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Cambrioge

Fri Dec 14th

The Quaestor’s Lodging

Dear Mr Pascoe,

Cambridge! St Godric’s College! The Quaestor’s Lodging!

Ain’t I the swell then? Ain’t I a Home Office commercial for the rehabilitating powers of the British penal system?

But who am I? you must be wondering. Or has that sensitive intuition for which you are justly famous told you already?

Whatever, let me end speculation and save you the bother of looking to the end of what could be a long letter.

I was born in a village called Hope, and it used to be my little joke that if I happened to die by drowning in Lake Disappointment in Australia, my cruciform headstone could read

Here lies

Francis Xavier Roote

Born in

HOPE

Died in

DISAPPOINTMENT

Yes, it’s me, Mr Pascoe, and guessing what could be your natural reaction to getting mail from a man you banged up for what some might call the best years of his life, let me hasten to reassure you:

THIS ISN’T A THREATENING LETTER!

On the contrary, it’s a REASSURING letter.

And not one I would have dreamt of writing if events over the past year hadn’t made it clear how much you need reassurance. Me too, especially since my life has taken such an unexpected turn for the better. Instead of grubbing away in my squalid little flat, here I am relaxing in the luxury of the Quaestor’s Lodging. And in case you think I must have broken in, I enclose the annual conference programme of the Romantic and Gothic Studies Association (RAGS for short!). There’s my name among the list of delegates. And if you look at nine o’clock on Saturday morning, there you will see it again. Suddenly I have a future; I have friends; out of Despair I have found my way back to Hope and it’s starting to look as if after all I may not be heading for the cold waters of Disappointment!

Incidentally, I shared my macabre little jest with one of my new friends, Linda Lupin MEP, when she took me to meet another, Frère Jacques, the founder of the Third Thought Movement.

What brought it to mind was we were standing in the grounds of the Abbaye du Saint Graal, the Cornelian monastery of which Jacques is such a distinguished member. The grounds opened with no barrier other than a meandering stream choked with cresses on to a World War One military cemetery whose rows of white crosses ran away from us up a shallow rise, getting smaller and smaller till the most distant looked no larger than the half-inch ones Linda and I carried on silver chains round our necks.

Linda laughed loudly. Appearances can deceive (who knows that better than you?) and finding Linda possessed of a great sense of humour has been a large step in our relationship. Jacques grinned too. Only Frère Dierick, who has attached himself to Jacques as a sort of amanuensis with pretensions to Boswellian status, pursed his lips in disapproval of such out-of-place levity. His slight and fleshless figure makes him look like Death in a cowl, but in fact he’s stuffed to the chops with Flemish phlegm. Jacques happily, despite being tall, blond and in the gorgeous ski-instructor mould, has much more of Gallic air and fire in him, plus he is unrepentantly Anglophile.

Linda said, ‘Let’s see if we can’t dispose of you a bit further south in Australia, Fran. There’s a Lake Grace, I believe. Died in Grace, that’s what Third Thought’s all about, right, Brother?’

This reduction of the movement to a jest really got up Dierick’s bony nose but before he could speak, Jacques smiled and said, ‘This I love so much about the English. You make a joke of everything. The more serious it is, the more you make the jokes. It is deliciously childish. No, that is not the word. Childlike. You are the most childlike of all the nations of Europe. That is your strength and can be your salvation. Your great poet Wordsworth knew that childhood is a state of grace. Shades of the prison house begin to close about the growing boy. It is the child alone who understands the holiness of the heart’s affections.’

Getting your Romantics mixed there, Jacques, old frère, I thought, at the same time trying to work out if the bit about shades of the prison house was a crack. But I don’t think so. By all accounts Jacques’ own background is too colourful for him to be judgmental about others, and anyway he’s not that kind of guy.

