by Alex Grecian
***
Twenty minutes later, a few cautious prisoners left their ruined cells and began to explore. Among them, Griffin waved Napper back and squatted next to the warder’s motionless body. He watched him for a long moment, looking for any sign of life. But there was none. The warder’s head was split open and a large stone from the wall of the prison’s south wing lay nearby, soiled with blood and matted hair. Griffin shook his head and clicked his tongue against his teeth in disappointment. Napper misunderstood, taking the sound as an opening for conversation.
“Serves him right, says I,” Napper said.
“Didn’t ask what you say,” Griffin said. “He wasn’t supposed to be over here at all. The warders were warned.”
“I’d’ve kilt ’im myself.”
“Well, the wall saved you the trouble.”
Prisoners were not allowed to speak. The walls of their cells were soundproofed, and when they were given exercise time, they were required to march silently abreast. Isolation was a part of the rehabilitation process. Griffin approved, despite feeling that rehabilitation was an impossible goal for most of the inmates of HM Prison Bridewell.
Griffin pulled the warder’s jacket off. He removed his own bloodstained shirt and draped it over the warder’s body, then put on the warder’s blue jacket. Its sleeves were an inch too short for Griffin’s arms, but it was less conspicuous than his prison uniform, with its pattern of black darts on white canvas. He shrugged his shoulders up and stooped a bit and decided it looked passable in the dim light of the prison corridor. He snugged the warder’s small cap down over his unkempt hair and kept his face to the wall as he walked, leaving the warder’s body in the corner. Napper shut the door of his cell and followed a few yards behind Griffin, keeping to the shadows as best he could.
If it were possible to see Bridewell from above, it would look like the right half of a broken wheel, with four spokes radiating outward from a central hub. The rim of the half wheel was an outer wall that bordered a courtyard surrounding the prison. Each spoke was, in fact, a two-story double corridor, with cells spaced at equal intervals down the length of it. Each of the four spokes was meant to house a different class of criminal, all of them men. There was no exit at the end of any of these spoke-corridors, and a fire four years earlier had killed eleven prisoners, all of them driven by flames down the inescapable length of that wheel spoke. There had been no public outrage at the news of their deaths. The eleven prisoners had been convicted of murder or rape, and the prison had simply swept out the corridor, buried the remains, and quickly filled the vacant cells. Since the fire and the refurbishment of that spoke of the “wheel,” less attention had been paid to where any particular prisoner was housed, and now murderers were kept with thieves and dippers were kept with male prostitutes. To leave the prison from one of the spokes, one was required to pass down the length of the corridor and through a heavy oaken door, banded with steel and locked from the other side. At that point, on any ordinary day, one gained access to the hub of the wheel and there were several doors to the prison yard from there, provided one was authorized to be moving around outside a cell.
At the moment, however, there were no warders in sight, except the dead man on the floor, and the prison was experiencing a brief bubble of calm that had settled in after the runaway train sheared off the southwest corner of the outer wall, plowed through five cells on the lower level of the south wing, and deposited itself, wheels still spinning, within the prison’s hub, only two feet away from the next wing full of inmates. Rubble and the twisted mass of the train blocked the ruined walls of the cells, except for chinks of light that shone through. A massive cloud of dirt and smoke still swirled about, the light beaming into it from outside, but had slowly begun to settle.
Griffin and Napper moved down the corridor to the far end, their feet sliding and crunching through grit. Griffin removed a chain from around his neck. Three keys dangled from the end of it, and he quickly selected the largest of them. He stuck it in the lock, turned it, and pulled the door open, scraping it against fallen rocks. Inside was a mangled corpse in dart-studded white cloth, only his lower extremities visible atop a fast-spreading pool of blood. Griffin left the cell and went back to the corridor, moved a few feet down, and tried the next door. He was conscious of the time he was taking and concentrated on staying calm. The train’s carriages had sheared through the westernmost wall, beginning at the southern tip, killing everyone in those cells and collapsing the floor above as they went. The prisoners were freed in their last seconds of life. Napper had been the only inmate to survive on that side of the wing.
The prisoners on the other side of the corridor had fared better. Most of the cells on the ground floor were at least partially demolished, but much of the floor above was intact. Griffin could hear men beginning to move about up there, but there was nothing he could do about them. It would take too long to free them. He knew that there was very little time before authorities would arrive to restore order. Griffin eventually found three survivors on the ground floor, three who were on his list, and freed them. He motioned to each of them in turn, and they followed behind him along with Napper. When he had found everyone he could in that wing, Griffin doubled back to the door at the opposite end of the corridor. A man above him on the east side of the corridor began to shout, challenging Griffin to free him. Others took up the chorus, but their voices were muted by a brown cloud of dust, and Griffin didn’t even look at them. He had as many men as he could realistically take with him. All the men he wanted.
He took a deep breath and pushed against the door. It swung open a crack on its iron hinges, and Griffin saw Napper hug the wall. He smiled. At this point, the greatest danger to Napper and the others was not the warders.
The door cracked open and Napper scampered forward, pushed behind Griffin, suddenly brave and anxious to get out of the stifling corridor. Griffin shooed him away and sidled through the narrow opening.
