Billy Rags E-Book

Ted Lewis

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 454

Beschreibung

It's the 1960s and Billy Cracken is a hard man to keep locked up. An austere and troubled childhood has given way to life as a hardened criminal and now status as one of the most feared prisoners in England. He has been moved from one maximum security prison to the next. Guards and inmates alike fear and begrudgingly respect the powerfully-built Cracken. But a life doing his porridge, even if as a minor celebrity, isn't the one he wants. A girlfriend and a child await Cracken on the outside and he'll stop at nothing to get to them. While plotting his escape he crosses a powerful mobster who vows to make Cracken's life hell, and if nothing else succeeds at making his escape all the more difficult, something the ever-rebellious Cracken defiantly relishes. The follow-up novel to the wildly successful Get Carter, Billy Rags is a fascinating look into the lives of British inmates serving time in a maximum security prison. Lewis manages once again to tell an exciting, action-filled story with a soul - demonstrated most clearly in a series of brilliant flashbacks to Billy's childhood and in the end conjures a character that will remind readers of both Tom Hardy in Bronson and Lee Marvin in Point Blank.

Leseprobe

Praise for Ted Lewis

‘Lewis is major’ – Max Allan Collins author of The Road to Perdition

‘Ted Lewis cuts to the bone’ – James Sallis, author of Drive

‘A pulp-fiction triumph worthy of Jim Thompson or James Ellroy. I can’t remember the last time I turned pages so eagerly… his work cuts to the bone, both literally and metaphysically’ – John Powers, NPR’sFresh Air

‘One of the most coldly brilliant crime novels you will ever read… a mesmerizing story of power, love, hubris and betrayal, but, above all, the portrait of what one might call a tragic villain… Complicated in plot, propulsive in its narrative pace, beautifully structured, it is a book you’ll want to read’ – Michael Dirda, Washington Post on GBH

‘Ted Lewis is one of the most influential crime novelists Britain has ever produced, and his shadow falls on all noir fiction, whether on page or screen, created on these isles since his passing. I wouldn’t be the writer I am without Ted Lewis. It’s time the world rediscovered him’ – Stuart Neville

‘An example of how dangerous writing can really be when it is done properly… By preferring to look the street straight in the face instead of peeping at if from behind an upstairs curtain, Ted Lewis cleared a road straight through the black jungle’ – Derek Raymond

‘His characters have no tenderness, the settings are bleak, but this isn’t pulp fiction – it’s real writing’ – Richard Preston, Times

‘This is vintage British pulp fiction at its fast, furious and thoroughly sleazy best’ – Laura Wilson, Guardian

‘The book is outstanding: Lewis… judges perfectly when to horrify the reader and when to hold back… But the book is also funny and zestful: Lewis’s delight in his complex double-cross plot and low-life characters is infectious, and there is poetry in his stark evocation of Lincolnshire’s desperate tattiness. It’s equal parts suicide note and celebration of the human ability to find reasons to keep going’ –Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

‘The Brit noir masterpiece by the author of Get Carter has been reissued. It’s well worth rediscovering’ – Robbie Millen, Times Best Books of 2020

‘An intuitive study of fear, guilt, loss and the corruptive power of violence, sex and pornography that redefined the possibilities of psychological noir. A savage valediction for the smart-suited working class gangster’ – Nick Triplow

‘Aristotle when he defined tragedy mandated that a tragic hero must fall from a great height… but he never imagined the kind of roadside motels of James M. Cain or saw the smokestacks rise in the Northern English industrial hell of Ted Lewis’s Get Carter – Denis Lehane

Author’s Note

This novel and its central character were originally inspired by certain actual events and by a real person. But it is a work of fiction: all the descriptions of prisons, convicts and their friends and relatives, prison officers and policemen are imaginary.

Introduction

by Nick Triplow

With Billy Rags (1973) and Jack Carter’s Law (1974), Ted Lewis left behind the Humber landscape that had given his writing its distinct, edge-of-nowhere rawness. Written under pressure to repeat Get Carter’s success, these books are as close as Lewis would come to writing conventional crime novels. That said, moral certitude and sweet redemption are definitely not on the agenda.

Billy Rags is the story of professional villain, Billy Cracken, serving 25-years for armed robbery. A failed escape attempt sees him moved to E Wing of Aston prison, a high security fortress where criminal kingpin, Walter Colman, and his associates hold sway. Pitting himself against Colman and the prison system, Cracken’s time is hard time and he hatches an audacious break-out plan.

Lewis’s novel was based on the 1971 trial deposition of convicted armed robber and prison escapee, John McVicar, then in the first year of a 26-year sentence for robbery and firearms offences committed while on the run from Durham Prison’s E Wing, the ‘prison within a prison’ that housed some of Britain’s toughest inmates. The manuscript found its way to the desk of Lewis’s literary agent, Toby Eady. Specifics are shady, but it seems the intention was for a part of the novel’s advance to support McVicar’s wife and young son on the outside.

Reviewing Billy Rags in the Spectator, Auberon Waugh praised Lewis’s realistic depiction of ‘ordinary, run-of-the-mill criminal psychopaths’, while bending the conventions of traditional thriller fiction: ‘Obviously, it is to Mr Lewis’s credit as an artist that his book is extremely depressing and distasteful… scenes of sodomy and violence are described as they happen, neither more nor less.’

With a second roman à clef in mind, Eady brokered a meeting between Lewis and bank robber turned supergrass, Bertie Smalls – the project is rumoured to have been abandoned after one vodka-fuelled session. Instead, Lewis returned to the character that launched his career with the short story, ‘Kings, Queens and Pawns’, published in November 1973’s Men Only magazine. A year later came Jack Carter’s Law.