But it’s funny how sensitive you can get about things like a prison record. These days I know that some ex-cons make a very profitable profession out of being ex-cons. That must really piss you and your colleagues off. But I’m not like that. All I want to do is forget about my time inside and get on with my life, cultivate my garden, so to speak.

Which is what I was doing quite successfully, and ultimately literally, till you came bursting through the hedge I’d built for protection and privacy.

Not once, not twice, but three times.

First with suspicion that I was harassing your dear wife!

Next with allegation that I was stalking your good self!!

And finally with accusation that I was involved in a series of brutal murders!!!

Which is the main reason I’m writing to you. The time has come, I think, for some straight talking between us, not in any spirit of recrimination but just so that when we’re done, we can both continue our lives, you in the certainty that neither you nor those you love need fear any harm from me, and myself with the assurance that, now my life has taken such a strong turn for the better, I needn’t concern myself with the possibility that once again the tender seedlings in my garden shall feel the weight of your trampling feet.

All we need, it seems to me, is total openness, a return to that childlike honesty we all possess before the shades of the prison house begin to close, and perhaps then I can persuade you that during my time in Yorkshire’s answer to the Bastille, Chapel Syke Prison, I never once fantasized about taking revenge on my dear old friends, Mr Dalziel and Mr Pascoe. Revenge I have studied, certainly, but only in literature under the tutelage of my wise mentor and beloved friend, Sam Johnson.

As you know, he’s dead now, Sam, and so, God damn his soul, is the man who killed him. Unless of course you pay any heed to Charley Penn. Doubting Charley! Who trusts nobody and believes nothing.

But even Charley can’t deny that Sam’s dead. He’s dead.

When thou know’st this, thou know’st how dry a cinder this world is.

I miss him every day, and all the more because his death has contributed so much to the dramatic upturn in my life. Strange, isn’t it, how tragedy can be the progenitor of triumph? In this case, two tragedies. If that poor student of Sam’s hadn’t overdosed in Sheffield last summer, Sam would never have moved to Mid-Yorkshire. And if Sam hadn’t moved to Mid-Yorkshire, then he wouldn’t have become one of the monstrous Wordman’s victims. And if that hadn’t happened, I would not be basking in the glow of present luxury and promised success here in God’s (which, I gather, is how the illuminati refer to St Godric’s!)

But back to you and your fat friend.

I’m not saying that I felt any deep affection for the pair of you or gratitude for what you’d done to me. If I thought of you at all it was in conventional terms, good cop, bad cop; the knee in the balls, the shoulder to cry on, both of you monsters, of course, but the kind that no stable society can do without, for you are the beasts that guard our gates and let us sleep safe in our beds.

Except when we’re in prison. Then you cannot protect us.

Mr Dalziel, the ball-crushing knee, would probably say that we have foregone your protection.

But not you, dear Mr Pascoe, the damp shoulder. What I’ve heard and seen of you over the years since our first encounter makes me think you are more than just a role-player.

I’d guess you’ve got doubts about the penal system as it stands. In fact I suspect you’ve got doubts about many aspects of this creaky old society of ours, but of course being a career policeman makes it difficult for you to speak out. Doesn’t stop your good lady, though, dear Mrs Pascoe, Ms Soper as she was in those long lost days when I was a young and fancy-free student at Holm Coultram College. How delighted I was to hear that you’d got married! News like that brings a little warmth and colour seeping through even the damp grey walls of Chapel Syke. Some unions seem to be made in heaven, don’t they? Like Marilyn and Arthur; Woody and Mia; Chas and Di …

All right, can’t win ’em all, can we? But at the time each of those marriages had that things-are-looking-up feel-good quality and, in terms of survival, yours looks like it could be the exception that proves the rule. Well done!

But, as I was saying, within those walls not even the nice worrying cops like you can do much to protect the rights of young and vulnerable cons like me.

So even if I’d wanted to plan revenge, I wouldn’t have had time to do it.

I was too busy looking for a route to survival.

I needed help, of course, for one thing I quickly worked out.

