Hell Is Empty Page 12

  I checked the surroundings and got the torch on again. Yes, a tunnel. But nothing so grand as an escape tunnel dug out of the earth with a teaspoon over the course of decades. This was some kind of service tunnel, it seemed: careful scraping about revealed rails sunk into the earth.

  It seemed to go towards the trees. There was a sleeping bag in there, chewed to bits by rats or foxes, and some cold drinks cans, a small hill of cigarette ends. I don’t know what that meant. Maybe someone keeping tabs on the prison. Maybe a place to keep warm while they made a drop or expected something in return. I found the entrance to the tunnel covered with stones and pieces of brick. Beneath that was a section of plastic sheeting, presumably to keep the worst of the moisture out and prevent collapse. There were some containers inside resting on what looked like radio-controlled carts. The containers were varied in size and shape. Some were plastic pods sealed with gaffer tape, some Tupperware boxes, some just wraps of tin foil. Most were empty but I found one stuffed with shivs. Another contained a bag of weed. One of the tubs was dusted with remnants of coke. Goodies bound for clink that never arrived because of the riot. It looked as if I’d discovered some method for transporting contraband in or out of the prison.

  I wondered whether I should get this stuff back to Mawker, but what good would it do? Perhaps there were others stalled mid-journey that might offer a lead in my search for Tann, but I doubted any of them would give me co-ordinates leading me right to his door. He was far away. He wasn’t stupid. If they couldn’t catch him within the first twelve hours of his escape, then he could be anywhere. Someone could be hiding him in an attic or a cellar. He could be out in the wilds. He could be across the Channel and sunning himself in Puerto Banús by now.

  But I guessed he was still in the country. There was the small matter of me to deal with, and I didn’t think he’d give up the opportunity to do so. He knew I stood between him and any chance he had of a long, peaceful exile.

  I watched the long, slow beam of the security guard’s torch as he came back and wondered why this broken-down doss hole needed any kind of protection. Maybe the prison service was so strapped for cash that they wanted to make sure nobody came to strip the lead from the windows, or made off with the copper wiring. I supposed there might be some salvageable stuff in the canteens and workshops. And at the very least, they didn’t want kids getting on the site and doing themselves a terrible injury on the broken glass and weakened masonry.

  I headed back to the car, having wiped off the canisters and returned them to the tunnel. If I got caught with any of that shit I’d be liable for a bed in Cold Quay’s replacement. Gone two a.m. I felt as if my internal clock had been overwound and dropped on the floor and kicked against a wall a few times. I wasn’t even sure what day it was. Only the Christmas lights shining in the houses parted by the M1 gave me any kind of clue as to where we all were.

  I thought of wrapping presents on Christmas Eve with Rebecca and trying, and failing, every year to get her to do it in the nude. While wearing a Santa hat. I would always write a letter from Father Christmas to Sarah after I’d had a few Bristol Creams, disguising my handwriting best I could. You’ve been very good this year. You know that Mummy and Daddy love you very much. Maybe next year you can sit on Rudolph… I’ve been very busy, you know. And then I’d scarf the mince pie and toss back the glass of brandy and put the carrot back in the salad crisper.

  I might have wrapped presents with you in the nude if you didn’t get so piss-pants drunk.

  It’s Christmas Eve. What else are you supposed to do?

  But that’s your excuse for everything. Christmas Day. New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day. The first daffodil of spring. Having a shave.

  You’re being dramatic. And more than a bit unfair.

  Just think on the number of times you could have spent truffle time with my magnificent norks. But you forwent that because you had your gob around a bottle neck.

  That was then, Becs.

  Yeah, well, I was then, too.

  Becs. Please.

  The wipers keeping beat to the sad song that always played. The rain. The splintering of all those red lights on wet tarmac. So much blood. There had been so much blood. The amount we carry in these fragile vessels. And it had all flowed so feverishly for me, as mine had for her, all those years ago. Now it felt like cold porridge in my veins. What was left of hers was soaked into the fibres of the floorboards on Lime Grove or turned to ash by the flames at the crematorium.