Lewis’s first Get Carter prequel is set in the London underworld of the late 1960s. Carter hunts a police informer in the Fletchers’ organisation. When he finds him, he’ll kill him. Old loyalties break down as Carter’s actions fuel old enmities.

In Jack Carter’s Law there is no revenge for a murdered brother or exploited daughter. It is this absence of moral cause, writes Max Allan Collins, that makes Jack Carter’s Law even ‘tougher and more uncompromising’ than its famous predecessor. Lewis delivers the comprehensive Jack Carter experience: the enforcer operating claustrophobic streets and grimy interiors of unfashionable London: low dives, smoky clubs and villains’ flats; the insides of Ford Cortinas, fag smoke, sardonic asides, bent coppers, naked violence, and sex for money. And drink. A lot of drink.

By this time, Lewis was writing against the odds. Heavy drinking placed his marriage under strain. Yet his voice is unmistakeable. Characteristic preoccupations of violence, sex and obsession are rendered in first person, present tense narratives that leave no space between the reader and flashes of action. Billy Rags and Jack Carter’s Law are timely reminders that when he was this good, Lewis made his own rules and dared you to look away.

Dear Sheila,

With any luck Ronnie should get this to you by Thursday. It had to come pigeon post on account of what I’ve got to say, as you’ll appreciate. When you’ve read it, get rid sharp. What we are talking about is on, most likely some time over the weekend, but maybe Monday or Tuesday. Whenever it is, though, I’ll be with you next week, darling. For Christ sake keep everybody else out of it. Only Ronnie knows and don’t talk to him about it either, because you’re not supposed to know and he might cop out, you never know. So just wait for the phone call, that’s all you can do. I know you’re feeling the same way as I am but it won’t be long now.

See you soon

All my love

Billy

PART ONE

I was glad I got Burnham. Not at first, and certainly not when I parleyed with the Governor, Captain Reece. He used to swish around the wing letting all the screws salute him; he and I had no difficulty whatsoever in identifying each other as enemies. He was shit-scared of me and he knew I knew it.

No, the thing I really liked about Burnham was the remarkable little trap-door in the top landing recess that led into the loft. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. But what was more unbelievable was that nobody had done it before. A nickful of them and no one had doddled.

I remember saying to Toddy who was doing a ten-stretch.

‘What they got in that loft Toddy? King Kong?’

‘I’m not with you Billy,’ he said.

Christ, I thought. I must be the only bright bastard in the whole nick.

‘The trap-door,’ I said. ‘The trap-door on the landing recess. What’s up there that stops anybody having a go?’

‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Can’t say I’ve thought about it. You reckon it’s worth a tickle, do you?’

Well, would I be talking about it if I didn’t, I thought, but to Toddy I said:

‘Tell us, Toddy, who are the chancers in this place? Who’s ready and who’s willing?’

Toddy gave me seven names, including his own.

‘You’re sure about that, are you?’

He knew what I meant because he said:

‘No bother. They’re all straight.’

So about a month after that conversation me and the seven others went through the trap-door after copping for the screws.

I’d plucked my one off the alarm bell, just in time.

We bundled them into a cell but we had to take off without tying them up because someone tipped a table up in the air that had a load of cups on it; but we all made it up through the opening. We scuttled along towards the end of the wing. As we ran Toddy said to Crump:

‘You’ve got the rope, haven’t you Crumpy?’ Crumpy told him to fuck off but Toddy’s voice had come out all fagwheezy and earnest and the fact that anybody on a doddle like this could forget the most important piece of equipment transformed the adrenalin pumping through the rest of us into hysterics, a sort of snorting giggle on the run. It was as if we were all running through apple trees with a farmer right behind us.

But when we got to the end of the wing I told them all where to start thumping at the roof and that channelled the hysteric energy in the right direction.

We smashed our way out through the tiles and Crump fixed up the rope and we all slid down it on to the ground and grouped together at the bottom of the outside wall. All except the strongest man in the nick; I stood apart and farther out from the others and began to swing the hooked rope to the top of the wall. I tried three or four times but it kept falling short.

Everyone began to look shitty and there was no doubt about it, the whole scene was very embarrassing: here we were out of the Security wing and standing by the wall in the dark without a screw in sight, with a rope and a hook and I just couldn’t get the bastard up. After about eight tries a young chancer by the name of Gordon Harris said to me:

‘For Christ’s sake, man, give some other fucker a go, will you, otherwise we might as well turn it in right now.’

I slung the rope and the hook at him.

‘All right, clever sod, you get it up then,’ I said, and turned on Tommy Dukes who’d made the hook because I had to spin off my frustration and loss of face on someone.

I said:

‘You stupid bastard, you weighted it all wrong.’

Tommy was so angry he couldn’t speak. He just stared at me with his mouth open and his eyes bulging out at me as though I was strangling him.

‘I told you the specification,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you do as I said?’

If he’d had the hook in his hand I think he would have put it over my head but before he could either say or do anything someone shouted, ‘Screws’. At the same time the hook clattered and scraped down the wall and rang out on the concrete, sounding like a cell door sliding shut.

I turned round and looked at the screws. There were four of them, standing about twenty yards away, in the shadow of the main block, just watching us. I knew that the last thing they were going to do was to get in amongst us so I said to the others:

‘Round the corner. We’ll try there.’

We all took off like athletes at White City. The screws didn’t move at first, either because the sprint start had startled them to death, or they knew something that we didn’t.

We stopped again and had three or four more tries with the hook. By this time all the main prison cons were up at their windows, shouting encouragement at us but it didn’t raise our game. The four screws appeared on the scene again so we took off towards the main gate.

But when we got there, Captain Reece was waiting to receive us, backed by a dozen or so more screws.