You can’t survive alone in prison.

As you well know, I’m not defenceless. My tongue is my chief weapon, and given room to wield it in, I reckon I can nimble my way out of most predicaments.

But if one nasty con is twisting your arms up your back while another’s sticking his cock in your mouth, wagging your tongue tends to be counter-productive.

This was the likely fate a guy I got banged up with on remand took some pleasure in mapping out for me if I got sent down to the Syke. Good-looking, blond, blue-eyed boy with a nice slim figure would be made very welcome there, he assured me, adding with a bitter laugh that he used to be a good-looking blond blue-eyed boy himself.

Looking at his scarred, hollow-cheeked, broken-nosed, ochre-toothed face, I found it hard to believe, but something in his voice carried conviction. Something in his judge’s too, and next time we met was when we arrived at Chapel Syke together.

He was an old hand at this and though I soon sussed out that he was far too far down the pecking order to have any value as a protector, I squeezed every last detail I could get out of him about how the place worked as we went about our new-boy task of cleaning the bogs.

The main man was a ten-year con called Polchard, first name Matthew, known to his intimates as Mate, though not because of any innate amiability. He wasn’t much to look at, being scrawny, bald, and so white faced it was like seeing the skull beneath the skin. But his standing was confirmed by the fact that during ‘association’ he always had a table to himself in the crowded ‘parlour’ which is what they called the association room. There he sat, scowling down at a chessboard (Mate: gerrit?) and studying a little book in which he occasionally made notes before moving a piece. From time to time someone would bring him a mug of tea. If anyone wanted to talk to him, they stood patiently by, a couple of feet from the table, till he deigned to notice them. And on rare occasions if what they said was of particular interest, they’d be invited to pull up a chair and sit down.

Polchard himself didn’t do sex, my ‘friend’ informed me, but his lieutenants were always on the lookout for new talent and if he gave them the go-ahead, I might as well touch my toes and think of England.

But in the short term, he went on to say, I was most at risk from a freelancer like Brillo Bright. You may have encountered him and his twin brother, Dendo. God knows where their names came from, though I have heard it suggested that Brillo got his after spending some time in a padded cell (Brillo Pad, OK?) At some point Brillo had decided that having a spread eagle tattooed across his bald pate and beetling brow with its talons wrapped around his eye sockets was a good way of improving his facial beauty. He might have been right. What it certainly must have improved was the odds on his being recognized whenever he pursued his chosen profession of armed robbery, which possibly explained why he’d spent half of his thirty-odd years in jail. Brother Dendo was by comparison an intellectual, but only by comparison, being an unpredictably vicious thug. The Brights were the only cons to have an existence independent of Polchard. On the surface they were all chums together, but in fact they were far too unstable for Polchard to risk the hassle of a confrontation. So they existed like the Isle of Man, offshore, closely related to the mainland, but in many ways a law unto themselves.

And helping themselves to a tasty newcomer would be a way for Brillo and Dendo to affirm their independence without risking any real provocation of the main man.

To survive I had to find a way of getting myself under Polchard’s protection which didn’t involve getting under one of his boys. Not that I’ve got any serious objection to a close same sex relationship, but I knew from anecdote and observation that letting yourself become a centre-fold spread in prison means you’re pinned down at the bottom of the heap just as surely as if you’d got a staple through your belly button.

First off, I had to show I wasn’t to be messed with. So I laid my plans.

A couple of days later I waited till I saw Dendo and Brillo go into the shower room, and I followed them.

Brillo looked at me like a fox who’s just seen a chicken come strolling into his earth.

I hung my towel up and stepped under the shower, plastic shampoo bottle in hand.

Brillo said something to his brother who laughed, then he moved towards me. He wasn’t all that well hung for such a big man, but what there was certainly had a strong sense of anticipation.

‘Hello, girlie,’ he said. ‘Like someone to do your back?’

