the day. He’d had to calculate another man’s mentality in all of this. Collins would be eager, but not too eager. Vance had always had a good sense of timing. It was one of the elements that had made him so successful an athlete. But today, much more depended on that timing than a mere medal.
When he judged the moment was perfect, he got out of bed and headed for the toilet. He passed the electric razor over his head and his chin again, then dressed in Collins’ ratty jeans and baggy polo shirt. The tattoos looked spot on, Vance thought. And people saw what they expected to see. A man with Collins’ tattoos and clothes must, in the absence of any contradictory features, be Collins.
The minutes crawled by. At last, a fist banged his door and a voice called out. ‘Collins? Get yourself in gear, time to make a move.’
By the time the door opened, the officer was already distracted, paying more attention to an argument further down the corridor about the previous evening’s football results than he was to the man who emerged from the cell. Vance knew the officer – Jarvis, one of the regular day-shift crew, chippy and irritable, but not someone who had ever taken any personal interest in any of his charges. So far, so good. The screw cast a cursory glance over his shoulder then led the way down the hall. Vance stood back while the first door was unlocked remotely, enjoying the solid clunk of the metal tongue sliding open. Then he followed the officer into the sally port and tried to breathe normally while one door closed and the other opened.
And then they were off the wing, moving through the main administrative section of the jail towards the exit. Trying to calm himself with distraction, Vance wondered why anyone would choose a working environment with sickly yellow walls and metalwork painted battleship grey. To spend your days here without descending into deep depression, you’d have to have no visual taste whatsoever.
Another sally port, then the final hurdle. A couple of bored-looking officers sat behind thick glass windows like bank counters, with gaps where documents could be passed through. Jarvis nodded to the nearest, a skinny young man with a crew cut and bad skin. ‘Is the social worker here for Collins?’ he said.
Not likely, Vance thought. Not if things had gone to plan. Not many women would turn up for work after they’d been wakened in the night by someone trying to smash into their house. Especially since the putative burglar/rapist had taken the precaution of slashing all four tyres on her car and cutting her phone line. She’d been lucky. If he’d been doing the job himself instead of having to delegate it, he’d have slashed her dog’s throat and nailed it to the front door. Some things you couldn’t outsource. Hopefully, what he had managed to arrange would be enough. Unfortunate for poor Jason really. He would have to set off for his Release on Temporary Licence day without the support of someone who knew him.
‘No,’ the man on the desk said. ‘She’s not coming in today.’
‘What?’ Jarvis moaned. ‘What do you mean, she’s not coming in today?’
‘Personal issues.’
‘So what am I supposed to do with him?’ He jerked his head towards Vance.
‘There’s a taxi here.’
‘He’s going off in a taxi? Without an escort?’ Jarvis shook his head, mugging incredulity for his audience.
‘What’s the odds? He’ll have all day on the ROTL without an escort, regardless. Just means it starts a bit earlier, that’s all.’
‘What about orientation? Isn’t he supposed to have some sort of orientation with the social worker?’
Crew cut picked a spot, examined his fingernail and shrugged again. ‘Not our problem, is it? We ran it past the Assistant Governor and he said it was OK. He said Collins presented no cause for concern.’ He looked at Vance. ‘You all right with that, Collins? Otherwise the ROTL gets cancelled.’
Vance shrugged right back at him. ‘I might as well go since I’m here now.’ He was quite pleased with the way it came out. He thought it was a decent representation of how Collins spoke. More importantly, he didn’t sound at all like himself. He thrust his hands into his pockets as he’d seen Collins do a thousand times, hunching his shoulders slightly.
‘I want it on the record that I’m not happy with this, no matter what the AG says,’ Jarvis grumbled as he led Vance through the high baffle gate that led to the outside world. He pushed open the door and Vance followed him on to a paved area flanked by a roadway. A tired-looking Skoda saloon sat by the kerb, its diesel engine rumbling. Vance smelled the dirty exhaust, a cloying note in the fresh morning air. It was a combination he hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Jarvis pulled open the passenger door and leaned in. ‘You take him to Evesham Fabrications, right? Nowhere else. I don’t care if he says he’s having a bloody heart attack and needs to go to the hospital, or he’s going to shit himself if he doesn’t get to a toilet pronto. Do not pass go. Do not collect ?200. Evesham Fabrications.’
The driver looked baffled. ‘You need to chill, mate,’ he said. ‘You’ll give yourself a stroke. I know my job.’ He craned his head so he could see past Jarvis. ‘In you get, mate.’
‘In the front, so the driver can keep an eye on you.’ Jarvis stepped back, allowing Vance to slide into the passenger seat. He reached for the seat belt with his prosthesis, hoping any clumsiness would be put down to the length of time since he’d last been in a car. ‘I don’t want to hear you’ve caused any trouble, Collins,’ Jarvis said, slamming the door shut. The car smelled of synthetic pine air freshener overlaid with coffee.
The cabbie, a shambolic-looking Asian man in his mid-thirties, chuckled as he pulled away. ‘He’s in a good mood.’
‘It’s not a mood, it’s his permanent state,’ Vance said. His heart was racing. He could feel sweat in the small of his back. He couldn’t quite believe it. He’d made it out of the front door. And with every passing minute, he was further from HMP Oakworth and closer to his dream of freedom. OK, there were still plenty of obstacles between him and that steak dinner, but the hardest part was behind him. He reminded himself that he’d always believed he led a charmed life. The years in jail had just been an interruption of his natural state, not a termination. The dice were rolling in his favour again.
If he needed reinforcement in that conviction, it came as Vance took a closer look at his surroundings. The car was an automatic, which would make his life a lot easier. He hadn’t driven since his arrest; getting behind the wheel would be a steep enough revision curve without having to deal with gear changes. Vance relaxed a fraction, smiling as he took in neat fields of spring grass with their tightly woven hedges. Fat sheep grazed, their stolid lambs mostly past the gambolling stage. They passed orchards, rows of stumpy trees covered in blossom that was beginning to look a little bedraggled. The road was barely wide enough for two cars to pass. It was a foreigner’s ideal of the English countryside.