It’s always hardest to lose when you think you’ve won. When I’d stood by the wall a few minutes back I’d thought it was just a formality. Now it was like being sentenced all over again; the same sick helplessness, the same desperate fighting feeling behind my eyes as the tears tried to get out, the same determination to show everybody you don’t give a stuff.

Reece’s piping voice floated through the night air.

‘It’s no good lads, the troops are surrounding the place. Come in quietly and don’t let’s have any trouble.’

You could tell from the tone of his voice he was feeling as shaky as we were. The screws didn’t look too happy about it either. A few of them were holding riot sticks and Gordon Harris pointed at the nearest one of them and screamed at Reece:

‘No trouble? What’s he got a riot stick for, then? You’re going to cosh us up, you bastards.’

The screw Harris had pointed at shifted the riot stick to behind his back and looked all sheepish. There was dead silence. Even the main block had gone quiet. The only sound was the far-off groan of a jet way up above the low night clouds.

‘The bastards are going to cosh us up,’ Harris screeched again.

Reece was beginning to look like a rabbit in a snare. He was frightened to say anything in case what he said triggered off the wrong kind of reaction but at the same time you could see he felt he had to say something as the screws were expecting it of him. But he didn’t so the screw who’d shifted the night stick behind his back spoke in Reece’s stead.

‘Come on, lads, it was a good try.’

Everybody ignored him. We were all milling about just looking sick. Freddie Simpson said to no one in particular:

‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I really thought we’d made it.’

Reece sounded in just as bad a state when he singled me out.

‘Cracken. Come on lad. It was a good try but you may as well go in.’

He must have thought he sounded coaxing, but to me it was just grovelling.

I stepped to the front of our group.

‘They don’t want to go in,’ I said.

This was just what Reece didn’t want; grandstanding. It would load the atmosphere even more against him.

‘They’ll go in if you go in,’ he said.

I turned round slowly and began to walk away. I was too depressed to play out a scene for the benefit of the main block. I didn’t have any particular place to go, it was just that I wanted to walk away from the whole fucking issue.

As I walked I was vaguely aware of Reece trotting behind me trying to kid me about how I could get them all back inside. Then I became aware of a different voice. I stopped and turned round. Gordon Harris was still holding the hook but Freddie Simpson had picked up the rope and was making a loop out of it.

‘I am going to hang you, you Welsh mountain goat. This is all your fucking fault.’

I realised he was talking to Reece about two seconds before Reece did. Reece’s jaw dropped and his eyes went glassy but the words he’d been saying still kept coming out as though his brain had nothing to do with his mouth and he started circling round me, with Freddie following him holding the loop and Harris trailing behind carrying the hook. It was the weirdest bloody thing you’ve ever seen. I mean they went right round me, two full circles, Reece staring at them shit-scared and yet burbling on to me as though nothing was happening, Freddie creeping after him like Quasimodo mumbling how he was going to fucking hang him and Gordon Harris poncing along behind holding the hook, looking like a spare prick at a wedding. And Freddie would have done it if he could, he had that look, it was all the grief of not being over the wall twisting him up inside and all he could see was Reece between him and the other side of the wall.

For Freddie’s sake I had to break it up so I shouted across to the others: ‘Let’s go back the way we came out.’

It took a minute or two to sink in because everybody had been fascinated by Freddie and his rope trick but I walked over to the main group and past them towards the spot where we’d dropped down. Reece just naturally followed after me and Freddie and Harris dropped the rope and the hook and ran past Reece to join the others who had already begun to follow me to the spot. When we got there Toddy cocked his head at the roof and said: ‘Why not give the troops a show?’

I nodded. Anything that would pour a little more crap over Reece’s head.

Reece had got back a bit of the military style he’d lost round by the gate. He’d certainly taken a big swallow because he walked over to us, his chin sticking out at right angles to his scraggy neck; he’d obviously decided that the time had come for him to take matters firmly in hand.

But everything shattered for him again when he saw the rope strung up and everybody climbing back up it to the roof of the wing. Toddy and I were the only two left on the ground when Reece got close to us.

‘Come on, Billy,’ said Toddy, offering me the rope. ‘No ranks always last.’

He was only doing a twelve.

‘After you, Toddy,’ I said. I wanted to see what Reece would do, whether he would make a grab for me if he saw I was left on my own.

Toddy went up the rope. I could see from Reece’s face that he was thinking about it, and so could everybody else. Death or glory, he was thinking.

He was probably writing the headlines himself: ‘Governor tackles Cracken single handed; courageous action foils attempted break.’ Except that the part the press wouldn’t put in was the two broken arms and the two broken legs that Reece would finish up with if he tried anything.

Reece was very close to me now. The screws and the cons were all watching Reece, to see if he’d do it, and I was looking at him too, letting my eyes tell him that I knew he never would, not in a million years.

Then I just gave him a smile that described how pathetic he was and I turned my back on him and swung away up the rope.

Afterwards a screw told me: ‘He should never have let you get away with it. He should never have let you get up on that roof.’

I scrambled over the top of the roof and stood up. The air was cold and fresh and above me the clouds were breaking up slightly and through the breaks crystal stars were still and remote, winking blankly at this pointless charade. I looked over the wall into the street. Besides the troops and the police, there were about a hundred people standing around, faces upturned, waiting to see what the animals would do next. What would it be? Swinging from branch to branch or scratching under the armpits. I wanted to spit on them. I looked at the lads. A few of them were so sick they couldn’t whip up any enthusiasm for a demonstration but Freddie and Toddy and Harris began to rip the slates off and smash the woodwork and tear the tarpaulin underneath. Scrambled words drifted up into the night air from the loud hailers. The lads just carried on dismantling the roof. Then they got the spotlight on us and began to unwind the hoses.

‘They’re going to squirt us,’ Harris said.

