Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

by Giles O'Bryen

  There was plenty of daylight left, and they wouldn’t come for me until after dark. I opened the window and lowered my makeshift fishing line. The strips of nylon jinked in every gust, so I hauled up the line and weighted it with the broken glass. It didn’t make much difference. Forehead jammed up against the lower edge of the window frame, I watched the knots in the nylon strips zigzag across my narrow field of view, but however much I twitched and tugged, the thing was impossible to control.

  I carried on, excitement giving way to frustration. It was like a fairground fishing game that nobody ever wins. Then the wind dropped and the spattering drizzle turned into a downpour. That did it. The nylon strips got wet, making them heavier and easier to manoeuvre. The noose flopped over the latch. I tugged gently and it tightened. But as it took the weight of the lid, it slipped off. I pulled the line up. This wasn’t going to work.

  I smelled fishfingers frying below. I should stop, be satisfied with the progress I had made, try again tomorrow. But I was too agitated to resist having one last go. I remade the noose so that the weight of the glass would help to tighten it and lowered away. It took three attempts to lasso the latch. I jiggled the line until I thought it would hold, then slowly, surely, lifted the lid on the green plastic hopper far enough to look inside.

  A pair of wellington boots. Some shapes I couldn’t make out in the failing light. I pulled a little harder to get the lid up to vertical. The noose slipped off. The lid banged down.

  I hid the line, then banged my fist against the cupboard door. It didn’t sound much like a plastic lid slamming shut, but it would do. I counted to five, then did it again. They unlocked the door and charged in, just in time to see my fist strike the cupboard door for a third time. I reeled back and gazed stupidly across the room.

  ‘Now, now, Slimey, that’ll do.’

  ‘Missing his mumsie, is he?’ said the other.

  ‘Bet she’s not missing him. Wishes she’d never had him, filthy paedo.’

  They kept this up while I ate burnt fishfingers and sliced white bread. This time I really didn’t care.

  25

  I remade my fishing line several times that evening, and eventually hit on a way of using a second line to draw the noose tight when it was hooked over the latch. However, my warders were active in the morning and I wouldn’t be able to try it out until the following afternoon. I went to sleep wondering whether I’d done anything to make them suspicious. Fortunately, they were the kind of geezers who have a superstitious awe of technology and believe that an electronic tag cannot possibly be bypassed – as my futile antics of the previous day had already confirmed. They didn’t think I could escape and it made them lazy. They spent too much time snoozing and watching TV and didn’t check on me as often as they should.

  I acted very chastened and cooperative when they took me to shower and fed me the following day, and perhaps they noticed a change in my demeanour, for the men became morose, as if any mood other than utter dejection was an insult to their custodial skills.

  The business of reconnecting the tamper-proof circuit on the broken tag very nearly defeated me. I set the battery aside, then experimented all morning, making tools with splinters of wood from the loose floorboard, and ties with nylon thread. Several times I nearly flung the bits and pieces out of the window. I cracked it only after working out that I could wedge the components into a gap at the edge of one of the cupboard shelves, which allowed me to work with both hands. I set it up so that I could reattach the battery in one simple step, then fetched my fishing rig from beneath the loose floorboard and set to work.

  The lid of the green plastic box came up neatly enough, and I managed to get it to swing back and rest against the wall. I’d been right about the wellington boots. There was also a pair of baggy socks and a few lengths of twine. It didn’t look promising but I worked on, moving one of the socks aside and eventually exposing the handle of what looked like a pair of garden secateurs.

  I got the twine up first and there was enough to replace most of the cumbersome strips of ticking. Even so, it was almost dark before I had the secateurs in my hand. They were a good tool, old but with a strong blade and a long enough handle to give leverage on the slides of the window frame. A little rhyme occurred to me as I hid my escape kit and straightened up the bed:

  When Ackford appears,

  I’ll snip off his ears

  With my secateurs.

  By the time I heard a key tap at the lock, I was as close to a picture of sleepy innocence as it is possible to appear in the eyes of a man who thinks you’re a paedophile.