  One thousand degrees Celsius.

  You always said I was hot stuff.

  14

  It isn’t difficult to find information about ex-cons. Maybe the nasty ones. The ones who’ve spilled blood to a point where life stops. The sex deviants. The kind of people who raise tempers. You don’t want public lynchings on the streets. But it gets a little easier if you trip down to the next zone down on the old ‘naughty pyramid’. The bank robbers. The organised crime heads. The serial, serious burglars. The ones who, in contrast to the killers and rapists and kiddy-fiddlers, sometimes find a weird kind of celebrity among the populace. Murder a policeman in the line of duty and you’re a bad boy. Break into his house while he’s at work and you’re a cheeky chappie. It gets a little bit more onerous to find the few prisoners who have been granted release from Cold Quay, and it’s nigh-on impossible to find anybody who once walked the corridors of Red Row, mainly because they’re either dead or still there… well, they would be if it was still standing. What I’m getting at is this: you don’t get released from Red Row.

  Except, someone did, once.

  Frank Pastor. You might recall the name. It was all over the papers.

  Pastor was from Norfolk. King’s Lynn, specifically. He ran a farm park near Methwold. You know the kind of thing. Paddocks and ponds filled with animals. The kids can get up close to the rabbits and chickens, feed the goats, then the parents are bled dry at the gift shop and cafeteria. Frank was arrested for murder in 1999 when an eight-year-old girl, Lucy Leigh, was found strangled in a field a mile south of the farm. Strands of Pastor’s hair were found on Lucy’s clothing. A fortnight later Pastor’s wife, Carmen, and most of the animals, died when the farm was set on fire by arsonists who’d already decided Pastor was guilty of his crime. It was an ugly mess. Pastor was sentenced to life imprisonment and bundled off to Cold Quay. Six years later another body was found in the same location as Lucy. But this was a grown man who had committed suicide. Russell MacLeish. There was a letter in his pocket, confessing to Lucy’s murder and admitting that he had framed Pastor because he had been in love with Carmen. That he was indirectly responsible for her death had become a burden too many for him to bear.

  So Pastor was released in 2005 and given a considerable amount of compensation. He gave it all away to charity and shunned the offer of a new identity. He wasn’t ashamed of who he was; he had done nothing wrong. He might have changed his mind if he’d known the amount of bother he’d receive from the papers wanting to tell his story; he was hounded for months. But eventually that all tailed off and, apart from the odd cowardly attack from those who thought there was no smoke without fire (no pun intended) – bricks through his window, car tyres slashed – he was left alone to stew in his own juices.

  He still lived in Norfolk, but had moved to a little place called Honing in the north-east of the county. There he rented a small barn that had been converted into a bungalow. I found it round six in the morning, after a lot of roaming around back roads and getting lost. It was very plain, very easy to miss. It was as if the tragedy of his story had imbued it with grey, as if the stones that surrounded it were incrementally pulling the barn down to be back among them again.

  Early, but fuck it. I knocked on the door and a dog barked. Deep bark. Big dog. A face appeared at the window to my left. He didn’t open it. He just stared at me. I’d worked it out that he was in his mid-fifties, but he looked much older. Who wouldn’t after the kind of mill he’d been fed through? His hair, grey and
unkempt, was in need of a wash and a cut. Deep channels had forged ways through his skin, making his face look as if it had ambitions to be a slot machine. His eyes were blue and damp and haunted. He didn’t look as if he’d been to bed.

  He came to the door and opened it. Smells flew at me. Dog shit and dog food and wet dog. The dog flew at me too. I didn’t know the breed but it was large and furious and filled with teeth.

  I stepped back, but Pastor had grabbed the beast by the collar. I stood there looking at the cords leaping out of his forearm as he barely prevented it from turning me into Sorrell mince.