With that he hurled a tile down towards the plain-clothes police who were standing in the nick yard, looking up with those po-faced expressions they all have. The tile shattered in front of them and they all stepped back, slowly, in perfect time with each other, like a load of bloody chorus girls.

Harris picked up a tile and so did Toddy and me and we began a barrage down into the yard.

This time the boys in grey overcoats lost their symmetry and scattered like so many bits of broken glass. Flash guns started going off. The police were popping from inside the nick, the press from outside. The press were wasting their time as we were fifty feet up but the police photographers were only fifteen yards away from the bottom wing so I tried to cover my face every time they took a picture.

The heroes down below finally got the hoses going but the power was too weak to dislodge us. Deliberately so. They couldn’t risk the scandal of one of us finishing up in the street with a broken back. That gave us back our confidence. Freddie eased himself to the edge of the roof.

‘I can piss harder than that,’ he shouted.

If he’d been better hung he’d have given them a demonstration.

We kept the tiles winging down for a couple of hours. Then the group inside the nick gave over with the hoses and just left us alone. Our audience down in the street started to drift away. Without any attention the situation began to pall.

‘Well, I don’t know about anybody else,’ I said, trying to detach my damp clothes from my skin, ‘I’m fucking freezing.’

Toddy sank down on the ridging.

Harris flung a tile out into the night as hard as he could and then relaxed completely, sagging down next to Toddy.

‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘Bloody sodding bastards.’

‘We’ve got to go down sometime,’ Toddy said.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go down. If we stay up here much longer somebody might miss us.’

Toddy pretended he found it funny and got up and swung himself down through the hole.

When we got back to the trap-door, Reece was waiting in the recess. He watched me all the way as I climbed down and he watched me as I scrubbed my tarred hands in the wash-basin. He was back in command again. Or so he thought. The exhibition he’d made of himself outside was just another memory for him to distort.

A half-decent bloke called Greaves, the chief screw, walked me back to my cell.

‘Well that didn’t get you very far, did it Billy?’ he said.

I shrugged.

‘It was only the hook that done us,’ I said.

‘I reckon you’re on two months’ chokey for tonight.’

‘It was worth it seeing Reece mess himself.’

Greaves didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t have to. He didn’t say anything to the lads who were calling their congratulations and commiserations as we walked the block, either. I just grinned at them all, well-braced as I walked, coming the old swagger, but when Greaves shut the cell door behind me I lay on my bed and I could have thrown up I was so depressed. There’d been a chance. A real one. All that had happened was that someone had ballocksed up the hook. I lay there and I could still smell the freshness of the night air and hear the soft surge of the town and see the warm orange of the strings of lights on the main roads that led out of the town. I didn’t sleep for a long time because I kept concentrating on the sounds and sights and smells of the evening so that I’d have something to exercise my mind on during the inevitable chokey that was to come.

The day before the visiting Magistrates’ Board turned up to smack our hands because of the escape I said to Toddy: ‘Have you ever noticed the way everybody bulls up for a scene like the Board?’

‘Sure I have, Billy. Standard practice.’

‘It may be standard practice for you and the rest of the fucking cons in the place but you can leave me out of it.’

‘How do you mean, Billy?’

‘The way they all go down there. Polished and pressed. It’s disgusting. Like they’re going to a party.’

‘So what about it?’

‘Wait until tomorrow, Toddy,’ I said. ‘I’ll give the sods bulling up.’

I’d always been a great one for walking around in my underpants in the Boobs. It’s a marvellous demoraliser of the spit and polish union to which all screws are fully paid-up members. And after getting myself all wound up by all the anxious pleasers I realised that the interview with the Board was an occasion when underpants were de rigueur.

So the next day I went to meet the Board just wearing my underpants enhancing the effect with my hair en brosse and about two weeks’ growth on my face.

The local worthy couldn’t believe his eyes when I sauntered in. Neither could his secretary: her eyes and mouth registered Full House disgust.

Reece affected a wash-my-hands-of-it-all expression but I knew he’d be burning slowly for the next day or two.

Then the Chairman read out the charges and told me off in a voice full of tact and kindness appropriate to dealing with the abnormal. So just to show him he hadn’t got me weighed up wrong I acted a bit spare as though I hadn’t understood very much of what he’d said so he repeated it all over again carefully enunciating every word and pausing after the long ones. I never had the heart to keep it up second time round so I gave him a nod or two just to encourage him and then pleaded guilty. Reece just stared into space, but even though he wasn’t looking at me he couldn’t see anybody but Billy Cracken in front of his eyes.

So we did our chokey and after two months everybody came off except me. I was the only one that got put on a confined-to-cell rule. Not even Freddie got that one and he’d threatened to hang the sodding Governor.

I tried a new tactic with Reece. Instead of ignoring him, I tried to talk to him as he came to my cell door, just to throw him. But all the time I talked he just looked into my cell at me with this expression of contempt on his face and when I’d finished he just smiled his smile and walked away without saying anything. I marked him up one point.

But the next time I went out on Exercise I refused to go back in. Six screws gathered round me and there was the usual little drama.

They set me and I set them but it was up to them to make the first move and that was never going to happen. The Chief Screw came out and bawled at them to take me in but he was wasting his breath so to save face he said: ‘For Christ’s sake Cracken don’t be a cunt. What do you think this’ll get you apart from the ’flu? All I’ve got to do is double them up and then even you won’t have any choice.’

‘All right, Chief,’ I said. ‘I’ll come in now because I’m on a hiding to nothing out here. But if I’m not moved inside three days I’m going to smash one of your screws for you. I won’t give him any chance. Because nobody’s giving me one.’

With that I walked through the bunch of them and back inside.

Two mornings later a screw unlocked my cell and said: ‘Get your kit packed up, Cracken.’

