The King of Diamonds

by Simon Tolkien

  Two nights later, working by torchlight in the darkness, they started work on the dummy heads. Eddie had been busy in the interim purloining what he needed, and, not for the first time, David was impressed by his cellmate’s resourcefulness. He had got carrots and flour from the kitchens and a spare prison-issue blue-and-white shirt from the laundry, which he had torn into small pieces.

  ‘That’s for the inside of the heads when I’ve got the outsides ready,’ said Eddie, who was standing over the sink in the corner mixing his ingredients. Page by page, he was tearing up O’Brien’s Jesus for Prisoners and adding it with practised hands to the flour and water mush to make papier-mâché.

  ‘What are the carrots for then?’ asked David curiously.

  ‘To give the heads some flesh colour.’

  ‘What about hair?’

  ‘Paintbrushes! I got two out of the rec room last night. The workmen leave them behind when they go home,’ said Eddie, looking even more pleased with himself than usual as he pulled back his mattress to reveal his ill-gotten gains. ‘You can start pulling the bristles out while I’m doing this.’

  ‘How was it over there?’ David asked. They’d been working steadily for a little while and David had now finished with the first paintbrush and started work on the second.

  ‘Great,’ said Eddie, breaking off from humming a discordant version of Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ as he looked up from the sink. ‘They’ve got all the dust sheets we need in there, which helps because we can’t use the sheets in here – we’ll need them for covering the dummies. The scaffolding’s up near the ceiling, just where we want it, and there’s an old half-broken tubular chair in a corner that’ll work perfectly for a grapple. You know, to get over that first wall. It’s looking good, Davy, really good.’

  An hour later Eddie was ready with the first head. He’d sculpted out a crude nose and ears and now he used a tube of glue that he’d stolen from God knows where to add bristles from David’s pile to make hair and eyebrows.

  ‘It’ll do,’ he said, turning the head from side to side. ‘We can use a pen to touch them up at the end after they’ve dried.’

  ‘How long’ll that take?’

  ‘Twenty-four, thirty-six hours maybe. Don’t worry. We’ve got time. It’s the screws finding them that bothers me. We’ll have to keep them under the bunks and hope there isn’t a cell search. That’s all.’

  ‘Hope we’re lucky, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, and stop sounding like a doubting Thomas all the time, okay? It’s getting on my nerves.’

  It was unlike Eddie to sound so irritated for no reason. The tension must be getting to him too, David realized.

  They went as planned on the Saturday night. When the cell doors were opened for evening association, Eddie had the dummies ready in the bunks. They’d broken up their two wooden chairs and covered them with their jackets and bunched up bedclothes to simulate their bodies, and then they’d laid the papier-mâché heads in profile on the pillows. The effect was better than David had anticipated, but Eddie, eyeing his handiwork with a professional detachment, was less confident.

  ‘They’ll work okay if the screws are just doing a quick check through the Judas hole, but if they come in here, we’ve had it,’ he said, giving the dummies a final dissatisfied look before they left the cell for what they hoped would be the last time. David’s heart was beating so fast he felt it would burst.

  Eddie had been right: There were less screws on duty than usual – just one out in the yard and another at a desk in the corner reading a newspaper, nowhere near the doorway at the other end of the gym that opened onto the darkened stairs leading up to the rec room above. And there’d been no head count going in, which made it a lot less likely there’d be one going out. But these positive developments didn’t help David calm down, and he soon began to find the waiting almost unbearable. Eddie had been adamant that they should stay downstairs until almost the last minute since there would be far less chance of their being missed that way, and he seemed to have no problem passing the time chatting to the other prisoners and joining in a game of basketball down the other end of the gym, but David couldn’t take his eyes off the clock on the wall. Time seemed to have stopped; the minute hand didn’t move at all, and he kept looking toward the stairs and then over at Eddie, waiting for him to give the signal for them to go.

