She decided to tackle him after the evening meal, when Derek had left to lend a hand in the shop. Patrons liked to see a member of the family behind the counter, though the temporary manager was a pleasant enough man. But Eagleton wanted familiarity, and Chas would have to get back to his work sooner rather than later.
Eve dabbed her lips with a napkin. She needed to go softly, because she had only just got Chas to agree to the purchase of a set of banisters with special knops that had been hand-carved in the eighteenth century. By the time it had been adapted to fit the staircase of Rose Cottage, the item was going to cost a fair amount. Chas had already complained rather loudly that it would leave him with no legs to stand on, so he wouldn’t be needing stairs with or without fancy hand-carvings on the spindles. ‘Chas,’ she began. ‘I just wondered whether—’
‘No. Don’t start, love. I’m telling you – don’t go there.’
‘I haven’t started, have I? But I’m about to. Somebody has to do it.’
He grunted, but offered no intelligible reply.
‘Wasn’t yesterday lovely?’ she breathed quietly. ‘A perfect, perfect wedding.’
The response was another grunt, this time accompanied by a frown.
‘The thing about epileptic fits,’ she said in a tone designed to be neutral, ‘is that you have to let your feelings out. If I don’t let them out, I could have a bad turn. They told me that at the hospital.’
At last, he spoke. ‘And they told me you hadn’t to get upset.’
‘I don’t want a fit.’ She paused for a few seconds. Wasn’t yesterday lovely?’ she asked again. ‘See, we have to think about the Middlers.’ The Middlers were those who lived in the centre of Eagleton, which had always housed a close community. ‘Dave and Philly – so happy,’ she said. ‘As for Pete and Babs – I know they’re not real Middlers, and I know they’ve been together only a couple of months, but they’re like a pair of socks that got separated in the wash – they belong together. I reckon they’ve always belonged together, so fate made them meet.’
Chas raised a suspicious eyebrow. ‘What’s that to do with the price of fish on Bolton Market? What’s your point, Evie?’
‘Then Lily and Mike,’ she continued seamlessly. ‘They’re happening people. They remind me of the flower power days when everybody buggered off to San Francisco with flowers in their hair.’
‘And not just their hair – they had flowers painted on their passion wagons in psychedelic colours,’ muttered Chas. ‘Bloody vans with daisies on them and daisies inside them as well. I saw a programme about that rubbish. All drugs and no knickers.’
Eve was not going to be dragged into unnecessary discussion. She had tailored this conversation and was building up towards a big finish, and the Love Children of the sixties would not be allowed a starring role. ‘Valda’s getting on all right with her mother-in-law – even Enid Barker looks as if she might take a turn for the better. It’s all nice and settled.’
‘And?’
‘And you’re going to bugger it up by arranging to kill the man who saved my life.’ There, she had said it. Well, she had said most of it. ‘When Eagleton has a murderer in its midst, how are they all going to feel? And just when everything’s getting nicely sorted out. Even Paul’s OK now he’s stopped hankering after Mo.’
Chas jumped to his feet. ‘Clive Chalmers didn’t have you clobbered to save your life, Evie. He had you nearly murdered instead of Lily Latimer. What happens to your happening people when she happens to get killed, eh? What about when he rings the bell for round two and sends some other bruisers to kill Lily? How will you feel at her funeral? Who’ll do the flowers? Because she’ll be in no fit state for making floral tributes and pretty wreaths.’
Eve shook her head. ‘He won’t do it again,’ she said.
‘Oh, well, I’m glad you did your doctorate in psychology. He’s focused on Lily, obsessed with her. One of the psychiatrists at the trial said he should be in a secure facility for the insane – he’s not right in the bloody head, girl. The chances are that he’ll keep trying till he’s dead, or till he runs out of cash. He wants her dead, Evie. He’s got money somewhere, and there’s plenty of folk about that would do anything for a bit of brass.’
A weighty silence followed. ‘So you’ll not stop at home tomorrow and look after me?’