  ‘Mr Pastor?’ I tried to say, but all that came out was fear-spittle and air.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘My name’s Joel Sorrell,’ I said, pulling myself together. ‘I’m looking for my daughter. Her mother was killed by a man who has escaped from Cold Quay.’

  ‘I know you. I read about you. And what? You think I’m the go-to guy when women get killed?’

  ‘You were proved innocent,’ I said. ‘You know why I’m here.’

  ‘So I was at Cold Quay,’ he said. ‘So what? Quiet, Renko!’

  The dog looked up at its master, licked its chops but continued to make weird yowling, growling sounds.

  ‘What kind of dog is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Caucasian Ovcharka,’ he said.

  ‘It must weigh two hundred pounds,’ I said.

  ‘Probably. They’re a bugger to train, and I haven’t managed it successfully, so be careful. He’s an aggressive bastard, and he won’t listen to me, especially if he’s got your head in his jaws.’

  ‘I’m not here for trouble.’

  ‘I just want to be left alone,’ he said.

  ‘I know. I would too, if I’d gone through what you suffered.’

  ‘I lost everything.’

  ‘Yes. I lost my wife too. I don’t want to lose my daughter.’

  His gaze drifted beyond me, as if he was checking to see if I had company.

  ‘Inside,’ he said. He moved away from the open door, wrestling with the dog which was growling more loudly now that I was daring to cross the threshold.

  We walked through a dingy hallway to a living room that really ought to have been renamed a dying room. There was nothing in it beyond a chair, a small table, a couple of books and a lamp. A rug that Renko rested upon. He went straight there now, and lay down to gnaw on a plastic toy.

  ‘I’d offer you a seat, but…’ he said, and sat down. ‘I’d offer you a drink too, but…’

  ‘That’s kind of you, but I’ll not trouble you for long,’ I said. ‘I wondered if you could tell me anything about Graeme Tann. Did you get to know him while you were inside?’

  ‘What makes you think I was on Red Row?’

  ‘You were on Red Row. All…’ My words faded out. ‘You were on Red Row,’ I said, again.

  ‘All the nastiest bastards were on Red Row. Is what you were going to say. Or words to that effect.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What you were put away for was deserving of that wing. But you didn’t do it. So it doesn’t matter. Why get precious about it?’

  ‘Because I thought about it,’ he said. ‘Because me and Carmen, we were going through a shitty phase of our marriage. I say “shitty phase” but I might as well just say “shitty marriage”. We were at each other’s throats constantly. I used to fantasise about murdering her. I was glad when she was killed.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. He seemed euphoric, as if he’d let loose a demon that had been clamped to his mind for decades. Maybe it had. Maybe he’d never confided to anybody before. He looked guilty and thrilled, his blue, wet eyes wide and confrontational. ‘I’m not here to judge you. I just want to know about Tann.’

  ‘Graeme Tann paid me no heed,’ he said. ‘And I kept to myself. I was busy with appeals. How would you feel if you were innocent and you suddenly found yourself in the middle of a bunch of people who had killed for pleasure, who had laughed and danced in blood, taken trophies, added another notch to an already big tally?’

  ‘I’d keep my head down,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. And that’s what I did. For six years.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean you didn’t see anything. I’m just looking for an “in”, Frank. Graeme Tann murdered my wife. It was a brutal, shocking murder. And now he’s out. And I don’t know where my daughter is.’

  ‘I don’t know how I can help,’ Pastor said. ‘I saw him. Of course I did. He had his cronies.’

  ‘You see,’ I said. ‘That’s interesting to me. “He had his cronies.” So… what? He wasn’t a crony? He didn’t seem… subservient to anybody, in your eyes?’

  ‘I wasn’t making any kind of study while I was in there,’ he said.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But he was… what? Some kind of kingpin? A leader?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Renko stood up from his rug, the plastic toy – what looked like a giant raspberry – squashed between his jaws. You could feel the heat off this monster from six feet away. I wondered who would come off worst in a battle between him and Mengele. A tie, I reckoned. Or they’d probably get on like a house on fire. No pun intended.