I looked at him. I knew I was going but screws make a point of telling you as little as possible just to keep you down so I said: ‘Going? How do you mean going?’

‘What I say,’ said the screw. ‘You’re on your way.’

‘Where to?’

‘Just pack up, Cracken. Then maybe you’ll find out.’

The screw’s name was Melchett. He’d been down on my list since the first week. But now I’d never get the chance.

‘You’re a very lucky screw, Melchett,’ I said. Melchett just looked at me. He knew what I meant. And so because he knew he was safe he relaxed and leant against the cell door and fished out a cigarette.

I began to sort out my odds and ends.

‘Hope you don’t suffer from homesickness,’ Melchett said.

I ignored him.

‘Where you’re going’ll make this seem like home sweet home.’

I picked up my stuff and whirled round quick as if I was going to cop for him. He dropped his cigarette and leapt out into the corridor. I grinned at him.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go down.’

I walked out into the corridor.

‘What’s up, Billy?’ Toddy said from behind his door.

‘I’m off on my holidays.’

‘Somewhere good?’

‘Reece’s booked me for the Riviera.’

‘Give Brigitte one for me,’ called Freddie as I passed his door.

‘Send us a postcard,’ said somebody else.

‘If I’ve time to write,’ I said.

We walked downstairs.

Reece was waiting at the bottom with about fifteen screws. We all walked out into reception. It was like a state visit. While I was signing the private property book Reece went into another room and I heard him say: ‘Why isn’t he wearing a jacket?’

Some screw mumbled a reply and Reece said: ‘I want him wearing a jacket when he goes out of here.’

A couple of seconds later a decent sort of screw came into reception holding a prison jacket.

‘Billy,’ he said, ‘put this on.’

I straightened up.

‘You must be joking,’ I said.

‘Come on, Billy,’ he said.

‘Tell silly ballocks to put it on himself.’

The screw went back into the room where Reece was and there was some more muttering and about four of them came back out and the same screw holding the jacket said: ‘You’ve got to put it on. Otherwise the Governor’s ordered us to make you put it on.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘that’s all right then. Now we know where we are. This way there’ll be no misunderstandings.’

I backed off into a corner and shaped up. I look the business when I shape up, hard eyes and everything, it’s one of my best effects. The screws walked towards me but they weren’t too keen to get where they were going. There was a bit of manoeuvring and then Greaves who had been watching from the doorway of the room where Reece was, walked to the screw who was holding the jacket and plucked it off him in disgust and went back into the room. I heard him say very emphatically: ‘He won’t wear it, sir.’

The edge in his voice was to let Reece know that that was that. There was a pause while they faced each other out and then Reece said something I couldn’t catch.

Greaves came back out looking weary of the whole fucking world, put the cuffs on me and handed his half of the cuffs over to one of the police officers who’d come to fetch me.

I got in the back of the car, a copper on either side of me and one up front beside the driver.

Reece came out and stood next to Greaves to watch us drive off. Just before Greaves closed the car door on us I leant across and said:

‘Where are we going, Greavesy?’

Before Greaves could answer Reece stepped forward and stared in at me. The veins in his head were almost throbbing enough to knock his hat off. He just couldn’t help himself because he snapped: ‘Broadmoor.’

The car drew away. We never went to Broadmoor. We went to Aston.

But even the piddling victories available in the nick have to be paid for one way or another. Two and a half years later, a couple of days after I’d been recaptured, I had to talk to a PO about a visit.

In the course of the conversation he casually remarked: ‘Oh, by the way, I was talking to an old friend of yours on the phone yesterday. Captain Reece. He asked to be remembered to you.’

They always win in the end.

The new kids are beginning to settle down. Cocksure set of little bleeders. Playground hardly room to move, they’re pushing and shoving and running all over the place. Soon be time to show them who’s top. Who’s king. Who’s Bozo.

Grey cloud streaks across the water puddle sky and shatters broken with footstep running.

A new kid stops in front of me.

‘Hey, is it you?’ he says.

I stop. Johnny Stretch and Arthur Easton stop too, two steps behind me, like they should.

‘Is it you though? Is it you that’s called Billy Rags?’

The excuse. The chance. Now I’ll show them.

‘Who telled you to say that?’

The yukker makes to dart but only his legs move flailing nowhere because his shirt collar’s in my fist.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t.’

Tears.

‘Who?’

‘Him.’

A nod of the head to Bas Acker. Bas. The rival. The only one worth fighting. I’d found that out my first week. Two years above me. But that didn’t matter. I’d cracked him easily, publicly, quickly. I was top. That was what counted. I’d weighed it up: you were popular if you had no peers. You did everything best. Best at fighting, best at footballing, best at cig-carding, everything. The better you were, the better you were liked. And if you were liked, you could do as you liked. And everybody did things for you. You were a king. It was easy. And now Bas had given me the excuse to prove it all over again, to the new lot.

I dragged the yukker over to where Bas Acker was standing with his mates. Johnny and Arthur followed behind.

‘Now, boy,’ I say to Bas. ‘This yukker says you told him I’m called Billy Rags.’

Bas glances at his mates who in turn wait to see what he’s going to do.

He hasn’t any choice.

‘What if I did?’

‘Take it back, that’s what.’

‘What if I don’t?’

‘You’ll see.’

Bas doesn’t say anything. I say to the yukker: ‘My name’s William Cracken. What is it?’

‘William Cracken.’

I slap him round the head.

‘What is it?’

‘William Cracken,’ he says, through tears.

I slap him again.

‘Leave him,’ says Bas Acker.

‘Oh yes?’ I say. ‘And what if I don’t?’

Now he’s no choice. Bas steps forward. I let the yukker go.

‘Fair fight, boy?’ I say to Bas.

‘Fair fight.’

‘Leather him, Billy,’ Johnny says.