Chas laughed, though there was no humour in the sound. ‘You’ve lost your place in the hymn book, Eve. Usually, you tell me to bugger off and let you get on with it, but now that I’m doing something you don’t want me to do, you decide to be ill enough to need watching. Look. What happened to you is headline news in Walton – and not just there. Every prisoner in Britain knows what was done to you. It’s already started. The grapevine’s spread beyond my reach. It’s already too late, love. But I can try to make sure Wally Willie stays safe.’
‘How?’ she asked.
‘I don’t bloody know till I bloody get there, do I?’ Chas left the room. He prayed that she wouldn’t start crying. If she wept, he would go back to her and promise her the earth, but Eve was not manipulative. She wouldn’t cry for effect, or to get her own way. Eve was a good woman. She was the best. Anyway, Valda was coming round soon, so Evie would hold herself together.
Eve fiddled with her napkin. Since the incident, she seemed to have changed. She saw things differently, more clearly. It was as if a thin veil had moved away, and her inner vision had improved as a result.
But. The world was going mad, and most of the madness was man-made. There were bad females, but it was the male who never grew up, who wanted to be cock of the walk, who needed to be the one who could piss highest up the wall, get the best woman, drive the fastest car, start and win every war. ‘I am sick and fed up,’ she told her reclaimed fireplace. It had been a good buy, thanks to Lily.
Lily. Could Eve really live with the knowledge that her new best friend’s life would be on the line for ever? Would Mike on his own be strong enough, wily enough, to stop the next invasion of Eagleton? ‘I don’t know, do I?’ she whispered. ‘It’s out of my hands.’
Then the doorbell sounded.
They sat in the Man and Scythe, Chas with a pint, Mike with a St Clement’s. He was driving, so he was the one who had to remain sober. He needed to have a clear head anyway, because Lily was in pain and he was learning how to massage her lower spine. He couldn’t leave her for too long, yet he wanted to speak to Chas. ‘Sorry to drag you all the way to town,’ he said.
Chas shook his head. ‘No. I was glad to hear that doorbell. My Evie was coming to the boil.’
Mike grinned ruefully. ‘If we’d gone to a pub in Eagleton, I’d have been plagued, because they’d all have been asking about the new priest and my plans as a layman. So. You go tomorrow, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘To see Walter?’
‘That’s right.’
Mike could see that his friend had taken an ear-bashing already, and the ear-basher was probably Eve. ‘Is she giving you a hard time?’
Chas nodded. ‘I’ve left her waiting for Valda. Valda’s expecting her umpteenth child, so that should give them enough to talk about. Evie will be wielding her crochet hooks and patterns – it’ll keep her occupied for an hour or two.’
‘Right. What are you going to say to Walter?’
‘I don’t know, do I? I mean, the jail network knows everything as we speak, so it’s past the stage where I can call a halt. I admit I was angry at first and I put pressure on for a visiting order. Yes, I regret that. But prisoners have their own way of dealing with this kind of crap, and they would have found out eventually.’
‘Especially now the men have pleaded guilty and dropped Chalmers in the soup.’
‘Exactly.’
Mike looked round the pub. He had never been here before, though he had read about Ye Olde Man and Scythe, first mentioned in 1251 in a market charter, and the oldest premises in the town. ‘This place was partially rebuilt in the seventeenth century,’ he told his co
mpanion, ‘though the vault is original.’
Chas offered no comment.
‘And over there’s the famous chair where the Earl of Derby sat before the Roundheads chopped his head off. We’re in one of the ten oldest pubs in Britain.’
At last Chas broke his reverie. ‘The poor bugger who lost his head owned the pub,’ he said. ‘But Bolton was famous for wanting royalty dead, buried and disinherited.’ He took a long draught of ale. ‘I hate Chalmers,’ he announced.
‘So do I. And neither of us has met him. But Eve’s right, Chas.’
‘I can’t stop it now. It’d be like trying to stop this lot beheading the Earl. Prison’s a machine with its own engine. Once it starts running, nobody can stop it – they seem to have built the bugger without brakes. All I can do now is see what’s what.’
‘You’ve helped a few ex-cons, haven’t you?’
Chas nodded.