  At quarter past seven, fifteen minutes before the end of association, Eddie came over. He looked furious.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Davy?’ he asked in an angry whisper. ‘Hopping from one leg to the other gazing up at the bloody clock – you might as well go and tell that screw over there exactly what we’re planning. Do something for Christ’s sake. Anything. Just stop looking shifty.’

  Eddie moved away before David could answer, and for the next ten minutes David walked the perimeter of the gym, keeping his head down, only glancing up occasionally at Eddie, never at the stairs. Until, at twenty-five past seven, he felt a tap on his shoulder and, seconds later, saw Eddie slip through the doorway and up the stairs. No one seemed to have noticed, and a minute or two later, he followed.

  Eddie was at the top of the stairs holding a small half-sized gym mat folded up in his hand.

  ‘What do you want that for?’ David asked.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The door to the rec room was locked, but Eddie seemed to have expected that. He took a thin piece of wire from out of his pocket, fiddled inside the keyhole for a moment, and then opened the door with a gentle push.

  ‘Piece of cake,’ he whispered before beckoning David to follow him inside. The rec room looked very different from when David had last seen it. Dust sheets covered the furniture, the pool and the ping-pong tables, and a scaffold on wheels stood in the corner, leaning up against the far wall. There were no ladders. The workmen must have taken them with them when they left for the day. Outside the windows the sun had almost set over the exercise yard, leaving the big room in an eerie twilight.

  Through the open door they heard the guard’s whistle down below, signalling the end of association, and then came the sound of the prisoners spilling out into the exercise yard and crossing over to A Wing, until finally the door of the gym shut with a bang, a guard’s voice shouted ‘goodnight’, and they were left alone in sudden silence.

  ‘All right. Let’s get to work,’ said Eddie, crossing over to the scaffold with a determined look on his face. ‘Come on; give us a hand, Davy. We need to move this. We don’t want to be visible through the windows, do we?’

  Gently, they trundled the scaffold over to the centre of the wall and then, once Eddie was satisfied with its position, he started clambering up its side toward the top. Halfway up he stopped, bent down, picked something up from one of the planks, and then let out a suppressed whoop of delight. He had something metal in his hand, but in the half-light David couldn’t make out what it was.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ said Eddie, waving the thing in the air like it was some kind of trophy, his face creased with a wide smile.

  ‘What is it?’ asked David from below, irritated by his own incomprehension.

  ‘A scaffolding clip, you idiot. They must have had one over that they didn’t use.’

  ‘How does it help us?’

  ‘For making a hole so we can get up through there,’ said Eddie, pointing at the ceiling. ‘It’s going to have a bit more weight behind it than our paint brush handles, isn’t it?’

  David nodded. He resented being spoken to like he was some bottom-of-the-class schoolboy, but he could see the point. The clip would help; it was a good omen.

  Once he was up on the top of the scaffold, Eddie beckoned down to David to follow. It was a high room and the ceiling suddenly seemed impossibly far away, and David cursed the workmen under his breath for taking away their ladders. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was a far less skilful climber than his cellmate. He lacked the strength in his upper arms to haul himself up between the bars and he fo
und it hard to balance on the narrow footholds. Two-thirds of the way up, he got stranded, unable to go up or down, and Eddie had to come down and help him the rest of the way.

  ‘Now maybe you can see the point of why I work out in the gym every day,’ said Eddie with a self-satisfied smile as he pulled and lifted David up onto the top level. He seemed to have forgotten his earlier ill humour now that he’d found the clip and they were under way with the escape.

  ‘What about keeping a lookout?’ asked David.

  ‘No point. If anyone comes up here, we’ve had it anyway. Unless you can think of an explanation of why we’re making a bloody great hole in the rec room ceiling after lights-out, of course,’ Eddie added with a grin.

  Now, lifting the clip above his head, Eddie punched it up into the ceiling, and David joined in beside him using the wooden paint brush handle that he’d brought from the cell. Almost immediately a great cloud of white plaster mixed up with horsehair fell on their heads, half-blinding them. Wiping the dust from their eyes, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  A pair of snowmen up to no good, that’s what we are, thought David. The adrenaline coursed through his veins and he suddenly felt absurdly happy.