The dimly lit hub was quiet. Without warders and prisoners moving through the space, the main room ahead of him seemed cavernous and long-since deserted. Griffin pulled the door open wider and, when the four other men were through, he shut the door and bolted it. The voices of screaming men in the ruined wing abruptly vanished, closed off by the enormous soundproof door.
Through a pile of loose stones at the base of the south wall of the hub, Griffin could see a wedge-shaped section of a locomotive carriage. If it had traveled through one more wall, it might have hit Griffin’s cell in the next wing and killed him. He took a deep breath and looked around him at the other men.
One of them was tall and bald. He had a nervous air about him and would not meet Griffin’s eyes. The bald man turned and strode away, and Griffin hissed at him to stay with the group. Any one of them who split away was likely to be caught and returned to a cell. The bald man glared at him, or rather at his shoes, but rejoined the ranks, and Griffin motioned for them all to follow. Griffin could hear Napper and the others close behind him as they moved across the big room, navigating around evenly spaced wooden tables and chairs, scarred and blunted by years of use, and through another door at the far end.
He led them through a succession of smaller rooms and down a long corridor that circled the inside of the hub’s outer wall. Above them, a gallery jutted out over the floor where a warder would usually be posted. Griffin wondered again about the dead warder they had encountered. Why had he not been warned?
They passed through another door, and Griffin shut it behind them. They were in a small room with an enclosure in the corner where Griffin remembered changing from his street clothes to the prison uniform. This was where new men were brought into the prison. They were now close to the world outside. Griffin had only been in the prison for two days, yet he was surprised by how much he already missed the outside world. He thought of horses and carriages and umbrellas, he thought of flowers and trees, he thought of women. He looked at
the others with him, and he knew that they were thinking of their impending freedom. They were all murderers, all sentenced to death for their crimes. There was a single door and a gate between the four of them and freedom. He wondered what they had planned for the days and nights ahead and concentrated on memorizing their faces so that he could identify them if they were separated later. He knew Napper, and the bald man’s name was Cinderhouse. Of the others, one was tall and gaunt, his limbs and neck stretched long, his face lean and expressionless. He resembled a walking tree. His name, Griffin knew, was Hoffmann. He nodded at Griffin. The other man stayed in the gaunt man’s shadow and scuttled along the wall as if hiding from everyone else in the room. Griffin had seen this smaller prisoner in the exercise yard. Some of the other inmates referred to him as “the Harvest Man,” but Griffin had no idea what his real name might be.
He used the big key to unlock the door ahead of them, and Napper instantly bounded ahead, pushing the others aside in his hurry to get out. Griffin found himself forced against the doorjamb. He scowled at Napper’s back, but held his tongue.
And then they were all outside in the fresh night air. Griffin looked up at a low scud of clouds drifting slowly through the deep dark blue. Beyond the clouds, he could see a scattering of stars and the hazy glow of a full moon. A drop of rain hit his cheek and he let it roll along his skin, savoring the coolness of it. He looked back at the prison, but the damage was out of his line of sight, around the curve of the hub. From here, there was no sign that the wall had come tumbling down.
Napper scampered past again, his head up, staring at those same stars, that same moon, those same clouds. Griffin’s eyes narrowed and his breath quickened. His hands balled into fists, and he heard a low growl that he only gradually realized was coming from himself.
He felt eyes on him. He turned his gaze from the sky to the killers around him and realized that the tall gaunt man and the bald man were staring at him. Where had the Harvest Man gone? And why didn’t he have a proper name? The gaunt man held a finger to his lips. The bald man shook his head slowly from side to side. Griffin nodded, annoyed, and motioned them forward across the dirt yard.
They moved over the grounds and to the gate in the high fence as the clouds opened up above them and it began to rain. The gate was abandoned, no warder in sight. Napper ran past them all and grabbed the bars of the gate in both hands. He pushed and the gate swung open, and they all followed him through to freedom.
Griffin stepped through the open gate into a wide brick plaza and squinted into the unseasonal fog. There was nobody outside the prison waiting for him, nobody in sight in any direction he looked, except the three remaining murderers. The night was silent and empty.
He watched the others disappear separately into the low-lying mist, none of them looking back or at one another. They were simply gone, marked here and there by pale afterimages against the dark sky. He felt a brief moment of panic, but squared his shoulders and made a quick decision. He fished inside the waistband of his trousers, found the hidden pocket sewn in the back, and pulled out a small chunk of blue chalk. He knelt and drew the number four on the bricks outside the prison gate, then an arrow that pointed away from the prison. He stood and filled his lungs with fresh air, decided to follow in the direction Napper had gone across the empty field to his right, and made himself disappear, too.
Chapter 2
Detective Inspector Walter Day left Regent’s Park Road and picked his way down the steps that led to the towpath bordering the canal. The moon was bright and full and its light gleamed on the water, but did nothing to illuminate the ivy-covered black rock wall beside him. The soles of his slippers slapped against the stones underfoot.
