They crouched beneath the paintings in the education room until the men’s footsteps faded into silence. Magnus got to his feet first. Something in the intensity of Jeb’s fear made him as keen to escape the other man as he had been to ally with him.
‘Good luck.’ Magnus was at the door before he realised that it was locked. Outside, in some distant corridor, the sound of screaming echoed. He turned and saw Jeb getting to his feet. The keys and weapon in his hands made him look more jailer than prisoner, despite his prison-issue clothes.
‘Like you said, we can split up once we get out of here.’ Jeb’s voice was low and intense, as if he had found his courage and was making a conscious effort to hold on to it. ‘But right now I reckon we stand more chance if we stick together.’
The screaming died abruptly.
Magnus asked, ‘What did you do that makes you so frightened?’
Jeb stepped closer. ‘Until you get these colours off you better be scared too.’
Magnus felt the heat of the other man’s body and smelled the sweet funky smell of stale and fresh sweat mingling on his skin.
‘All you need to know is that I never hurt anyone who didn’t have it coming to them. I never touched up little kiddies and I never put my hands on a woman that didn’t want me to put my hands on her.’
‘Is that what the women would say?’
Jeb flinched. ‘Women say a lot of things.’ He unlocked the door and scanned the corridor left to right, like a sniper. ‘I never met a woman who didn’t say more than her prayers.’ There was a catch in his voice, as if something in his throat’s mechanism was broken.
Ten
The prison officers’ locker room had already been ransacked, but whoever had been there had concentrated on money and valuables. The small space was littered with clothes, rifled wallets and gaping sports bags. Jeb undressed quickly and stowed his tracksuit out of sight on top of one of the lockers. Magnus stripped off his tracksuit. It was like trying to find an outfit in a jumble sale, sifting through a muddle of styles and sizes, looking for something that would fit and would not mark him out as a fraud.
‘Hurry up. It’s not a fashion show.’ Jeb pulled on a Hope for Heroes T-shirt.
Magnus saw the Union Jack tattoo on Jeb’s chest and wondered again if he had been in the forces. He found a bright blue mod T-shirt with a target on the chest and topped it with a brown hoodie. The hoodie was too warm for the weather, but he liked the idea of being able to hide his face.
‘Here, these should fit you.’ Jeb tossed a pair of jeans at him. They were long in the leg. Magnus folded the hems into turn-ups. Jeb was tying the laces on a pair of top-of-the-range Nikes. ‘Try and find something you can run in.’
It was strange, wearing the clothes of someone you had never met. Magnus rooted through the tangle of clothes and shoes until he found a pair of size eights. He wondered if the screws had left in such a rush there was no time to change out of their uniforms, or if they were still somewhere in Pentonville, coughing up their guts in the sickbay or dealing with a riot in the far reaches of the jail. He thrust his hands into the pockets of the jacket and found an Oyster card and a discount voucher for two classic margaritas and a bottle of wine at Pizza Express. He crumpled the voucher into a ball and let it drop to the ground.
Out in the prison corridors beyond someone bayed like a wolf.
‘I’ll be glad to get out of here,’ Jeb muttered. He was rooting through the abandoned gear, pocketing car keys, checking ID cards. He found a Snickers bar, tore its wrapper free and shoved it into his mouth.
Magnus felt he might kill Jeb for a share of the chocolate but he asked, ‘How will we do it?’
‘Same way we came in, through the front door.’
The locker room was windowless and lined with steel cabinets. It was larger than the cell they had shared, but it gave Magnus the same trapped feeling and his skin itched with the urge to escape. A Daily Express lay folded beneath a wooden bench. Its headline screamed, CONTAGION! Magnus picked up the tabloid. It had been published two days ago. The first three pages were devoted to the virus. People were calling it the sweats and it was overloading hospitals in London, Paris, New York and Berlin. There was an editorial alleging that the poor state of the NHS had precipitated the crisis, but the criticisms were well-rehearsed and perfunctory, as if the journalist’s heart had not really been in the story.
China and Russia had issued statements denying rumours of outbreaks in their major cities, but social media contradicted official accounts and the Express carried surreptitiously-taken photographs of a Shanghai hospital ward lined with beds full of failing patients.
A small galaxy of celebrities had been felled by the virus. Magnus searched for Johnny Dongo’s name, but either the comedian was okay or he had been eclipsed by A-listers. There was something distasteful about the celebrity photographs, the rows of hot women in bikinis, all of them dead.
‘Look at this.’ Magnus passed the paper to Jeb.
‘You can’t trust tabloid rags.’ Jeb tossed the paper on to the floor. ‘They don’t care about facts, or whose life they ruin, just as long as they can twist out a good story.’
Magnus lifted the paper from the floor and held it wide, showing Jeb the photograph of the hospital ward, flanked by sidebars of smiling female celebrities.
‘People are dying.’
Jeb was riffling through jackets and trouser pockets. He glanced up. ‘We already knew that.’ He clicked a penknife open, checking its blade. ‘How many of these actresses are holed up in some spa, ready to come back from the dead with a big tada when the time’s right? And who says the people in that hospital have the chills? All that photo shows is exactly what I’d expect to see in a hospital, patients lying in bed.’
‘They’re calling it the sweats.’
Jeb clicked the penknife shut. ‘Sweats, chills, I don’t give a fuck.’ He slid the closed knife into his jeans pocket. ‘Just concentrate on getting out of here. We can worry about killer flu after that.’
Magnus joined Jeb on the floor and rummaged in a sports bag. There was nothing useful in it, just a bottle of shower gel that claimed to double as shampoo and a towel, but touching another man’s possessions felt intimate and wrong. Magnus shoved it out of the way and started on another bag. He wanted to find something to eat. He wanted a knife like the one Jeb had found, or, better still, a Taser. He said, ‘What if the front door’s locked?’
‘I’m hoping someone will have already solved that problem for us, but if it’s locked then we find a way of opening it.’ Getting rid of his incriminating tracksuit had made Jeb more confident. ‘Here.’ He passed Magnus a prison officer’s identity card.
The man in the ID photograph was older than Magnus. His hair was a similar dark brown, but it was cut short in a barber-shop no-style. His face was thin and intelligent-looking; perfect casting for a university professor, or a curator of rare manuscripts.