I step forward.

‘I will,’ I say. ‘Just like last time. And next.’

After the fresh air it’s the smell that gets you. Even though I’d been inside the police car breathing in the BO of my four travelling companions, it had been like sniffing Paradise compared to the smell of E wing. It hadn’t been up more than three years, but the smell was there. They must mix it in with the concrete.

E wing was an L-shaped block of cells. The two gates leading into it were on the bottom landing on either end of the L. When I arrived there were about twenty-nine normal prisoners scattered around on the top three tiers. Apart from three sex cases: Strachey, Hopper and Rose.

Of course, these were kept separate, but they were there.

There was no work. You either stayed in your cell during the day or were split into one of two rooms where you sat around chatting. There was a piddling little exercise yard that people often didn’t bother to use for the statutory hour a day. And from six to nine there was television. The only other facility was weight lifting or weight training every week night from six to seven-thirty. Which was something I marked down for when I got out from behind my door.

Which was where I spent my first month at Aston.

But just the same when I got from behind it I’d sorted out everything there was to be sorted. I’d got all my information through my door in the form of notes from Walter Colman via a tame screw called Fussey.

Walter was the first person I went to see the day they unlocked my door.

When I appeared in the doorway of Walter’s cell he was half-lying, half-sitting on his bunk reading a Playboy magazine that was without its cover. I thought: knowing you Walter, you’ll be reading the interview or an article on the proliferating dangers of a data bank society, not studying the bums and knockers.

He didn’t look much different since I’d seen him last, except that this time he didn’t have a tie on. The shirt was nice, pale yellow with a tabbed collar, and the trousers were sharp and beautifully pressed, obviously the bottom half of one of his old business suits.

His hairline had receded a bit, but he’d combed it across instead of back so that his forehead didn’t show too much. He still had his sideboards and at the back his hair was barbered just the way he always wore it, just tickling over the edge of his collar. Except for a slight pursing of the lips there was no expression on his face at all as he read the magazine. His eyes were blank and his face was flat and motionless as ever.

I tapped on the cell door.

‘Anybody at home?’ I said.

Walter looked up. For a split second the deadness stayed on his face and then he grinned and got up off the bunk, but his eyes were blank and cold. Walter’s eyes always were: excepting when he was shooting volts through someone’s ballocks.

‘Billy,’ he said, taking hold of my hand. ‘You’re out, then.’

‘That’s right, Wally,’ I said, gently pulling my hand away from his. ‘They finally decided to open the cage.’

‘Sit down,’ Walter said, indicating the bunk. ‘Have a snout and tell me the news.’

I shook my head.

‘I’ve been sitting down for the last bleeding month,’ I said. ‘And funnily enough nothing very much has happened to me.’

‘No, what I meant was,’ Walter said, offering me a snout, ‘tell me about Burnham.’

I took the snout and Walter lit us up. I leant on the edge of his writing desk and he lay down on his bunk.

‘I saw about it in the papers,’ Walter said, ‘but tell us what really happened.’

I shrugged.

‘That’s all in the past, Wally, I don’t really want to talk about it.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘You tell me your news,’ I said.

It was Walter’s time to shrug.

‘A few changes in the offing,’ he said. ‘Or so I hear.’

‘Like what?’

‘They’re talking about a proper exercise yard being built. And they’re fixing up a wrought-iron shop on the ground floor.’

‘That should be fun,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Walter.

Outside across the landing, four cons broke into laughter at something or other. The sound echoed up to the roof of the block.

‘And what else?’

‘What else?’ Walter blew smoke out into the air. ‘Nothing, only that we get a new Governor shortly, together with his new assistant who’ll be responsible for this wing.’

‘I can’t wait.’

Walter smiled slightly.

‘You seem quite content, Walter,’ I said. ‘I mean, sort of at peace with the world and all that.’

‘Not much sense being any other way, Billy, really, is there? I mean, with my card.’

I put my cigarette out in his ashtray.

‘How’s business?’ I said.

‘Can’t complain,’ he said. ‘We show a profit.’

‘You must be fucking rolling in it,’ I said. ‘If it’s anything like I remember.’

‘That was quite some time ago,’ Walter said. ‘We’ve expanded a bit since then.’

‘I bet you fucking have. What happened at the trial? I mean, you must have done a deal for them to leave the other operations alone.’

‘The way of the world, Billy,’ said Walter. ‘Justice must be seen to be done. We were too much in the public sector to be absolutely watertight on that one.’

‘Don’t tell me you took a chance, Walter. I mean, not you and Tony.’

‘Let’s say our inside man at the top had a lower tolerance level than we’d bargained for.’

‘That man being Braben.’

Walter didn’t say anything.

‘Who is now off the force.’

No answer. The penny dropped.

‘That’s why they only clobbered you on the one operation,’ I said. ‘That’s why they only went for you and Mavis. They wanted Braben. And you gave him to them.’

‘Retired of his own accord, so I believe,’ Walter said.

There was a short silence. I looked at Walter and Walter looked at the ceiling. A lump of ash dropped on to his shirt, but he didn’t attempt to brush it away. Which was very unlike Walter.

‘You know,’ he said, almost as if he was talking to himself, ‘I reckon if we’d knocked off Franklin, I mean, actually finished him off, as opposed to what we did do, I don’t think I’d have got my card marked anything like as big. Or Mavis. I really don’t.’

I didn’t say anything to that. I knew all about Walter and Mavis when they went to work on someone and that was one reason why Walter and I would never be bosom pals. Amongst various other things.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Now you’re leading a baron’s life.’

‘It’s different in Security. Not like the other wings. Less of a hassle to make your points. There’s no petty stuff. All big fish together. Who wants to prove anything? We wouldn’t be here in the first place, would we?’

