The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien
the open door they heard the guard’s whistle down below, signalling the end of association, and then came the sound of the prisoners spilling out into the exercise yard and crossing over to A Wing, until finally the door of the gym shut with a bang, a guard’s voice shouted ‘goodnight’, and they were left alone in sudden silence.
‘All right. Let’s get to work,’ said Eddie, crossing over to the scaffold with a determined look on his face. ‘Come on; give us a hand, Davy. We need to move this. We don’t want to be visible through the windows, do we?’
Gently, they trundled the scaffold over to the centre of the wall and then, once Eddie was satisfied with its position, he started clambering up its side toward the top. Halfway up he stopped, bent down, picked something up from one of the planks, and then let out a suppressed whoop of delight. He had something metal in his hand, but in the half-light David couldn’t make out what it was.
‘We’re in luck,’ said Eddie, waving the thing in the air like it was some kind of trophy, his face creased with a wide smile.
‘What is it?’ asked David from below, irritated by his own incomprehension.
‘A scaffolding clip, you idiot. They must have had one over that they didn’t use.’
‘How does it help us?’
‘For making a hole so we can get up through there,’ said Eddie, pointing at the ceiling. ‘It’s going to have a bit more weight behind it than our paint brush handles, isn’t it?’
David nodded. He resented being spoken to like he was some bottom-of-the-class schoolboy, but he could see the point. The clip would help; it was a good omen.
Once he was up on the top of the scaffold, Eddie beckoned down to David to follow. It was a high room and the ceiling suddenly seemed impossibly far away, and David cursed the workmen under his breath for taking away their ladders. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was a far less skilful climber than his cellmate. He lacked the strength in his upper arms to haul himself up between the bars and he found it hard to balance on the narrow footholds. Two-thirds of the way up, he got stranded, unable to go up or down, and Eddie had to come down and help him the rest of the way.
‘Now maybe you can see the point of why I work out in the gym every day,’ said Eddie with a self-satisfied smile as he pulled and lifted David up onto the top level. He seemed to have forgotten his earlier ill humour now that he’d found the clip and they were under way with the escape.
‘What about keeping a lookout?’ asked David.
‘No point. If anyone comes up here, we’ve had it anyway. Unless you can think of an explanation of why we’re making a bloody great hole in the rec room ceiling after lights-out, of course,’ Eddie added with a grin.
Now, lifting the clip above his head, Eddie punched it up into the ceiling, and David joined in beside him using the wooden paint brush handle that he’d brought from the cell. Almost immediately a great cloud of white plaster mixed up with horsehair fell on their heads, half-blinding them. Wiping the dust from their eyes, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.
A pair of snowmen up to no good, that’s what we are, thought David. The adrenaline coursed through his veins and he suddenly felt absurdly happy.
Bit by bit the plaster came away, and soon the hole above their heads was large enough for them to see through to the roof space above.
‘I’m going up to take a look,’ said Eddie. ‘I won’t be long.’
Standing on David’s hands, he hauled himself up through the opening onto the rafters above, and for a moment all David could see from below was the beam of Eddie’s pocket torch travelling across the timber underside of the roof. It seemed a long way away.
But Eddie had lost none of his confidence when he came back down.
‘It’ll work,’ he said. ‘There are a couple of planks across the beams where we can stand. We’re lucky it’s a flat roof. It’s going to make it a lot easier. You finish off the hole. I’m going down to get the dust sheets and the chair.’
‘What chair?’
‘The one over there in the corner. The one for the grapple, remember?’ said Eddie, pointing down to a cheap swivel chair behind the door. It was missing one of its wheels, and David was surprised it hadn’t been thrown away.
Clambering up and down the scaffold like a human monkey, Eddie brought the gym mat and four of the dust sheets up from below, and then tied a last one around the base of the chair and pulled it up to the top, where he positioned it under the hole in the ceiling that David had just finished widening.
‘Right, you first. I’ll hand you the stuff once you’re up there,’ said Eddie, holding the chair steady as David got on it and put his head up into the dark roof space above, feeling with his hands for the rafters on either side so he could lever himself up. But then he froze. Down below, someone, it had to be a screw, was rattling the handle of the gymnasium door.
For what seemed an eternity but was in fact less than a minute, David stood motionless on the swivel chair, his feet and legs in the rec room, his head and upper body in the roof space above.
What an idiot, he thought to himself. What an idiot I was to think we could get away with something as harebrained as this. He’d not yet done any time in the punishment block, but he’d heard enough about it to feel sick to his stomach at the prospect.
But then Eddie’s voice came from below his feet.
‘It’s all right, he’s gone. Just some screw doing his rounds, checking the doors are locked. That’s all.’
Relief flooded through David, leaving him weak at the knees, and he had to use all his strength to haul himself up through the hole. But there was no time to relax as Eddie started handing him up the mat and the dust sheets straightaway before following himself, pulling the swivel chair up after him by the dust-sheet rope to which it remained attached.
‘I thought we’d had it,’ said David, wiping the sweat from his brow. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.
‘Yeah, well, you were wrong. You need to calm down, keep your nerve. That’s what you need to do. Because up there we’re going to have to be even more careful,’ said Eddie, shining his torch over the underside of the roof above their heads. ‘We can’t risk even one of those slates falling off. You hear me?’
‘Yeah, I hear you,’ said David, breathing deeply in a vain attempt to slow 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