  His snoring might have brought her round. The back beside her was huge and white, practically hairless, and vibrated with a contented rhythm. With the side of her face, she could feel the lump hammer underneath the pillow, that this animal had not even noticed as
he rolled about the bed. But she knew she could not reach or use it.

  She had been sick, she smelt, she was dying for the lavatory. But Rogers, waking then just like a happy child, opened his eyes, and coughed, and farted, and rolled over on her as he fumbled with the knots that held her legs. She felt his penis growing like a rubber stalk, screeched as he jammed a knee against the inside of her thigh to force it open. First the right knee, then the left, he used them like hammers, put all his weight on her soft flesh as he knelt to drive it in her. Sarah went numb, incapable of normal thought or movement let alone response. And Rogers came, and shouted like a drunken pig, then stuck his tongue deep in her throat, and bit the bottom of her lip off.

  Last night, she thought, as he went off to have a noisy shit, she had felt that he was trying to destroy her, that his assaults had little to do with actual sex. Today, somehow, he was actually fucking her and it was worse, if she was a rag doll what matter, he was fucking. He came back from the lavatory, let her ‘go and enjoy his leavings,’ then began again, making her lick and suck and chew him till he rose again, then asked politely if he might ‘jam it up her arse.’

  Why bother to reply? Because she had to. Because he punched her in the mouth. And she watched her telephone while he raped her, she watched it hanging, swaying, on the wall. The phone that had betrayed her, yesterday. But only Michael knew the number now.

  And it did not ring.

  *

  London. Sinclair, Fortyne, Parker.

  Over the next few days Sinclair revelled in the manipulation of the British press, mighty and incorruptible. The death of Charles Lister and his associates was the break that he had prayed for, and with the help of Judith and Fortyne he systematically knocked questions of blame for Bowscar off the front pages, then into dull obscurity. By judicious leaks and feeds, the evening papers and TV had screamed wildly of the ‘Mystery Spy Deaths’ in a London street, and the morning headlines were even larger and more satisfactory.

  ‘US Drugs Link in Woodland Massacre’ was the general line, the bodies in the Hampshire mud providing the gruesome note, and the sexual element covered by big pictures of Syvil Hollis, whose body had been bared to the waist to reveal both bullet holes and bosom. It was a gutter classic.

  For those like Peter Jackson who knew the facts, the disseminated story was even more extraordinary. The deaths in London and World’s End, as well as the minor trouble at Bowscar, had been plotted and financed almost entirely by the American Mafia, Cabinet sources revealed – and as such had nothing to do with bad conditions or alleged overcrowding at all. Indeed, the story came close to parody in its portrayal of the indigenous inmates as innocent victims whose equilibrium and peace of mind had been upset by the vicious machinations of Lister and his confederates.

  ‘Shit,’ said Jackson, handing the Mail and the Sun across to John de Sallis. ‘I should have known it. It’s you bloody foreigners leading us astray again.’

  The marvel for Sinclair, though, was how self-contradictory the newspapers could be without either apparently noticing or caring. On the front pages they splashed tales of murderous Yankee mobsters and their evil molls, while on inside pages they quoted unnamed government sources still insisting that only a handful of prisoners had escaped from Bowscar, and those unlikely to be dangerous.

  True to Judith’s direction – and the straitjacket of the Official Secrets Act – they buried stories on their home news pages of isolated acts of violence in isolated places, without making the obvious link. Members of the public who phoned in were listened to with sympathy, and then forgotten. In return, the news crews were allowed to overfly the jail in helicopters, and publish pictures of the smoking ruin with arrowed convicts waving from the roof – although the corpse of Abbey was only ever shown in blurred, long-distance shots. A matter of good taste.

  On top of the pictures and film footage, there were diagrams, endless interviews with the military commanders, shots of armed forces discreetly clustered round other jails ‘in case of copy-cat violence’, and photo-calls with injured officers in hospitals, who gave pre-digested answers to prearranged questions.

  Now that they were confident of the press, Sinclair and his advisers went about the business of cleaning up the pockets of bestiality with the utmost ruthlessness. Tom Amory, who with Pat Parkinson and Tony Snaith had been holding a middle-aged farmer and his wife and teenage daughter since the night of the outbreak, died in a hail of bullets at three o’clock one morning, although sadly, the girl died too. Several other men were cut down in the street, and two in bars. Tony Geraghty, whose skinny wife had bangled in gun parts for Peter Smith also died, but not by the hands of authority. The landlord of a pub in Gorton found him bleeding rapidly to death in the lavatory at closing time one night. Earlier, he had been talking to two men in overcoats, one blond, one balding.