‘You’d call Strachey and Hopper and Rose big fish, would you?’

‘We never see them, so consequently we never think about them.’

‘I hope we never do,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to have to go back behind my door because of that filth.’

‘You know, Billy,’ Walter said, ‘that’s always been your trouble. If you don’t mind me saying so. You’re always on the boil. Never know how to relax. Never been able to sit back and accept things.’

‘And that’s what you’re going to do, is it, Walter,’ I said. ‘Sit back and accept things. For the next twenty-five fucking years?’

Walter didn’t like that one. He raised himself up on his elbows.

‘Do you know where you are, Billy?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, there it is. I can’t be plainer, can I?’

‘You mean to say that with all your bread and influence you’re calling this place the end of the line?’

He shrugged.

I looked at him.

‘Do me a favour,’ I said.

He didn’t say anything. I picked up the magazine from his bed.

‘Lend us your Playboy, Wally,’ I said. ‘After all, you’ve got plenty of time in front of you to finish it.’

‘Cracken.’

Soft shafts of afternoon sunlight slide through the slow swirling chalk dust in the quiet classroom.

I pretend not to hear Copley’s voice. Johnny Stretch and the others begin to buzz at the prospect of a Cracken diversion.

‘Cracken? Somebody pinch him, will you, just to make sure he’s still with us.’

Copley always tries to turn this kind of thing into a joke if he thinks it’s going to get out of hand. He’s one of the easiest of the lot to play up.

The buzzing gets a little louder.

‘Quieten down, class,’ he says.

I stay as I am, hunched forward over my desk as if I’m concentrating on my book. The class goes quiet again. Copley is forced to walk down the aisle of desks to where I am sitting. I take no notice of him.

‘Cracken?’

I sit bolt upright in my chair, nearly causing my desk to topple over, acting as though I’ve been startled out of my wits. The class bursts out laughing. Copley steps back a foot or two in surprise.

‘Yes sir, sorry sir,’ I say, like a soldier on parade.

Copley tries to recover his poise.

‘Cracken, I was attempting to communicate with you. But somehow I didn’t seem to be meeting with much success. Do you think you could explain why?’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘Why didn’t you answer?’

‘Sorry, sir, I can’t hear you very well. You haven’t lost your voice have you, sir?’

Copley is on the verge of fetching me one but he manages to restrain himself.

‘Out to the front of the class, boy,’ he says in what he imagines to be his no-nonsense voice.

‘Sorry, sir,’ I says, wrapping my handkerchief round my finger, and wriggling it about in my ear. ‘I think I’ve gone deaf.’

This is too much even for Copley. He grabs my arm and drags me to the front of the class and with his free hand he scrambles his wooden ruler out of the drawer in his desk. He moves his grip down to my wrist and holds my hand out in front of me.

‘Now, boy,’ he says, ‘we’ll see if this won’t improve your hearing.’

But as he swishes the ruler down I jerk my hand out of the way not only causing him to miss but also to over-balance slightly, so that he has to let go of my hand to steady himself on the edge of his desk.

‘Sorry, sir,’ I say. ‘My hand slipped.’

The class roars with laughter.

‘Quiet!’ shouts Copley.

‘Won’t let it happen again, sir.’

Copley grasps my hand again and furiously brings the ruler down seven or eight times, completely out of control, haphazardly hitting my knuckles, fingers, wrist, anywhere. But I make his lack of control even more unbearable for him because all the while he is raining blows on me I just keep looking him straight in the eyes and smiling as though he’s not having any effect on me at all.

When Moffatt and his assistant Creasey took over you could hardly say the earth shook. Nothing changed and nobody took much notice of them. But I sensed that Moffatt was watching us and most of what he saw he didn’t like. I was on to his game straight away; he was giving it a week or two to sort us out and after that we could expect a few new rules to stop life from becoming one long dreary round.

I found out about the first innovation one night while I was working out with the weights. The gym was empty until Terry Beckley, who was on a fifteen for armed robbery, came in and squatted down on a bar-bell and watched me for a while.

Terry was twenty-two. I’d got his form from a mate of mine while I’d been outside. He was one of those characters who always seem to have some private joke going on inside their heads. Whenever you bump into them they always look as though they’ve just seen something very funny and you always have the feeling that when you say something to them it reminds them of what they were laughing at in the first place. But this mate of mine who’d known him on the outside had been full of bad news about him. He’d once seen Terry do his pieces on an old billiard hall cowboy called Harold Pearson just because Harold had tried to save the game by accidentally-on-purpose moving the pink to get a better angle. Now, according to my mate, Terry wasn’t exactly short of a bob or two at the time and Harold whose eyes for the game were no longer as good as they should be, and not being a superannuated man, was reduced in his old age to living off the leftovers at the all night pie-stands. But on the occasion of his tournament with Terry he must have thought he was in luck because apparently even a blind man playing with an eel for a cue could have beaten him.

But Harold hadn’t been able to resist brushing a cuff against the pink and Terry had taken him apart and finished up by putting Harold’s fingers on the edge of the table and giving them one with the stick.

But tonight Terry was his usual grinning self.

‘What is it, Billy?’ he said. ‘Planning to walk through the walls? Like Superman?’

I let the weights go and picked up my towel and draped it round my shoulders.

‘You’ve got muscles on your muscles,’ he said.

‘Never know when you might need them,’ I said. ‘Got a snout?’

‘Naw,’ he said. ‘Right out. Got some news, though.’

‘News?’

‘There’s something else to look at in the TV room.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Moffatt’s invited Hopper and Rose out to watch TV.’

I stared at him.

‘You’re joking,’ I said.

‘Rose had more sense,’ Terry said, ‘but Hopper’s out there now, looking for a friendly face. Course, with Strachey, it’s different. He’s going to be allowed to see “Watch with Mother” during the day.’