  ‘I saw his cell once,’ he said. He was looking at me curiously, and it made me think of people who are gearing up to do something extreme and perhaps foolish, like BASE jumping, or free climbing. It seemed as though he was assessing me to see how I would take what he was gearing up to say. ‘I was helping the wardens shift furniture. We had to change the chairs in some of the cells. They were wearing out. Tann got a new chair. I noticed your name was on one of the walls. He’d written it on a piece of paper and it was stuck to the wall. There were other names. I thought maybe it was some kind of list of grievances. A shit list.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I said. ‘I’m top of some shit lists compiled by some of the nicest people you’re ever likely to meet. So it makes sense I should be on the shit list of a complete shit. Give me something else. Give me something I can use.’

  ‘I need a drink after all,’ he said, getting up. ‘You might think it’s easy to dredge this stuff up, but we’re talking over ten years ago. This is a time I’ve been trying to forget, I’ll have you know. You turning up puts me back in the middle of the shitstink corridors and nightsticks smacked across the back of the legs.’

  I made to follow him to the kitchen but Renko growled at me. I allowed the dog to lead the way. The kitchen was a slightly more interesting place. Here was a tiny TV and a radio and a bench filled with green plants. A stack of newspapers tied together with gardener’s twine. I leaned against a chair while Pastor fixed himself a whisky and water.

  ‘Want one? Or is it too early for you?’

  ‘What about those miniatures?’

  He picked up a handful of vodka miniatures and he tossed them my way, along with a plastic cup. ‘I’ve had those for months,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand the stuff. It’s like drinking surgical spirit.’

  I wasn’t going to waste time correcting him, or educating him on the superiority of ‘burning wine’. I got the Smirnoff down me while he sipped his drink and watched Renko do that shameless begging routine that all animals fall into when they sit in the room with all the food.

  ‘I’m stunned,’ I said, ‘that the authorities are no closer to catching him now than on the day of the riots. I mean, what is he? A shadow? How does someone like that just disappear off the face of the earth?’

  He shrugged, his glass paused on the moist surface of his lower lip. The haunted look in his eyes had softened somewhat, but he still looked damaged as hell. ‘It strikes me that he’s the kind of person who would have something set up, all ready for him if the breakout was a success.’

  ‘Any ideas?’ I asked. ‘Any clue as to where he might have gone? Maybe you overheard some plans.’

  ‘Maybe I didn’t. But what would you do? Boat in a harbour waiting to take him to Spain. Someone’s cellar or attic. Maybe he’s living rough o
ut in the sticks. He’s a survivor, isn’t he?’

  ‘Graeme Tann was a streak of piss before he was put away,’ I said. ‘He was a pathetic little shitehawk. What happened to him in prison? What turned him into Cool Hand Luke?’

  Pastor swirled his drink and positioned his nose above the whisky, as if the answers to my questions could be discerned in its vapours. ‘People in prison miss their home comforts. Graeme Tann was able to provide them.’

  ‘You mean like blowjobs and buggery?’

  ‘No,’ Pastor said. ‘He was like a gofer. He could get you what you wanted. That’s power, in a place like that.’

  ‘Like what? What could he get you?’

  ‘Booze, pills, weed, wank mags. The usual stuff.’

  ‘How did he manage it?’ I asked.

  ‘There was a tunnel. Small one. Out in the exercise yard, went all the way up to the fence. One of his contacts on the outside met it coming the other way. They put rails in. Remote-controlled cars…’

  ‘I know. I saw it.’

  ‘It’s not uncommon. What was uncommon was how quickly Tann could get you your luxury items. It was as if he knew he had to make a success of this venture if he was to slide up the food chain. And he did. By the time a splinter group wanted to take over his operation he had serious muscle protecting him. Imagine that. Hard bastards at every turn, watching your back for you. Needless to say, he wasn’t put off.’