Brian Freemantle - The Blind Run

‘He’s a bastard.’

‘Right bastard,’ agreed Charlie. He felt sick.

‘I wanted to be your friend, Charlie.’

‘I understand.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Charlie. ‘Stay safe.’

‘And you.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Try hard,’ murmured Hargrave. ‘I’ve seen this happen to people before in the nick. They end up mad.’

It was on the fifth day of restrictions when he heard them coming along the landing, an hour after he’d been confined to the cell: it wasn’t quite dark, the grey time of night. The cell light was on but it didn’t seem to help much. Charlie pulled away from the door, hunched on the bunk, knowing intuitively where the footsteps would stop. They did.

It was neither Hickley nor Butterworth: Charlie thought he recognised one of the screws from reception but he wasn’t sure. Between them was a comparatively young man, younger than Charlie anyway, still upright and looking about him demandingly. He had an outside haircut and the discomfited look of a new prison entrant, suddenly deprived of clothes that fitted him and put instead into the bluish grey uniform that came only in stock sizes.

His nose wrinkled at the very entrance to the cell. ‘Dear God!’ he said. ‘What on earth is this!’ It was an exaggerated voice, stretching vowels and consonants, a voice that had responded to tutors and prep school teachers and university dons and got respect from head waiters and hotel doormen.

‘Home,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s no place like it.’

The British embassy to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics borders the Moskva river, almost opposite the Kremlin: the view from one to the other is uninterrupted and the story is that during his manic, despotic reign Stalin used to become apoplectic looking from his window to see the Union Jack rippling so close and so defiantly in the wind.

The communications centre for the British embassy is a peculiar room, deep in the basement and far below ground level: before workmen were flown in from London to tank the chamber, dampness from the adjoining river seeped through the walls and stained them. Appropriately, the discoloration was an iron red, not the green of mould.

The brickwork they created remains. Within it has literally been built another room, suspended from the roof and from the base and the sides by single streel struts, so that it looks like a module created for physics instruction. There is a medieval-type drawbridge, linking this suspended chamber to the one outside. It is withdrawn – like the castle of the middle ages – from inside, so that the suspended structure is completely isolated apart from its support bars and those are swept weekly by electronics experts, to ensure no listening attachment has been installed upon the diplomatic and secret radio traffic that emanates from it.

Progress is usually synonymous with improvement. For signals transmissions – clandestine transmissions, that is – it isn’t so. Microwave relay is the easiest thing to eavesdrop on, particularly when an embassy is so close to a suspicious seat of a suspicious government.

By the sixth week of the coded messages being relayed to London, they were being intercepted with complete clarity if without any understanding at 2, Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow.

That’s the headquarters of the KGB.

The man shuddered as the cell door closed solidly behind him, turning to stare at it. Charlie remembered doing the same; everyone did, the first time. After several moments the man moved further into the cell, his belongings collected in a rolled up towel. In his swamping tunic, Charlie thought he looked like a shipwreck victim rescued on an island of big men. The newcomer seemed aware of it as the impression came to Charlie, looking down at himself as if for the first time, plucking disdainfully at the rough cloth with his fingers. He put the towel roll on the empty bunk and gazed around, at the table and the chair and the wall rack, briefly at Charlie and then, for the longest time, up at the narrow triangle of light from the only window. Charlie waited and saw the abrupt sag of his shoulders.

‘Christ,’ he said, hollow-voiced.

‘You get used to it.’

The man started, as if he’d forgotten Charlie’s presence. He turned to face Charlie and said ‘Sampson. Edwin Sampson.’

He offered his hand. The instinctive politeness of public school, thought Charlie. He allowed the briefest contact between them, not bothering to stand. Sampson frowned at the rudeness.

‘I know who you are,’ said Sampson. ‘They told me.’

‘I read about you,’ said Charlie. ‘The beginning of the trial, at least.’

‘Thirty years!’ said Sampson. ‘That’s what I got. Thirty years.’ He looked again towards the window.

‘You must have done a lot of damage.’

‘That sounded critical.’

‘It wasn’t meant to sound anything.’

‘You can hardly bloody talk: there isn’t a section in the department that doesn’t know what you did,’ said Sampson, viciously, if you hadn’t managed to run until the Treason Law limitation ran out, you’d be doing thirty years too: most probably.’

‘I wasn’t criticising,’ repeated Charlie, wearily.

‘Everyone said you were bloody rude: people who could remember you, that is.’

Sampson swore with a small-boy defiance, as if he were trying to shock. Charlie swung back on to his bunk, lying with his hands cupped behind his head. He had bigger problems than worrying about offending a snotty-voiced little bugger who’d sold his country down the river. Charlie hadn’t done that; no one but he could ever accept the qualification, not even the damned judge to whom it had been so patiently explained, but it was the truth. Charlie knew he wasn’t a traitor.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ asked Sampson. There was a plaintiveness about the question.

‘Why not make your bed?’ suggested Charlie, nodding towards the folded blankets. ‘This is recreation period but you don’t get it first night in.’

‘Recreation?’

‘There’s a television room, place to play chess and draughts and things like that.’

‘Why are you locked up then?’ demanded the younger man.

Clever, thought Charlie, ‘I’m on restrictions… punishment,’ said Charlie.

‘What for?’

Charlie sighed. ‘In prison you don’t ask anyone what they’re doing time for and you don’t ask about their punishments. You don’t ask about their background or their families. In fact you don’t ask about anything. This is the nick, son: not a public school.’

‘That was another thing they said about you: that you’re an inverted snob,’ said Sampson.

‘I don’t give a shit what they say about me,’ said Charlie. It was all past: too long past.

‘Is it bad? In here, I mean?’ The nervousness was obvious in Sampson’s question.

Charlie turned again to look at the man. ‘You’ll find it rough, at first,’ he said, ‘In fact, you’ll find it bloody awful. But you adjust, learn to behave prison fashion. Keep your head down, until you learn the rules,’ Charlie paused. ‘And I don’t mean the official ones, on the printed form.’ Pity he didn’t practise what he preached, thought Charlie.

Sampson had his back to Charlie, trying to arrange the blankets in some proper shape over the bed and failing. Charlie thought kids made their own beds at public school: or did they still have fags to do it for them? Sampson would get a bollocking at cell inspection. After several moments Sampson turned and sat down, squatting forward towards Charlie.

‘I want you to know,’ he announced.

‘Know what?’

‘What I did.’

‘I’m not interested.’