‘How long’s Hopper been up there?’

‘’Bout an hour.’

‘And nobody copped for him?’

Terry shook his head.

‘Well, I hope they have before I get up there,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I might wind up behind my door again.’

I went into the shower and ran it cold. I thought about Hopper. Just Terry saying his name had been enough to tie my stomach up in knots.

I’d been in the nick at the time he’d made the papers. Usually I avoided reading stuff like that, but this I’d read and I’d been shocked to tears, the kind of tears that pop out of your ducts when grief chills the skin on your face. The bit that had affected me really badly had been the part where the father of one of the kids had found his own daughter where Hopper had left her. I could imagine myself standing over the body, looking down at what Hopper had done to it, done to something that had once belonged to me.

I towelled myself down and dressed and walked upstairs to the TV room.

I stood in the doorway and looked round the room.

Hopper was sitting near the door with his screw, well apart from the rest of them. The others, eleven or so of them, were sitting in a semi-circle around the room. Everybody was watching TV as though they’d never seen it before. Not one of them was cracking on to Hopper. It was as if he wasn’t there. Maybe they were ignoring him because none of them wanted to go behind their doors. Or because just to acknowledge his presence would make them sick to their stomachs. But whatever the reasons I wasn’t standing for this. I looked at Hopper who was staring hard at the box. He didn’t look more than seventeen, let alone twenty, with his fair hair brushed straight back and his bony cheeks and the straggling bumfluff along his top lip he looked like something out of a sepia photograph around nineteen-fourteen. He was sitting bolt upright, his hands gripping his kneecaps.

The only person who’d cracked on to my being in the doorway was Terry Beckley who’d fixed himself up with a place next to the TV so that he’d have a good view of my entrance.

‘Turn it off, Terry,’ I said. ‘He’s not watching that.’

Terry was well pleased to do something. He promptly stood up and turned it off and grinned his grin in Hopper’s direction.

The room was so quiet it could have been empty. Everybody was looking at Hopper. I began to wind them up.

‘You got any kids, Tommy?’ I said to Tommy Dugdale. Tommy inclined his head slightly and massaged his bald spot with the flat of his hand.

‘Yeah, Billy,’ Tommy said. ‘I got a little girl.’

‘What sort of age is she, Tommy?’

‘She’ll be nine next birthday.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Nine. Nice age that.’

‘Pretty little thing, she is,’ Tommy said. ‘Golden curly hair. She really loves her terrible old daddy.’

‘I bet she does.’

‘Don’t know what I’d do if anything was to happen to her.’

‘I know what you mean.’

I turned to Dave Simmons.

‘What about you, Dave?’ I said. ‘You’ve got a couple, haven’t you?’

‘That’s right, Billy. Twins. Little crackers they are.’ He fished a small leather envelope out of his breast pocket. ‘Did I ever show you the snaps?’

‘Don’t think you did, Dave,’ I said, walking over to him. I stood behind his chair and bent over him.

‘That’s outside the house with the missus,’ Dave said, handing me a photograph. ‘And this one’s at Margate with their Auntie Annie. They had a week there last year.’

‘Nice,’ I said. ‘You seen these, Terry?’

Terry joined me behind Dave’s chair.

‘Charmers,’ Terry said. ‘Aren’t they, Billy?’

I looked across at Hopper.

‘Just his type, I would have thought,’ I said.

‘Bit old for him,’ said Ray Crompton. ‘Too much for him to handle.’

‘Probably prefers them with nappies on,’ said George Hodge.

‘Do you like them in nappies?’ said Des Walker.

‘Lovely feller, really,’ said Terry.

‘A charmer.’

‘Just loves kiddies.’

‘Do anything for them.’

‘To them.’

‘Which bit do you like best? Before or after?’

‘Or in between?’

‘The bit with the bayonet, I should think.’

‘When they’re crying for their mummies.’

‘They should have given him to the father.’

‘They should have cut his fucking balls off.’

‘Maybe somebody will.’

Hopper’s face had gone the colour of ice cream and his head was flicking from speaker to speaker like the swivel head on a ventriloquist’s dummy. Everybody was worked up ready to explode. It was written all over their faces. I was waiting for somebody to trip it so that I could screw the first two knuckles of my fist into Hopper’s neck.

While everybody had been calling out, the screw had stood up and put himself between Hopper and the rest of us, but now there was fear on his face because he knew that once we moved there would be absolutely nothing at all that he could do to stop us.

One or two of the boys made movements as if they were about to stand up. The screw said: ‘Out, Hopper. Back to your cell.’

Hopper stood up as though he was on strings and ran out of the room.

‘He’s crying,’ somebody said. ‘The rotten little bastard’s crying.’

The screw gave us as long a look as he dared and then followed after Hopper.

‘Fuck it,’ I said, belting the back of Tommy Dugdale’s chair.

‘Billy, that was a victory,’ said Benny Beauty. ‘No one got nicked. Gordon will be sick about the whole thing.’

‘We should have had him,’ I said. ‘We will next time.’

‘Once, when I was in Leicester,’ said Ray Crompton, ‘there was a feller called Cliff Reid who was down for it, and so what everybody did was to fill up their mugs from the tea-room boiler and they let him have it that way.’

‘Here, that’s not half bad,’ said Terry. ‘That’s a little beauty.’

‘If we were to do that,’ I said, ‘everybody would have to be on it. Nobody not carrying a mug.’

‘What about the lads down on the Twos?’ said Ray. ‘Are they in?’

The Twos were well pleased it wasn’t on their plate. You could tell. There was an atmosphere of wary elation about them, like frightened kids in a classroom when only one of them was responsible for putting the tintack on teacher’s seat but knowing that they’d all cop for it in the end.