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
