them since the trial.’
‘So revenge never enters your mind? No little fantasies to while your nights away?’
It was funny, I’d been feeding her lies and half-truths for weeks, and now when I was telling her it like it is, no prevarication whatsoever, I was getting that disbelieving grin.
‘Read my lips,’ I said distinctly. ‘Thoughts of revenge haven’t broken my sleep nor troubled my waking hours. Cross my heart. Kiss the Book. Swear on my father’s grave.’
I meant it, every word. Still do.
‘Then how do you explain the topic you propose for your PhD thesis?’ she asked.
This took my breath away for two reasons.
First, how the hell did she know what my proposed thesis topic was?
And second, how did I explain it?
The Revenge Theme in the English Drama.
Could it be that all the time I thought I was coolly, calmly and collectedly planning my future like a rational man, deep down inside me some bitter scheming fury was obsessed with thought of vengeance against you and Mr Dalziel?
Well, since then I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I can put my hand on my heart and declare with complete honesty that not one thought of you or Mr Dalziel crossed my mind as I chose my thesis topic.
Like I said earlier, I was bored to tears by all the sociological crap I’d had to shovel out for my degrees. I wanted something different. I wanted something to do with real people feeling real passion and I knew I had to turn from sociology to literature for that, and to the theatre in particular. I remembered an old English teacher who used to say there are three springs of action in the drama – love, ambition and revenge – and the greatest of these is revenge. So I started reading the Elizabethans and Jacobeans and very soon realized he was right. In terms of dramatic energy, nothing was more productive than revenge. Love moved, ambition drove, but revenge exploded! I knew I had found my theme, but it was an artistic, an academic, an autotelic choice, having nothing to do with extraneous matters like my own situation.
But I could see how it must look to Amaryllis with her Freudian squint.
I opened my mouth to argue, decided this was the wrong tactic, and said instead, ‘I’d really never thought of that. Good God. And here’s me thinking … well, I never!’
Let her see me gobsmacked, I thought. Let her feel completely in charge.
And all the time my brain was racing to work out how she knew about my proposal. I’d never mentioned it to her. Indeed I’d only put it together myself last week and sent it off to the extra-mural department of the University of Sheffield who had still to reply …
That was it! Her husband. I knew from the grapevine he was a university teacher. Her presence at the Syke meant it was likely it was one of the Yorkshire universities. I’d assumed his discipline would be the same as hers, but why should it be?
If I was right … but first check it out.
I could see no easier way than the most direct.
I said, ‘This would be your husband telling you about my application, I presume? And you filling him in about me. Funny that. Don’t the usual rules of patient confidentiality and pastoral responsibility apply in the case of convicted felons then?’
A fishing expedition she might have wriggled away from, but this was a grenade lobbed into the water.
She did her best but she was floundering belly-up from the start.
‘No, really, nothing sinister,’ she said, flashing me an all-sophisticates-together smile from those tubulous lips. ‘Just one of life’s little coincidences. Jay, that’s my husband, happens to be in the English Department there, you see, and he happens to chair the committee which looks at these things, and he happened to mention that there’d been an application from someone in Chapel Syke …’
An expert interrogator like yourself would have easily spotted the symptoms of evasion, too many happenses, trying to cover the fact that when she leaves here, she heads home and chats away quite happily with her poncy husband about the funny things her banged-up clients have been telling her, fuck professional confidentiality, probably livens up the chat round the dinner table with little anecdotes plucked from our soul-baring confessions. For a moment I felt genuinely indignant till I recalled that most of what I personally had told her was crap, more arsehole-baring than soul-baring.
I said, ‘Well, that’s handy. Maybe you could give me a hint how my application’s going, seeing as they’re taking forever to respond to me direct. I was thinking of having a word with the Visitor about it. He’s always banging on about prisoners’ rights.’
That gave her something to think about. Lord Threlkeld, our Chief Visitor, must be familiar to you. I bet he’s one of old Rumbletummy’s pet hates, being a notorious bleeding heart who likes nothing better than a good case of professional misconduct either from the police or the prison service to wave at his peers in the House.
She gathered her wits and answered, ‘It’s not for me to say, of course, but I think they’re really impressed by the quality of your proposal. I know that Jay in particular is keen to see that you get approval … all things being equal, of course …’
Oh my Amaryllis, is chess one of the sports you play in the shade? I wondered, hiding a smile as I interpreted her words. Good old Jay would love to be your advocate, but that might be difficult if you’re making some silly complaint about his wife …
‘Now that would be kind,’ I said. ‘Is there any chance your husband would be interested in supervising me himself?’
‘Oh no,’ she said hurriedly. ‘He’s taking up a new post next term in his old college, so he won’t be around, you see. But there is a colleague of his, Dr Johnson, who’s showing a very positive interest …’
And that was the first time I heard dear Sam’s name, but I hardly felt it as an epiphanic moment, I was more concerned with pressing home my advantage.
‘So now you’ve happened to find out about my PhD proposal, what do you reckon it shows about me?’ I asked. ‘Do you really think I’m secretly harbouring thoughts of revenge against the people I blame for putting me here?’
‘That’s putting it too strongly, perhaps,’ she said. ‘I don’t see you as a strongly vengeful personality. While it would be surprising if you didn’t feel some resentment, I see your choice of thesis subject as a sublimation of these feelings. In other words, it’s part of the healing process rather than part of the trauma.’
This was Reader’s Digest stuff, I thought gleefully. This was the kind of simple diet I wanted the boneheads who decided my future to be fed on.
‘So in fact, Doctor, you think the topic of my PhD proposal, and its acceptance at Sheffield, will be a help in getting me transferred to Butler’s Low? I mean, I wouldn’t want to be too far away from my supervisor, would I?’
‘I can see that,’ she said, nodding and making a note. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
I took that as a yes, and a yes is what it proved to be, though in