  Bit by bit the plaster came away, and soon the hole above their heads was large enough for them to see through to the roof space above.

  ‘I’m going up to take a look,’ said Eddie. ‘I won’t be long.’

  Standing on David’s hands, he hauled himself up through the opening onto the rafters above, and for a moment all David could see from below was the beam of Eddie’s pocket torch travelling across the timber underside of the roof. It seemed a long way away.

  But Eddie had lost none of his confidence when he came back down.

  ‘It’ll work,’ he said. ‘There are a couple of planks across the beams where we can stand. We’re lucky it’s a flat roof. It’s going to make it a lot easier. You finish off the hole. I’m going down to get the dust sheets and the chair.’

  ‘What chair?’

  ‘The one over there in the corner. The one for the grapple, remember?’ said Eddie, pointing down to a cheap swivel chair behind the door. It was missing one of its wheels, and David was surprised it hadn’t been thrown away.

  Clambering up and down the scaffold like a human monkey, Eddie brought the gym mat and four of the dust sheets up from below, and then tied a last one around the base of the chair and pulled it up to the top, where he positioned it under the hole in the ceiling that David had just finished widening.

  ‘Right, you first. I’ll hand you the stuff once you’re up there,’ said Eddie, holding the chair steady as David got on it and put his head up into the dark roof space above, feeling with his hands for the rafters on either side so he could lever himself up. But then he froze. Down below, someone, it had to be a screw, was rattling the handle of the gymnasium door.

  For what seemed an eternity but was in fact less than a minute, David stood motionless on the swivel chair, his feet and legs in the rec room, his head and upper body in the roof space above.

  What an idiot, he thought to himself. What an idiot I was to think we could get away with something as harebrained as this. He’d not yet done any time in the punishment block, but he’d heard enough about it to feel sick to his stomach at the prospect.

  But then Eddie’s voice came from below his feet.

  ‘It’s all right, he’s gone. Just some screw doing his rounds, checking the doors are locked. That’s all.’

  Relief flooded through David, leaving him weak at the knees, and he had to use all his strength to haul himself up through the hole. But there was no time to relax as Eddie started handing him up the mat and the dust sheets straightaway before following himself, pulling the swivel chair up after him by the dust-sheet rope to which it remained attached.

  ‘I thought we’d had it,’ said David, wiping the sweat from his brow. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘Yeah, well, you were wrong. You need to calm down, keep your nerve. That’s what you need to do. Because up there we’re going to have to be even more careful,’ said Eddie, shining his torch over the underside of the roof above their heads. ‘We can’t risk even one of those slates falling off. You hear me?’

  ‘Yeah, I hear you,’ said David, breathing deeply in a vain attempt to slow his racing heartbeat.

  What helped was work, and soon they set to again, punching up through the timber frame of the roof and prising away the tiles one by one. It was harder work than it had been with the ceiling down below, and David felt mentally and physically exhausted when they finally got up onto the roof an hour later. But the evening air revived him. He inhaled it deep into his lungs and felt the excitement rekindling in his chest as he looked out over the lights of the city. Nearby, the thick stone walls of St George’s Tower, the ancient keep of Oxford Castle, loomed out of the shadows, and above them the moon hung high in the eastern sky, shedding a pale light on the prison buildings down below. On one side was the exercise yard from which they’d come, on the other an open courtyard with buildings on three sides, and beyond that the two high walls that stood between them and freedom.

  ‘Okay, we need to get back down out of sight,’ said Eddie after a moment, looking at his watch. ‘We’ve got two hours to wait before they’re here. And I hope to God there’s some cloud cover when we go. We’ll be sitting ducks if we have to cross that yard in this light,’ he added with an angry backward glance at the moon.

  The waiting was awful, worse than anything that had gone before. Sitting, perched precariously on a crossbeam in the semi-darkness, David watched as Eddie worked and reworked the knots in the two dust-sheet ropes.

