Death’s Jest-Book. Reginald Hill

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      The main man was a ten-year con called Polchard, first name Matthew, known to his intimates as Mate, though not because of any innate amiability. He wasn’t much to look at, being scrawny, bald, and so white faced it was like seeing the skull beneath the skin. But his standing was confirmed by the fact that during ‘association’ he always had a table to himself in the crowded ‘parlour’ which is what they called the association room. There he sat, scowling down at a chessboard (Mate: gerrit?) and studying a little book in which he occasionally made notes before moving a piece. From time to time someone would bring him a mug of tea. If anyone wanted to talk to him, they stood patiently by, a couple of feet from the table, till he deigned to notice them. And on rare occasions if what they said was of particular interest, they’d be invited to pull up a chair and sit down.

      Polchard himself didn’t do sex, my ‘friend’ informed me, but his lieutenants were always on the lookout for new talent and if he gave them the go-ahead, I might as well touch my toes and think of England.

      But in the short term, he went on to say, I was most at risk from a freelancer like Brillo Bright. You may have encountered him and his twin brother, Dendo. God knows where their names came from, though I have heard it suggested that Brillo got his after spending some time in a padded cell (Brillo Pad, OK?) At some point Brillo had decided that having a spread eagle tattooed across his bald pate and beetling brow with its talons wrapped around his eye sockets was a good way of improving his facial beauty. He might have been right. What it certainly must have improved was the odds on his being recognized whenever he pursued his chosen profession of armed robbery, which possibly explained why he’d spent half of his thirty-odd years in jail. Brother Dendo was by comparison an intellectual, but only by comparison, being an unpredictably vicious thug. The Brights were the only cons to have an existence independent of Polchard. On the surface they were all chums together, but in fact they were far too unstable for Polchard to risk the hassle of a confrontation. So they existed like the Isle of Man, offshore, closely related to the mainland, but in many ways a law unto themselves.

      And helping themselves to a tasty newcomer would be a way for Brillo and Dendo to affirm their independence without risking any real provocation of the main man.

      To survive I had to find a way of getting myself under Polchard’s protection which didn’t involve getting under one of his boys. Not that I’ve got any serious objection to a close same sex relationship, but I knew from anecdote and observation that letting yourself become a centre-fold spread in prison means you’re pinned down at the bottom of the heap just as surely as if you’d got a staple through your belly button.

      First off, I had to show I wasn’t to be messed with. So I laid my plans.

      A couple of days later I waited till I saw Dendo and Brillo go into the shower room, and I followed them.

      Brillo looked at me like a fox who’s just seen a chicken come strolling into his earth.

      I hung my towel up and stepped under the shower, plastic shampoo bottle in hand.

      Brillo said something to his brother who laughed, then he moved towards me. He wasn’t all that well hung for such a big man, but what there was certainly had a strong sense of anticipation.

      ‘Hello, girlie,’ he said. ‘Like someone to do your back?’

      I unscrewed the top of my shampoo bottle and said, ‘Have you got that chicken sitting on your head so everyone will know you’ve got scrambled egg for brains?’

      It took him a moment to work this out, then his eyes bulged in fury, which was fine as it doubled my target area.

      As he lunged towards me, I raised the bottle and squeezed and sent a jet of the lavatory cleaning bleach I’d filled it with straight into his eyes.

      He screamed and started to knuckle at his eyes and I gave the skinned end of his rampant dick another quick burst. Now he didn’t know what to do with his hands. I stooped, hooked his left ankle from under him, then stood back as he tumbled over, hitting his head against the wall with such force that he cracked a tile.

      All this in the space of a few seconds. Dendo meanwhile had been standing there in sheer disbelief but now he began to advance. I waved the shampoo bottle towards him and he halted.

      I said, ‘Either get bird-brain here to a medic or buy him a white stick.’

      Then I picked up my towel and retreated.

      You see how I’m putting myself in your hands, my dear Mr Pascoe. A confession to assault and grievous bodily harm occasioning death. For it turned out that Brillo had a surprisingly thin skull for so thick a man, and there was damage which led to a tardily diagnosed meningeal problem which led to his demise. You could probably get an investigation going even after all this time. Not that I think the authorities at the Syke would applaud you. They went through the motions at the time, but brother Dendo who couldn’t bring himself to co-operate with the Law even in circumstances like these, lost it when one of the screws dissed his dead brother and broke his jaw.

      That got him out of the way for which I was mightily relieved. Of course all the cons knew what had happened, but in the Syke no one grassed without Polchard’s say-so, and as there was a touch of negligence in Brillo’s death, the screws were glad to bury him and the affair, very few questions were asked.

      That was stage one. Polchard too probably wasn’t sorry to see the back of the Brights, but there were plenty of people around who would be happy to do Dendo a favour, so I still needed the top man’s protection.

      So to stage two.

      At the next period in the parlour, I approached his table and stood at what I’d worked out was the appropriate petitioning distance.

      He ignored me completely, not even glancing up under his bushy eyebrows. Conversation and activity went on elsewhere in the room but it had that hushed unreal quality you get when people are simply going through the motions.

      I studied the chessboard as he worked out his next move. He’d obviously started with an orthodox Queen’s Pawn opening and countered it with a variation on the Slav defence. Playing yourself is a form of exercise by which the top-flight chess-player can keep his basic skills honed, but the only real test, of course, lies in pitting them against the unpredictability of an equal or superior player.

      Finally after what must have been twenty minutes and with only another five of the association period left, he made his move.

      Then, still without looking up, he said, ‘What?’

      I stepped forward, picked up the black bishop and took his knight.

      The room went completely silent.

      Leaving the knight open to the bishop was a trap, of course. One which he’d laid for himself and would therefore not have fallen into. But I had. What he needed to know now was, had I done it out of sheer incompetence, or did I have an agenda of my own?

      At least that’s what I hoped he needed to know.

      After a long minute, still without looking up, he said, ‘Chair.’

      A chair was thrust against the back of my legs and I sat down.

      He spent the remaining period of association studying the board.

      When СКАЧАТЬ