‘Then surely you can pass some sense down the line?’
‘Depends what you mean by sense. You should listen to our Derek and his Old Testament stuff – he reckons folk were violent as hell before Jesus came along. The wrath of God, he calls it. Mike, I don’t know what they intend to do, but they won’t stop Chalmers this side of death. In his mind, Lily belongs to him. If he can’t have her, nobody can, so he sounds very Old Testament to me.’
Both men stared into their drinks for a few minutes. Chas could hear Eve going on about how peaceful the village was, about the vet having transferred his affections from Lily to a glamorous new veterinary nurse, about how even their Derek had started courting an office temp, about everything in the village being lovely except . . . except for the fact that Lily’s life was still in danger. ‘He could kill her yet, Mike.’
‘I know.’
‘And you can live with that?’
Mike raised his arms. ‘I don’t know. We could move.’
‘There’s no hiding place. Unless you want to emigrate.’
‘I don’t. This country might be in a bloody mess, but it’s our bloody mess.’
The conversation circled for a few more minutes before dying of natural causes. They finished their drinks and left the pub.
On the way home, they continued to talk, though nothing changed. Mike’s lecture on revenge fell on deaf ears, while Chas simply sat in the passenger seat and offered the same arguments as before. It was too late. The machinery was in gear, and nothing short of a miracle would close it down.
Fourteen
Although Chas had paid many visits over the years to Her Majesty’s Prison, Liverpool, the sight of the building never failed to upset him. The sheer size of the fort from which no man could escape was overwhelming, as were the perimeter walls that seemed to reach higher towards the heavens each year. Most places seemed to grow smaller when a person reached adulthood, but this was the exception.
There were worse prisons, he supposed, jails with tiny rooms into which two or three men were sandwiched for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, but Walton was a forbidding and evil-looking place that seemed to bleed all residual hope from the soul of any newly arrived observer. But he had to go in. Soon, his brother might be an inmate, and Chas shivered when that thought hit the front of his mind.
He parked his car and glanced at nearby council houses, ordinary homes containing ordinary families. The people who lived cheek by jowl with Walton probably scarcely noticed it after a while. It was here the way St George’s Hall was in town, the way the Liver Birds sat on the shore watching out for returning sailors, the way the pub was down the road and the church was round the corner. But Chas saw it sporadically, so he feared it. Yes, his brother might be here soon, but that problem was not to be on today’s agenda. This was the day on which Chas might learn what was about to happen to the man who had tried, albeit by proxy, to kill a woman. Eve. It should not have been Eve, yet it had been Eve. A shiver travelled the length of his spine, causing him to grind to a halt near the gate through which visitors were beginning to walk.
He could hear her, could hear Mike asking him not to cause any more trouble, but what could he do but go on? He couldn’t change anything. If Walton had decided on the fate of Lily’s ex-husband, nothing would stop the march of the contained. In prison, everything was magnified, because life was small, restricted and edgy. An imagined slight could result in a broken arm, while even a dirty look could begin a war between landings. Old lags remembered the Boswell family. Their mother had been kind, while Chas’s brothers had earned the respect of many who lived on that delicate cusp between lawfulness and criminality. Chas had helped some who had been determined to reform, so the Boswells were a kind of royalty. Eve, a Boswell by marriage, had to be defended at all costs by the folk behind these walls.
Chas didn’t know what to hope for. Wally Willie was known by friends and enemies alike as a mad bastard, but he wasn’t a killer. Wally knew killers; killers knew and respected Wally, because he kept the jail alive and amused through long, grey stretches of time filled with little beyond model-making and banter. God. Chas neared the gate and swallowed. He would never get used to this dump. Those inside made delicate boxes out of matchsticks, sewed together tobacco pouches for friends at home, used any method available to plod their way through days that seemed endless.
While queuing, he concentrated on what he had read in Charlie Bronson’s Good Prison Guide. Charlie had awarded Walton five stars out of ten, because Scousers had made him laugh, while his destruction of the roof had cost the government over a quarter of a million pounds. Guards had allegedly beaten Bronson senseless after the event, but who would listen to a crim with a bad habit of kidnapping people and refusing to be subdued? It took up to ten screws to shift Bronson when he didn’t want shifting, so they had punished him for making them look inadequate.