Day’s wife, Claire, was under the mistaken impression that she hadn’t been sleeping lately. In fact, she slept fitfully in short bursts that she later couldn’t remember. She tossed and turned and snored and flung her limbs at him, trying to arrange herself comfortably around the mass of her belly. Day often snuck out of bed and went to the parlor, poured himself a brandy, and read until he fell asleep in his big leather chair. Tonight, the moon had beckoned. He had put on his trousers and slipped quietly out of the house, pulling his jacket on over his nightshirt.
His eyes felt bruised and gummy, improperly fitted into their sockets. He blinked, trying to clear them and bring the path into focus, but a soft fog hovered low above the canal. The night seemed filmy and immaterial. He trudged along, sniffing the wet air, passing slowly beneath bridges and low-hanging branches, heavy with dripping leaves, and watched as a long narrow houseboat passed him, unmoored and rudderless, drifting away in the opposite direction, until it disappeared around a bend.
He floated along beside the water and thought about his wife, thrashing about in their bed, generating heat. He felt powerless to help Claire or even to make her more comfortable. She was carrying all the weight of the pregnancy by herself. His helplessness made him anxious, made him want to run. At least as far as the towpath. A brief escape. Alone in the wee hours with the dark scent of canal water in his nose, he felt maybe a bit more free, a little less vulnerable.
He stopped and squinted up at the wall beside him, reached out and brushed his fingers against the cool stones. Here beside the canal at two o’clock in the morning, with nothing to distract him from the inevitable, he saw that he had no control over his future, no control over Claire’s life or the life of their coming child.
He looked away from the wall at the towpath ahead. A few yards ahead, he could see the bars of a gate gleaming faintly in the moonlight. There were no horses out this late to pull the boats through the water, so someone had closed the gates. He would have to turn back.
He stared at the tops of his slippers, watched them twist slowly around under him, and watched them begin the march along the path in the direction he had come, back up the steps, back to the road.
He paid no attention to the footpaths on either side of him and instead wandered up the middle of Regent’s Park Road, thinking about the baby. That new Day on its way.
He stopped walking and took the slipper off his left foot, fished out a rock, and threw it as far as he could. He watched it disappear in the early-morning mist. He leaned against the trunk of a tree beside the path, steadying himself while he put his slipper back on, and looked up at the moon caught in the branches above. The tree had been there before Day was born and would no doubt be there long after he died. Black vines crept up the sides of it and tiny sprouts nudged through the bark, out into the night air. He wondered whether they would grow to be stout branches and nourish the tree. Or perhaps they were only offshoots of the vine, burrowing up under and through the tree’s bark, eventually choking it to death.
He balled up his fist and punched the tree trunk. Immediately, he regretted having done it. His knuckles hurt, and when he held his hand up and moved it in the moonlight he saw blood. He turned and rested his back against the unharmed tree and sank down along it to the ground, sat there. He bit his lip and plucked a blade of grass from the dirt between his legs, reached up and stabbed the moon with its tapered end.
Nine months had given him too long to think about things. His work had helped with that. He had buried himself in an overflowing caseload and ignored his nagging doubts about fatherhood. What did he know about being a father? His own father, Lord knows, had not set a wonderful example. Arthur Day had given Walter no clues as to how one went about the process of becoming a father. Everything—the entire life he saw ahead of him—was a complete mystery. If only things could remain unchanged. A happy life, a fulfilling job, a wonderful wife, and a tidy home.
But of course, it was too late for that.
He tore the blade of grass lengthwise. It separated easily along the grain, but it was useless now and dead. He dropped it back to the ground and felt sorry that he had killed it.
He may have slept then. He didn’t know. His mouth tasted terrible. The moon,
at least, appeared to be in the same place in the sky, so if he had slept, it hadn’t been long. He pushed himself back up and patted the trunk of the tree and walked away from it, back up the lane.
He turned in at his gate by instinct and so did not immediately notice the young boy standing on his porch. When he did look up, he expected to see the familiar blue door in the center of the terrace house, but Claire was standing in the open doorway with a lantern held high. She pushed past the boy and came down the steps and set her hand lightly on his arm.
“Where were you?” she said. Her eyes were wide and searching, as if there might be a clue in the blunt planes of his face.
Day opened his mouth to answer and closed it again. He suddenly felt as though he had betrayed her. He had left her alone and had indulged in self-pity at a time when she needed him to be strong and, more than anything, to be with her. He had acted as a child would act, and he shook his head at her now, unable to speak. He felt his face flushing with shame and was thankful that the lantern light was too weak for Claire to see him clearly.
“Inspector,” the boy said. “Sir?”
Day looked up at him. “What is it, boy?”
“He’s sent for you. Sir Edward has.”
“At this time of night?”
“Sent for ever’body, sir. I mean ever’body there is. I had a time findin’ you, too. They tol’ me you was in Kentish Town, not out here. Posh!”
Day sighed. Day didn’t like to advertise the fact that he lived well beyond his means in the Primrose Hill area. The house was a gift from Claire’s parents. “Tell me what’s happened.”
“They’re out, sir. They’re all out, the bad ’uns are. The whole prison’s disappeared in a puff of smoke, and the bad ’uns are in the streets.”
