Magnus scanned the entrance hall, preparing for the next attack, but he and Jeb were the only people left standing.
‘Shit.’ Jeb leaned forward panting, his hands on his knees. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’
‘I don’t.’ Magnus was gasping for breath. ‘Do you think he’s…?’
Jeb looked up. ‘Christ, that was a close one. I thought he had me there.’
Magnus held out his hands. They were trembling. ‘I think I might have…’
Jeb said, ‘You did what you had to do. You saved my skin and I saved yours.’
Magnus gave a crazy laugh. ‘What does that make us? Blood brothers?’
Jeb folded his penknife and slid it into his pocket. ‘It makes us even.’
There was a rumble of activity beyond the prison. Magnus looked towards the open gates and saw a flash of desert camouflage, a pale alert against the London brick.
Thirteen
‘We could pretend to be screws and show them our ID.’
Magnus kept his voice to a whisper, even though the wall they were crouched against was too far from the gate for the soldiers guarding it to hear them. His heart was still pounding from the fight in the entrance hall, but the fear that had stalked him since his arrest had vanished. The drab courtyard gleamed with colours he had never noticed before and the air made his skin tingle. Magnus’s eyes tracked a seagull flying high above. The sky was bluer than he remembered, the bird a soaring flash of white.
‘If they don’t believe us, it’ll be game over.’ Jeb was sorting through his pockets, examining the tangle of car keys he had lifted from the locker room. ‘I’m not getting banged up again.’
‘Going straight?’
Jeb glanced at Magnus. ‘That kind of comment could get you into trouble inside.’
‘Glad I managed to avoid trouble,’ Magnus whispered. He had a hysterical urge to laugh.
‘Save the jokes for later.’ Jeb was all business. He nodded towards the gates where a small group of soldiers stood, cradling guns. ‘It’s up to you what you do. I’m going to drive through them.’
Magnus took a deep breath. His bravery had been all adrenalin and it was wearing off. He felt tired and hungry.
Jeb said, ‘I’m not sure why these guys are hanging around instead of barging their way in, but my guess is that they’re not sure what they’re going to find inside and are waiting on reinforcements. We need to make our move now.’
It occurred to Magnus that he could hand himself in, throw himself on the mercy of the soldiers and take his chances. It was the phrase ‘mercy of the soldiers’ that decided him. The memory of news reports from Afghanistan and Iraq, film footage of men in orange jumpsuits being stretchered in chains into cages at Guantánamo Bay. He said, ‘How will we do it?’
‘Find a car, put the pedal to the metal and aim it at the gates. No finesse.’
‘What if they shoot?’
‘Duck.’ Jeb shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we both end up with an extra bloody eye in the middle of our forehead. Are you up for it or not?’
This was how men landed in prison, Magnus realised, how he had got there himself, acting without imagining the consequences. He shook his head. ‘Probably not.’
‘Fuck you then.’
Jeb rose from their hiding place and ran the length of the wall, keeping his body low. Without thinking about what he was doing, Magnus followed. Jeb halted at a corner and peered round it. ‘I thought you were crapping out.’
‘I am,’ Magnus whispered. ‘But I can’t hide behind this wall for ever. There might be another gate.’
‘An unguarded exit?’
‘You never know.’
Jeb let out a snort. ‘The car park’s over there. Don’t make a show of yourself, if you’re following me.’
The clothes Jeb had chosen were shades of grey that melted into the urban landscape. Magnus glanced down at the mod T-shirt he had stolen from the locker room. The red and white target on his chest seemed like a poor choice now and he pulled up the zip of his hoodie to cover it.
Jeb turned the corner and sprinted across open tarmac to where ranks of cars were parked. Magnus plunged after him, thigh muscles singing with the effort of crouching and running. ‘They’ll probably shoot me in the arse and blow my fucking bollocks off,’ he muttered. But he made the shelter of the cars and hunkered down between a Mondeo and a Shogun. Jeb was flitting between the rows of vehicles, pointing one electronic key after another.
The Mondeo next to Magnus flashed its sidelights and gave an electronic chirrup.
‘Fuck.’ His voice was all breath.
Jeb jogged over, opened the driver’s door and slid inside.
‘Sure you don’t want to come along for the ride?’
‘I can think of pleasanter ways to commit suicide.’
‘Don’t jinx me.’ For the first time since they had sheltered in the art room Jeb looked nervous. He adjusted the rear-view mirror and fitted the key in the ignition. ‘You sit on your arse if you want. I’d rather take a chance than end up back inside.’
Magnus did not bother to contradict him. ‘Look.’ He pointed across the car park. ‘That’s our way out.’
The prison van was skewed across three spaces at the far end of the car park. It was long, with three small, high windows on either side, more like a large horsebox than a vehicle designed for ferrying men. Jeb complained that he didn’t have keys for it, that Magnus was making him lose time and that the van was ‘fucking impregnable’, but Magnus suspected that he was secretly relieved not to be facing a cordon of armed soldiers through the Mondeo’s wide windscreen.
Magnus pulled at the back door to the van, but it was locked tight. He skirted round to the front passenger side and Jeb took the driver’s door. Magnus tried opening his side.
‘Fuck, it’s locked.’
Even as Magnus said the words he heard the door on the other side click open and the horror in Jeb’s voice.
‘Jesus Christ.’
It was impossible to know how long the prison guard had been slumped in the well of the driver’s seat. But these were the hottest days of summer and it had been long enough to bloat the man’s stomach and putrefy his flesh. Jeb held his bloodstained sleeve against his nose and mouth.
‘No way, man, I am not getting in there.’
Magnus thought he saw something moving on the guard’s swollen belly. He turned and retched, holding a hand over his mouth to muffle the sound. Bile stung the back of his throat. He breathed deeply, his hands on his knees bracing himself, and then straightened up, took off the brown hoodie and grabbed the dead man’s arm, using the cloth as a barrier between his flesh and the corpse’s.
The smell was worse than that of the Minke whale that had been beached when he was fourteen. A group of volunteers had tried for hours to get it back into the water but the beast’s radar was faulty, or perhaps it had been ill and wanted to die. Their efforts had failed. The next day he and Hugh had dared each other to climb up on its black mountain of a body. In the end they had done it together, the pair of them slipping and sliding until they reached its peak, standing triumphant until the gases in the whale had suddenly shifted, and they had tumbled off, laughing and swearing, sure that the creature had come back to life.
‘Worse than a whale’s fart,’ he muttered. The dead guard flopped to the ground and Magnus saw the white stuff wriggling in the rotting flesh more clearly. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Swearing helped. He dragged the man to one side, wiped the seat with the brown hoodie and dropped it on to the man’s face. ‘Rest in Peace.’ The van’s keys were resting in the ignition. Magnus turned to where his cellmate was crouched. ‘Do you want to drive?’