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.’
‘What about this?’ asked David, tapping the end of the rope they’d just come down.
‘It’ll just have to stay there. I know. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we’ve got no choice. With any luck, we’ll be out of here before anyone sees it.’
And so, leaving the dust-sheet rope hanging down from the roof behind them, a hostage to fortune, they took off round the edges of the courtyard, staying in the shadow of the buildings and doubling down almost to their hands and knees as they passed underneath lighted windows. One was open and they could hear voices inside laughing, but somehow they got past it without incident until finally they crossed open ground to the wall they had to climb. Eddie ran along the side of it a little way, looking for the place they’d be least exposed. Then, once he’d made his decision, he got up on David’s shoulders, raised the swivel chair above his head while David held the dust-sheet rope to which it was attached, took several practice swings, and then threw the chair up and over the wire on the top of the wall. The noise of its impact on the other side was louder than they’d expected and they froze for a moment in a strange eight-foot tableau of man on man, but nothing happened, and Eddie dropped back down to the ground.
‘Okay, start praying,’ said Eddie in a whisper as he took the rope from David and started gently pulling the invisible chair back toward him. At the top of the wall it wobbled and then caught in the wire. Eddie pulled it harder but it didn’t move; it was secure. Silently he pumped his fist, and drew a deep sigh of relief. Still no one seemed to have heard them.
‘All right, I’m going up first, and I’m going to put this down on the wire. It’ll make it easier to get over,’ he whispered, pointing to the folded-up gym mat inside his shirt. ‘Don’t worry, okay. Just do what I say,