There was a new rumour about inmates getting together to prepare suits against guards, civil actions to be mounted after release, but it would be a waste of time, Chas believed. Anyway, most of the warders here were OK. But the few bad men who concentrated on torturing those with long sentences made a mockery of the whole system by becoming criminals themselves. So. He tapped a nervous foot. His wandering thoughts had passed several minutes while he got inside, and he handed over his visiting order. Yes, he was inside, and that knowledge made him shiver anew.
‘Chas?’ said the guard.
‘Oh – hiya, Mr Martin. How are you doing?’
‘Seen better days, lad. I’m getting past it now. Come to see old Wally again?’
‘That’s right. How’s he getting on?’
Mr Martin laughed. ‘He’s more trouble than a pimp at a Methodist Sunday school picnic – he’ll never learn. Still causing bother. Some don’t improve with age.’ He leaned forward and lowered his tone. ‘There’s been a bit of trouble. Go careful, lad.’ Immediately, he drew back and reverted to normal. ‘Enjoy your visit. Wally’s in fine form. There’s a rumour he’s caught a mouse and started to train it, God help us.’ He moved on to the next in line.
Chas placed his coat in a locker before sitting in the visitors’ lounge. A bit of trouble? Martin was a man who could be trusted, a screw who had always been more than fair. He had a reputation for kindness, since he often carried sweets for prisoners and, when he found time, would even listen to their grievances and worries. A bit of trouble. Chas went though the search, walked past a couple of sniffer dogs, stood by while his personal belongings went through a scanner. When he had retrieved his money and bits of jewellery, he stood among the rest and waited for the automatic doors to open.
Immediately, he sensed the atmosphere. Guards who usually stood around the walls were dotted about among prisoners’ tables, while those behind glass at mezzanine level stood to attention, eyes scanning the room below. Inmates sat very still and quiet, though a low buzz of conversation began when relatives greeted loved ones. This was a tough prison and it allowed for no nonsense. Rumours abounded about the availability of drugs, but, at this moment, Chas could not imagin
e any quarter being given by the currently rigid, sour-faced staff. They appeared to be in shock; something of moment had happened, and it had happened today. They were on red alert, and it would be better not to breathe too deeply just now . . .
Wally Wilson was at the far end. His bib sported the number nineteen, and Chas hastened to greet the old reprobate. Guards hovered. They seemed to be steering themselves away from families and towards those who had just one male visitor. As Wally and Chas fell into the latter category, they were plagued. After the exchange of pleasantries, Chas went to buy drinks and biscuits from machines. Following the prison code, he left the lid on Wally’s drink before handing it over. A removed lid could mean drugs concealed in the cup, so it remained sealed.
They discussed prison food, the length of time Wally still had to serve, football, the Iraq war. Wally eyed the hovering guard. ‘If you come any closer, we’ll have to get married,’ he snapped. Then he turned and nodded almost imperceptibly in the direction of a group at another table.
Pandemonium erupted, though it seemed to be a harmless enough chaos. While prisoners banged on their tables, everyone in the room sang Happy Birthday to someone or other. Under the weight of this noise, Wally finally managed to convey a message. ‘It’s happened,’ he said. ‘Over half an hour ago. Fazakerley Hospital.’ He joined in the singing and banging. Whistles blew, guards brought the room to order, and Wally ordered Chas to stay where he was.
Chas understood. If he tried to leave too early, the guards would suspect that Wally might be connected to whatever had happened. Clive Chalmers was in hospital. Beyond that certainty, Chas knew nothing and would discover little while the wardens remained on red alert. They talked about Wally’s brother, about Derek and his new girlfriend, about Liverpool’s year as Capital of Culture. ‘They should come in here if they want culture,’ said Wally, his voice deliberately amplified. ‘There’s all kinds growing in that shower block. Oh, and we’re training our cockroaches to do the military two-step.’ He winked at his companion. ‘Some of these screws are talented, too.’
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