  ‘There must be easier ways of doing this,’ he said, adjusting his position for the hundredth time. He’d never felt more uncomfortable.

  ‘There are,’ said Eddie, nodding. ‘Impersonation’s the best if you can get away with it, but you need a lot of luck. Johnny Allen, the mad parson, was the best. You must’ve heard of him. He was in all the papers a few years back.’

  David shook his head.

  ‘It was brilliant. He was a strangler, one of those ones that can’t help themselves, and so they put him in Broadmoor, you know the loony bin for the criminally insane. High security though – guards round the clock and all that. Well, he was a bit of a song-and-dance man Johnny was, and he used to entertain the crazies on Saturday evenings with a vicar routine, dressed up in an old black suit and a stock and dog collar. And this went on for nine or ten years until one Sunday morning he got out of bed, got into his outfit, and just walked out. Simple as that. Screws didn’t recognize him and thought he’d been holding a service or something. Bye-bye maximum security, hello London,’ Eddie added with a grin.

  Above their heads the church bells out in the city tolled three times, and Eddie glanced at his watch, looking suddenly serious.

  ‘Quarter to twelve,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Time to go.’

  Moving carefully, they climbed back up onto the roof, hauling their equipment after them. The moon was just as bright as before and Eddie shook his fist at it half-heartedly.

  ‘Well, I suppose at least we’ll be able to see what we’re doing. Even if half the prison can too,’ he said, sounding resigned.

  Slowly, laboriously, Eddie paid out the first of his dust-sheet ropes until the bottom hung three or four feet above the ground.

  ‘Are you sure it’ll hold?’ asked David, looking over doubtfully at the nearby drainpipe to which Eddie had tied the top end.

  ‘Yeah, and I’ll be holding on to it too. I’m the one who should be worried. It’ll just be me and that drainpipe when I go down. Now get on with it. We haven’t got all day.’

  Halfway down the wall, David stopped, hanging on to the rope for dear life. He remembered his first swimming lesson and his father telling him how nothing was as bad as it looked. Well, he was wrong, he thought. Halfway down the rope it looked a lot worse than it had done from on top. He
had too much imagination. That was the problem. He could feel his bones shatter on the concrete down below even while he was still hanging here in mid-air. Eddie’s voice, hissing down at him from above, broke through his panic.

  ‘Listen, Davy, keep going or I’m letting go. You hear me, you fucking idiot?’

  David heard. Half-grabbing, half-falling down the dust sheet, he hit the ground a second later, shaken, bruised, but with nothing broken as far as he could tell.

  There was no time to recover. Eddie was already lowering the swivel chair on the end of the second dust sheet. It turned quicker and quicker as it made its descent, knocking several times against the windowless wall of the gymnasium, but eventually David had it in his hands, and Eddie let go of the rope, letting it fall to the ground. Quickly he followed, coming hand over hand down the dust sheet on which David had hung suspended a minute earlier, waiting to die. He had the small gym mat folded up inside his shirt.

  ‘What the fuck happened back there?’ he asked in an angry whisper as soon as he reached the ground. ‘Are you trying to get us caught?’

  ‘No, of course not. I panicked. That’s all. I’m not a climber like you.’ David sounded as if he was about to cry.

  ‘All right, all right. I’m sorry,’ said Eddie, swallowing his annoyance as he realized that it wasn’t helping anyone. ‘Look, the wall over there’s a lot lower than this one. It’s only the wire we’ve got to worry about and that just hurts, it’s not scary.’

  ‘And then?’ asked David, looking over at the wall beyond, the perimeter wall of the prison. It was way higher than the first; higher than the wall he’d just come down.

  ‘There’ll be ladders. I already told you that. But we’ve got to get there at twelve,’ said Eddie, glancing anxiously at his watch. ‘That’s the time they said they’d put them over, and they can’t leave them hanging there for long or someone’ll see them. So come on, let’s go. Follow me and keep your head down, for Christ’s sake.’