  Back in my room after supper, I worked on the window with the secateurs and had the blocks free within twenty minutes. I pushed the window wide open and plotted a route: lower yourself onto the box, put on the boots – they’d taken my shoes away on arrival – across the grass to the garden wall, over and away down the lane.

  The last step was to get ready to disable the tag at my ankle as soon as I’d connected up its replacement. If the mother unit clucked for a response and got two cheeps in reply, rather than the one it was expecting, the alarm would certainly go off. How long would I have? It had taken eight seconds for the alarm to sound when I’d broken open the case the previous day, so the interval between clucks was at least that long. But I’d have no way of knowing what point in that interval had been reached when I reconnected the battery. I might have eight seconds or more; I might have none.

  This was assuming the replacement tag worked at all. Another unknown.

  I picked up the glass and began to cut through the band that secured the tag to my ankle. If I broke the tamper-proof wire embedded in the plastic, that would be that. But I needed to be able to rip the tag from my ankle fast when the moment came. I worked round the tie, sawing gingerly towards the centre until I dared go no further. There was a fair thickness of plastic left, but a hard tug on the case and the band would snap, disabling the tag. Then the mother unit would never know the cheeps that said all’s well had come from a chip and a battery laboriously wedged in place by a cupboard shelf.

  The TV went off at ten-thirty and by eleven-thirty the house echoed with whistles and grunts from the bruisers disported on their couches and beds. I pushed open the window. It was cold, with a steady, chafing wind humming in the trees. The puddles in the track beyond the wall gleamed like pools of oil. I put the secateurs in my pocket and knelt over the chip and the battery. I ran through the movements my hands would make, from the delicate work on the chip to the violent wrenching of the tag from my ankle. If the alarm went off, so be it. I had no better ideas.

  I checked that the chip was securely wedged in place, took several deep breaths to compose myself, then pressed the wires home with a splinter of wood and reached for the tag. The tie cut into the skin of my ankle, snapped. I counted the seconds. Got to eight. Nothing. Ten. Twelve. Silence, blooming softly through the house. Fifteen, twenty. A fox barked from the fields and I’ve never heard a lovelier sound come coursing through empty air. Thirty seconds. I stared at the chip and the battery, not wanting to breathe in case I disturbed it.

  After a minute, I knew it was safe to leave. I stepped softly to the window, swung over the ledge and lowered myself down, then dangled from one arm and reached up with the other to shut the window as far as I could – I didn’t want anyone to notice a cold draft under my door. The plastic box was a yard beneath my feet, but suddenly I didn’t trust it. I swung sideways and jumped clear. Grabbed the boots from the box, sprinted to the wall and threw them over. Climbed. Picked up the boots and ran, refusing to let my feet flinch from the flintstones embedded in the icy mud.

  Two hundred yards from the house, I stopped and pulled on the boots. Too small. I cut slits in the toes with the secateurs, then ran on to the end of the track. From here the lane cut straight through the trees. I had no idea where I was going, but it was sweet relief to feel the rubber boots slapping on the wet road, the night air numbing my hands and cheeks.

&nb
sp; After half an hour or so, I emerged from the wood and came to a village – a few streets with a solitary streetlamp by the bus stop. I checked the timetable: Shakers Wood. Two buses a day, running between Great Yarmouth and Sandringham. Judging by the schedule, it was a fair few miles to either. Just along from the bus stop was a cul-de-sac of bungalows with cars parked out front. I would have liked to have stolen one, but the army hadn’t yet taught me how to hot-wire a car.

  I walked up the cul-de-sac until I came to a ramshackle place with an ancient Triumph Herald parked in front of the garage. As I got closer I saw that the garage doors were ajar. I slipped inside, pulled the doors shut and felt round for a light switch.

  The striplight flickered on and revealed a large pile of dilapidated furniture, partly hidden under dust sheets. I was just about to switch the light off and leave when I noticed a bicycle wheel poking out from behind the arm of a sofa. I had to move a stack of broken chairs to get at it, but that done I had in my hands a handsome black racing bike with a leather saddle and the words Jack Taylor emblazoned on the downtube. It was half a size too small for me, there was a cheap braided wire lock round the rear wheel and both tyres were flat. But there was a pump slung under the crossbar. . . It was worth a try.

