Daisy in Chains(96)

WOLFE IS RELAXING, lowering his heartbeat, settling his breathing, the way he once did before a difficult operation, before a long run, before taking the plane up. He has a towel around his neck, so anyone glancing in will think he’s just finished one of his exercise sessions. He glances at his watch, even though he’s told himself he mustn’t and swears that he won’t do it again. He knows exactly what the time is. Calm is what he needs to be right now.

A shadow blocks the doorway. One of the guards is looking in.

‘Guv.’ Wolfe nods his head, once. Just enough for politeness.

‘Dismantling the grotto are we, lads?’

The paper chains have all been taken down and lie in coiled heaps like copulating snakes on Phil’s bunk.

‘Twelfth night, Guv,’ Wolfe says. ‘Unlucky to keep them up any longer.’

‘Twelve what?’

‘Twelfth of January,’ Phil pipes up. ‘The date you’re supposed to take your Christmas decorations down or the bad pixies will come and get you. Or something like that.’

Wolfe doesn’t let himself smile. The screws don’t like smiling inmates. It always makes them think they’re missing something. Which, of course, they usually are.

‘Yeah, well. Make sure they go in the bin. Frigging things are a fire hazard.’

The guard leaves, his footsteps clipping down the corridor, the door closing in his wake. Wolfe gets up and opens it again before pressing one hand against his trouser pocket to feel the reassuring hard lump of steel in there.

Across the corridor Mr Sahid is watching him. Sahid looks at his watch. His eyebrows rise. Wolfe lets his head drop, maintaining eye contact, then lifts it again.

Sahid throws back his head and yells something in Arabic.

A second later, two men appear from nearby cells. In a movement so slick, so coordinated, it looks rehearsed, they vault over the rail and drop. Immediately a whistle blows and shouts are heard. A guard comes racing. Inmates crowd out of their cells.

Wolfe turns to find Phil directly behind him. He bends his head to let his cellmate hang several coils of paper chain around his neck.

‘Good luck, mate,’ Phil tells him.

The two men, who are young and very fit, who have never drunk alcohol in their lives and who have trained at a special gym for Muslim men since they were sixteen years old, haven’t dropped far. Landing on the net that prevents the upper corridors from being used as suicide launching pads, they are now using it to stage an impromptu circus act.

Wolfe, still draped in paper chains, makes his way along the corridor, peering over the railing, as though seeking a vantage point for the entertainment below. Men are yelling encouragement, guards are insisting that everyone goes back to their cells right now. The men ignore them. This is fun enough to risk a cuff on the back of the head.

The two men are holding hands and leaping high into the air. One of them somersaults over the other. As he lands, one foot goes through the net and the crowd applauds as though it’s just seen the best stunt ever.

Wolfe reaches the door. Men are pouring in from the next hallway and it will be locked soon. Already the cry of ‘lockdown’ is sounding along the block and that is the signal for the fighting to start. Wolfe picks up his pace. He is running by the time he gets to the end of the second corridor. This door is locked but Wolfe hasn’t wasted his time in the metal fabrication workshop. The key he’s fashioned over several weeks won’t win any design prizes but it’s been tried and tested and doesn’t fail him now.

When he arrives at the gym Wolfe throws the towel over the security camera just as he does every time fight club takes place. Any guard seeing the camera black out at this time of day will assume a malfunction. He will investigate, but not while a full-scale riot is taking place in one of the blocks. Wolfe has about five minutes, by his own calculation, and that should be enough.

Time enough to cut through the black masking tape holding together the steel frame of the five-a-side goalposts, so that the pieces fall apart where Wolfe has previously sawn through them; also in the metal fabrication workshop. He now has six, six-feet-long tubes and three shorter tubes of just over a foot long. The longer tubes have small, black eyelets screwed into them at eighteen-inch intervals. Wolfe took a risk, attaching the eyelets in advance, but it has paid off. No one has spotted them and their being pre-attached will save valuable time. When he gets outside he will slot the long poles together, using four clamps made from doubled-over aluminium cans. These he has been storing in the canvas bag that, even in the dim light of the gym, is still the blue of Maggie’s hair.

Also in the bag are the nuts and bolts that will fix the three shorter poles to the two, assembled, longer ones and hold them in position.

The steps of the ladder are made from reinforced wire netting, cut from the football nets that Wolfe found in the canvas bag. Alone in their cell at night, he and Phil have cut and twisted the netting into ten, very strong, lengths of wire rope and these he will fasten on to the eyelets of the poles to form steps. For the past two weeks, the ‘steps’ have been hidden inside the paper chains that have adorned their cell. The discarded paper lies scattered around the gym floor now like a snowstorm seen by someone on psychedelic drugs.

With Phil’s help, and with a number of other prisoners and guards who owe him favours turning a blind eye, Wolfe has fashioned a ladder capable of getting him to the top of the outer fence and down the other side. His heart is pumping hard now, but this happens a lot to a man who is in peak physical condition and he needs the rush of adrenalin he knows it will bring.