The Freedom Trap. Desmond Bagley

of this nick?’

      ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said regretfully. ‘But the Review Board would look upon you very kindly if you co-operated with us.’

      ‘What sort of co-operation?’

      ‘Come off it, Rearden,’ he said tiredly. ‘You know what we want. The diamonds, man; the diamonds.’

      I looked him in the eye. ‘I’ve never seen any diamonds.’ Which was the exact truth – from the start to the finish of the caper. I never saw the diamonds at all.

      ‘Look, Rearden; we know you did it, and we’ve proved it conclusively. Why try to act the innocent? My God, man; you’ve been sentenced to a quarter of a lifetime in prison. Do you think you’ll be good for anything when you come out? The judge was right – the game isn’t worth the candle.’

      I said, ‘Do I have to sit here and listen to you? Is that part of my punishment?’

      ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ Forbes said. ‘I don’t understand you, Rearden. I don’t understand why you’re taking all this so calmly. All right, let’s try another tack. How did you know the drop? How did you know where the diamonds were being sent? That’s of some interest, too.’

      ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

      ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ he repeated. ‘Do you know – maybe that’s true. You could be telling the truth.’ He leaned back in his chair, opened his mouth and shut it again and stared at me. After a few moments he began to laugh. ‘Oh, no!’ he said. ‘It couldn’t be as simple as that! You couldn’t have been double-crossed, could you, Rearden?’

      ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

      Forbes tapped the table. ‘You arrive in England out of the blue, and four days later you do the snatch. It must have been set up for you – you couldn’t have laid it all on in three days. Then we pick you up and there are no diamonds. So where are they? Obviously, someone else must have them.’

      He chuckled. ‘Could it be the same someone who made a telephone call and wrote an anonymous letter? You passed on the diamonds and then got shopped, Rearden. Your brainy pal who planned all this made a patsy of you – isn’t that the truth?’

      I sat mute.

      ‘What!’ he said. ‘Honour among thieves? Don’t be as big a fool as you make out to be. Your friend sold you to the law for a few thousand lousy quid and you’re standing for it.’ He sounded disgusted. ‘Don’t think you’re going to get out of here to go looking for him; it’s not going to be as simple as that. I’m to make recommendations to the Home Office, too, you know; and I’m going to report a total lack of cooperation. And that will mean that you’ll be a high-risk prisoner for a hell of a long time – no matter what the Governor may recommend. You can be a good boy in here – you can be the perfect prisoner – but it will cut no ice with the Review Board after they read my report.’

      I said hesitantly, ‘I’ll think about it.’

      ‘You do that,’ he said forcibly. ‘Any time you want to see me just pass word to the Governor. But don’t try to play the fool with me, Rearden. Don’t waste my time. You give us what we want and we’ll nail your friend for you. We’ll crucify him. And you’ll be off the hook as far as high risk is concerned. What’s more, I’ll see to it personally that the Review Board gives your case every favourable consideration. I can’t do more than that, can I?’

      Privately, I doubted if he could do as much. A detective-inspector is pretty small fry at Scotland Yard and if he thought I couldn’t see what he was up to he must have thought I was a dumb bunny. All that Forbes wanted was to clear the case and get a good conduct tick on his card – the man who recovered the unrecoverable. And once he’d done it then I could go to hell as far as he was concerned. I wouldn’t count; I was just another bent villain, and you don’t have to keep promises to crooks. Talk about honour among thieves!

      I said slowly, ‘Twenty years is a long time. I’ll think about it very seriously, Mr Forbes.’

      ‘You won’t be sorry,’ he said expansively. ‘Here, have a cigarette.’

       THREE

      I suppose a man can get used to anything. They tell me the Jews even got used to living – and dying – in Belsen and Dachau. Well, this was no Dachau, crummy though it was.

      At the end of the first week I no longer had my meals in the cell but joined with the others in eating in the Hall. It was then I discovered that I was a personality. There’s a very strong caste system in a prison largely based on criminal achievement and, oddly enough, on the lack of achievement which results in a long sentence. Roughly speaking, the long-term prisoners, such as myself, were at the top of the heap with the high-risk boys as the élite. They’re looked up to and respected; they hold their little courts and can command the favour of many parasites and hangers-on.

      That is one classification. Another is by type of crime. The brainy boys – the con men and professional frauds – are on top with safe breakers running them close. At the bottom of this heap are the sex criminals whom nobody likes. The honest burglar is a much respected man, more for his workmanlike and unassuming ways than anything else.

      I was in a position to command a lot of respect, had I so wished it. My status stemmed from the fact that not only was I a long-term man but that I’d diddled the johns and hadn’t grassed on my mysterious pal. You can’t keep a secret in prison and everyone knew the facts of my case. Because I kept my mouth shut about the diamonds and because everyone knew what pressure Forbes was exerting I was reckoned to be one of the all right boys; an oddity, but one to be respected.

      But I steered clear of all entanglements and alliances. I was being a good boy because I didn’t want my high-risk status to continue for any longer than it had to. The time would come when I was going to escape and I had to get rid of the constant surveillance – the singling out of attention on Rearden. Not that I was the only high-risk prisoner – there were others – about half a dozen in all. I steered clear of the lot of them.

      Because I was high risk they gave me the job of looking after the tidiness of ‘C’ Hall where I was under the eye of the Hall screw permanently on duty. Otherwise they would have had to provide a warder to escort me to the workshops instead of going with the others in a gang supervised by a trusty. They were short-staffed and this was a convenient arrangement. I didn’t object; I mopped the floors and scrubbed the tables and worked with a will. Anything to be a good boy.

      Homosexuals are the bane of prison life. One of them rather fancied me and pursued me to the extent that the only possible way of dissuading him was to give him a thump on the nose which I didn’t want to do because that would have been a black mark on my record sheet. It was Smeaton, my landing screw, who got me out of that predicament. He saw what was happening and warned off the queer with a few choice and blasphemous threats, for which I was thankful.

      Smeaton was typical of the majority of prison officers. He hadn’t interfered because he particularly wanted to prevent my corruption. He’d done it for the sake of a quiet life. The screws looked upon us neutrally for the most part and to them we were just a part of the job. Over the years they had learned a technique – stop it before it starts; keep the temperature down; don’t let trouble spread. It was a very effective technique.

      So I kept to myself and out of trouble. Not that I didn’t mix with the others at all; if I drew attention as a loner then the prison psychiatrist would fix his beady eye on me. So, during the free association periods, I played a few games of cards and improved my chess considerably.

      There were others to talk to besides one’s fellow criminals. There were the unofficial visitors. Why these were called unofficial I never found out because they had to be authorized by the