  The secateurs did for the lock and when I pumped up the tyres, they held air. I lifted the rear wheel and pressed the cranks and the hub spun silently. I hadn’t expected to complete my escape on a bicycle, but why not? I replaced the dust sheets, turned off the light, wheeled the Jack Taylor out into the cul-de-sac and climbed aboard.

  I’d done some competitive cycling at university; this bike was heavier than I was used to, the rear brake was useless and the gears didn’t like changing; but once you got up to speed, it loped along as smooth as a cantering greyhound.

  I headed west, because I was going to need TJ Farah’s help now, and he lived near the SAS HQ in Hereford. The landscape was flat and I followed dead-straight drover’s roads across low-lying fields. A quarter moon appeared from behind a fringe of wind-torn cloud and the marshland glistened as if criss-crossed with silver thread. I had a following wind at my back. Weeting flew by, Hockwold cum Wilton, Prickwillow, Haddenham. . . Ten, fifteen, twenty miles, the signposts said. I’d taken the bike around two a.m. A person who is reasonably fit can maintain a speed of seventeen or eighteen miles an hour. I was more than reasonably fit and reckoned I could do twenty once I got a rhythm going. By the time they unlocked my empty room at seven-fifteen, I should be a hundred miles away. I didn’t think the owner of the bike would notice it was missing, and there’d be no reports of stolen vehicles in the vicinity. So they’d assume I’d gone on foot – implying a search with a radius of forty miles at most. A huge area, but I’d be far outside it.

  My mind unclenched, and for a while there was nothing but the sensation of carving through time and space, light as a whistle on the air. I kept to back lanes and B roads, taking the westerly option at every junction, stopping to drink at water butts and farmyard hoses. Fenstanton, Hail Weston, Thurleigh. . . The landscape started to roll: big, desolate fields ploughed into jumbled slabs of gleaming earth. The wind backed round to the north and drove the clouds away, and the new air was so cold it was hard to breathe. The wellington boots slapped at my calves. Weariness entered my legs, and every little hill had me panting. The flying Jack Taylor became an old steel bike again.

  I had to re-fuel, eat. But it was still an hour before dawn and I had no money. The wind moaned in my face, bearing a smell of wet coal. This is where you earn it, I told myself. You won’t get back to Skopje on a tide of euphoria.

  Dawn crept into the sky at my back and that buoyed me for a while, but then the cold was gnawing at my bones and I knew I couldn’t go on. I passed a sign to Wellingborough, then came to a halt alongside a Dutch barn stacked with bales. I wheeled the Jack Taylor round to the sheltered side and buried it under a pile of loose straw, then made a burrow for myself and crawled in.

  26

  Hunger woke me a few hours later. I stood up unsteadily and a rat which had crept close to my body for warmth scurried off across the concrete floor of the barn, shedding bits of straw from its greasy back. I tidied myself and tried to work out what time it was. Nine at least, probably nearer ten. I was officially on the run.

  I cycled into Wellingborough and found the railway station. Reasoning that I looked like a beggar, I started to beg. It wasn’t the most sensible way to start my life as a fugitive, but by now my hunger was such that no other consideration counted for anything at all. People inspected askance my mutilated boots, dank tracksuit bottoms and grubby T-shirt and most of them diverted accordingly. I thought how quickly I had crossed the border between relative contentment and absolute catastrophe – and perhaps some passers-by saw it, too, because I soon had enough money for a No. 3 Breakfast at the ambitiously named Royal Café, which occupied a noisy berth under the arches just to the south of the station.

  After mopping up the last smear of egg, I found an Internet café and paid for half an hour’s usage, then got into my server using a tricksy little backdoor I’d installed because people like me are not just paranoid, we are prescient, too. I accessed my cellphone backup and noted down TJ’s number, then cycled round in search of a call box. Wellingborough seemed to be phasing them out, and the one I finally found in a semi-industrial quarter of town didn’t smell well used – at least not for making phone calls. I fed my last forty pence into the slot and dialled, praying that TJ was back from Kosovo and hadn’t already been dispatched on another op.

  He took about twenty rings to answer. I heard a child yelling excitedly, My turn, Dad, it’s my turn, isn’t it? Dad!