I unscrewed the top of my shampoo bottle and said, ‘Have you got that chicken sitting on your head so everyone will know you’ve got scrambled egg for brains?’

It took him a moment to work this out, then his eyes bulged in fury, which was fine as it doubled my target area.

As he lunged towards me, I raised the bottle and squeezed and sent a jet of the lavatory cleaning bleach I’d filled it with straight into his eyes.

He screamed and started to knuckle at his eyes and I gave the skinned end of his rampant dick another quick burst. Now he didn’t know what to do with his hands. I stooped, hooked his left ankle from under him, then stood back as he tumbled over, hitting his head against the wall with such force that he cracked a tile.

All this in the space of a few seconds. Dendo meanwhile had been standing there in sheer disbelief but now he began to advance. I waved the shampoo bottle towards him and he halted.

I said, ‘Either get bird-brain here to a medic or buy him a white stick.’

Then I picked up my towel and retreated.

You see how I’m putting myself in your hands, my dear Mr Pascoe. A confession to assault and grievous bodily harm occasioning death. For it turned out that Brillo had a surprisingly thin skull for so thick a man, and there was damage which led to a tardily diagnosed meningeal problem which led to his demise. You could probably get an investigation going even after all this time. Not that I think the authorities at the Syke would applaud you. They went through the motions at the time, but brother Dendo who couldn’t bring himself to co-operate with the Law even in circumstances like these, lost it when one of the screws dissed his dead brother and broke his jaw.

That got him out of the way for which I was mightily relieved. Of course all the cons knew what had happened, but in the Syke no one grassed without Polchard’s say-so, and as there was a touch of negligence in Brillo’s death, the screws were glad to bury him and the affair, very few questions were asked.

That was stage one. Polchard too probably wasn’t sorry to see the back of the Brights, but there were plenty of people around who would be happy to do Dendo a favour, so I still needed the top man’s protection.

So to stage two.

At the next period in the parlour, I approached his table and stood at what I’d worked out was the appropriate petitioning distance.

He ignored me completely, not even glancing up under his bushy eyebrows. Conversation and activity went on elsewhere in the room but it had that hushed unreal quality you get when people are simply going through the motions.

I studied the chessboard as he worked out his next move. He’d obviously started with an orthodox Queen’s Pawn opening and countered it with a variation on the Slav defence. Playing yourself is a form of exercise by which the top-flight chess-player can keep his basic skills honed, but the only real test, of course, lies in pitting them against the unpredictability of an equal or superior player.

Finally after what must have been twenty minutes and with only another five of the association period left, he made his move.

Then, still without looking up, he said, ‘What?’

I stepped forward, picked up the black bishop and took his knight.

The room went completely silent.

Leaving the knight open to the bishop was a trap, of course. One which he’d laid for himself and would therefore not have fallen into. But I had. What he needed to know now was, had I done it out of sheer incompetence, or did I have an agenda of my own?

At least that’s what I hoped he needed to know.

After a long minute, still without looking up, he said, ‘Chair.’

A chair was thrust against the back of my legs and I sat down.

He spent the remaining period of association studying the board.

When the bell went to summon us back to our cells he looked me in the face for the first time and said, ‘Tomorrow.’

And thus I moved out of the first, which is the most dangerous, stage of my prison career, Mr Pascoe. If I’d just sat around rehearsing revenge on yourself, I would by this point probably have been raped, possibly mutilated, certainly established as everyone’s yellow dog, to be kicked and humiliated at will. No, I had to be pragmatic, deal with the existing situation as best I could. Which is what I’m doing now. I make no bones about it. I no longer want to be constantly glancing back over my shoulder, fearful that you are out there, driven to pursue me by your own fears.

Perhaps one day we may both come to recognize that flying from a thing we dread is not so very different from pursuing a thing we love. If and when that day comes, then I hope, dear Mr Pascoe, that I may see your face and take your outstretched hand and hear you say,