  There were questions in the House, of course, and naturally lies were told. The Prime Minister, naturally again, kept a careful distance from the crisis, responding to questioners only when it was possible to excoriate them for lack of patriotism or undermining the security services or police. Mostly, the task fell to Sir Gerald Turner, and he did it rather badly.

  Donald Sinclair, when he got the opportunity, chose to go in hard and hot. When the question of McGregor was raised – ‘the man I rightly dubbed the Animal’ – he insisted that the government had no reason to think he had escaped, and blamed the major part of the riot on ‘governor Richard Pendlebury’s unilateral decision to release this dreadful man from the solitary confinement I personally deemed vital’. He also dropped in, presumably without realising how badly it reflected on Sir Gerald Turner, that he had strongly recommended that Pendlebury be sacked – but had been overruled.

  Rumours of the simmering row in Westminster surfaced spectacularly when the Guardian, in an exclusive frontpage piece, revealed that Sir Gerald Turner, shortly before the Bowscar disaster, had said he would be prepared to sacrifice one of Britain’s prisons as a way of demonstrating just what would happen. His cries of anguish were audible throughout Parliament, and of rage throughout Queen Anne’s Gate.

  He in turn leaked his fury to The Times, suggesting that it was a pack of lies, and he knew who was responsible. Sinclair refused to rise to the bait, but Radio 4 next morning broadcast a tape on which he could clearly be heard saying ‘It will be more than just a sacrifice, it will be a bloodbath, Sir Gerald.’ Later, in the House, Sinclair said piously that he utterly deplored leaks, from whatever source and for whatever reason, and what was more, he had absolutely no recollection of such a conversation with the Secretary of State. Next morning’s tabloids, however, followed up with allegations that Sir Gerald had been anxious to ‘send in the troops’ the morning after the riot, ‘whatever the consequences in terms of human life’. He merely issued a lame denial.

  Judith Parker reported with some satisfaction to Sinclair and Fortyne that Turner had then secured an audience with the PM, and demanded that Sinclair should be sacked or curbed. He’d denied again, more hotly still, the ‘send in the army slur’ and thought Sinclair would destroy the government’s liberal reputation.

  ‘How did that go down?’ asked Sinclair, and Judith laughed.

  ‘Tactical suicide,’ she said. ‘I mean, for God’s sake, the PM’s got the mentality of Rupert Murdoch where liberality’s concerned. And anyway, he’d had a call from Michael Masters’ wife, and he was on Gerald’s case for that as well. Where the hell’s her husband? When will he be rescued from the prison? Is he still alive? When was the Home Secretary going to do something about it? The something, being, of course, send in the troops. Poor Turner’s in the shit, Donald. Hang on in there and we’re made. Believe me. We are doing fine.’

  That night, however, as Sinclair and his mistress drank champagne, the name of Masters recurred too often. They both felt that he would be outside the prison somewhere, that his wealth would have made sure he had escaped. They knew more than his wife about his love life, also, thanks to t
he secret services, but still not half enough. They knew he had a girlfriend and a boat, and they knew he had good reasons to discreetly disappear. Damned good reasons. They also guessed he wanted some revenge.

  ‘Best case,’ said Donald, ‘would be the bastard’s dead. We don’t believe in fairies though, do we? But he’s a canny operator. I just hope he’s clean away and won’t come back and end up back in jail for even longer. But if he does…I could be in the shit.’

  ‘And if he does, my love,’ said Judith. ‘Turner’s still in the deeper shit. And there’s more bastards than just Masters we don’t know about, aren’t there? That Irish godfather, all those drugs barons, the yardies, mad Koranisters – it’s Gerald’s can to carry for the lot of them, whether they’re inside or on the rampage in the streets. Just play it cool, my love, and he goes down. And if he goes down, you go up, don’t you?’

  She put her glass down and walked over to the bed. She patted it. She smiled a certain smile at him, and ran her tongue around her lips, lasciviously.

  ‘You’re going to be top dog, my love. Top dog and dirty with it. Please do come and have a little practice now.’

  *

  Bowscar. Richard Pendlebury.

  Inside Bowscar Prison, the sense of dislocation and unreality gathered momentum. Its movement was from mass excitement and hysteria, through fear and anticipation of a counter-attack, to anger and puzzlement when nothing happened. There were far more prisoners left inside than had escaped, and enough of them had been sufficiently calm and motivated to organise a structure amid the chaos.

  While most men fought each other, looted and smashed the offices, urinated and defecated on every square yard of accessible floor and table space which represented prison hierarchy and made bonfires of their secret files, the saner ones rounded up the hostages and locked them into individual cells to save their lives. They were given bucket lavatories, and were intermittently taken, under guard for their own safety, to slop out in the ruined sluices, to throw the contents of their plastic pails into the shattered stumps of lavatory bowls or the cracked urinals. They were even given food.