  ‘Hi, how are you today?’ I asked brightly. ‘I wonder if you’d have a moment to talk about some financial offers we have exclusively for customers in the Hereford region.’

  He gave a deep sigh, read out a number and hung up. It would be a pre-paid phone – all of us in this miserable business assumed that our regular phones were tapped. I called him back, gave him the number of the call box, and finally we could talk.

  ‘It must be fucking hard being you, Jimmy Palatine.’

  ‘You heard what happened?’

  ‘Some. When did they let you out?’

  ‘They didn’t.’

  ‘Shit. Any bodies?’

  ‘No. I have to get back to Skop, TJ. I need help.’

  ‘You need more than help, you need a fucking miracle. You need Dr Who and his fucking Tardis.’

  ‘It’s not about me. That girl, I made a bad, bad mistake. I handed her over to a gang of pimps. I have to get her out.’

  ‘You do not have to get her out. What you have to do is stay away from Kosovo. They’re going to shit all over it anyway.’

  ‘I can ID some of them, including the one who tried to kill me. I know where they’re based. At least—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about every half-arsed thing that’s happened in your life, Jimmy, so shut the fuck up. I’ll help you one time, no more, because you helped my man Azza, who’d not’ve even needed help if I’d been doing my job. So there it is. Where are you?’

  ‘Wellingborough.’

  ‘Station car park, eighteen hundred tomorrow. Send a pic of your gobsmacked face.’ He read out an email address. ‘Call me at nine to confirm.’

  ‘Thanks, TJ, I really—’

  You said it was my turn, Dad! I heard, then the line went dead. For a moment I felt like that child, needy and persistent, though quite without the charm.

  I went back to the café and sent TJ a passport photo I had on file, then cycled out of Wellingborough. Time is cruel. I had not one single minute to spare, and it had dumped in my path an immovable interlude of thirty hours. Space will not compromise. The distance between a country lane outside Wellingborough and Syrna Street, Skopje, could not be contracted or sidestepped or cajoled into setting its topographical exigencies aside. I was not Dr Who. I had no Tardis. I couldn’t risk an airport, so would have to
get to the continent by boat, then south by road and rail. Timetables, connections, night trains clanking into sidings for interludes interminable and unexplained. I pedalled slowly.

  A sign told me I was thirteen miles from Northampton and I remembered that was where Father Daniel’s order was based. Since I had time on my hands, I decided to pay the place a visit. I was still suspicious about the priest, unsure what, if anything, he knew about Syrna Street; but I could go incognito. I stood on the cranks and the Jack Taylor sprang forward. Forty minutes later I rolled up to a pair of iron gates under a stone arch with a brass plate set in the left-hand pillar: Order of St Hugh, it read, and beneath it, Visitors please use the entrance on Huddleston Road. Beyond the gates, a gainly old Elizabethan manor house had spread its red-brick skirts in an acre of grounds. Towering chimney stacks decorated with elaborate zigzags and crenellations held themselves aloft against the low grey sky. To one side was a small chapel and a graveyard; to the other a short gravel drive led to a low-built annexe.

  I cycled past an ornamental garden of geometrical lawns and box hedges and turned into Huddleston Road, then left the Jack Taylor in a hedge on the other side of the road and strolled up the drive. The annexe had half-glazed double doors and I peered inside at a row of wooden chairs and a table set against the wall beneath a reproduction of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I tried the door and it opened.

  The table was set out with leaflets and photocopied sheets: service timetables, information about something called St Hugh’s Tuesday Club, and a history of the order with, on the inside cover, a photograph of a large man with showily arranged white hair and a red face. Father Wulfstan Murray-Bligh, read the caption, Rector General. I skimmed through the introduction. St Hugh’s ‘is a mendicant order with active participation in apostolic endeavours, dependent on the alms generously donated by its patrons and supporters,’ it explained. On the third page was a photograph of the refuge, taken from far enough away that you couldn’t see how run-down it was. ‘Opened in May 1996, our refuge in southern Kosovo takes in orphaned children from across this troubled region, and with the grace of God helps them to start new lives. Funds are urgently needed to allow us to continue this important work.’