Cat O'Nine Tales and Other Stories - Jeffrey Archer [36]
“But what would you have done if Mr. Perkins had sentenced you to a year?” I asked.
“I’d have been on my best behavior from day one,” said Pat, “and they would have released me in six months. They have a real problem with overcrowding at the moment,” he explained.
“But if Mr. Perkins had stuck to his original sentence of just three months, you would have been released in January, mid-winter.”
“Not a hope,” said Pat. “Just before I was due to be let out, I would have been found with a bottle of Guinness in my cell. A misdemeanor for which the governor is obliged to automatically add a further three months to your sentence, and that would have taken me comfortably through to April.”
I laughed. “And is that how you intend to spend the rest of your life?” I asked.
“I don’t think that far ahead,” admitted Pat. “Six months is quite enough to be going on with,” he added, as he climbed on to the top bunk and switched off the light.
“Goodnight, Pat,” I said, as I rested my head on the pillow.
“Have I ever told you about the time I tried to get a job on a building site in Liverpool?” asked Pat, just as I was falling asleep.
“No, you haven’t,” I replied.
“Well, the foreman, a bloody Englishman, no offense intended—” I smiled—”had the nerve to ask me if I knew the difference between a joist and a girder.”
“And do you?” I asked.
“I most certainly do. Joyce wrote Ulysses, and Goethe wrote Faust.”
Patrick O’Flynn died of hypothermia on 23 November 2005, while sleeping under the arches on Victoria Embankment in central London.
His body was discovered by a young constable, just a hundred yards away from the Savoy Hotel.
The Red King
“They charged me with the wrong offense, and sen-I tenced me for the wrong crime,” Max said as he lay in the bunk below me, rolling another cigarette.
While I was in prison, I heard this claim voiced by inmates on several occasions, but in the case of Max Glover it turned out to be true.
Max was serving a three-year sentence for obtaining money by false pretenses. Not his game. Max’s speciality was removing small items from large homes. He once told me, with considerable professional pride, that it could be years before an owner became aware that a family heirloom has gone missing, especially, Max added, if you take one small, but valuable, object from a cluttered room.
“Mind you,” continued Max, “I’m not complaining, because if they had charged me with the crime I did commit, I would have ended up with a much longer sentence—” he paused—”and nothing to look forward to once I’m released.”
Max knew he had aroused my curiosity, and as I had nowhere to go for the next three hours before the cell door would be opened for Association—that glorious forty-five minutes when prisoners are allowed out of their cell for a stroll around the yard—I picked up my pen, and said, “OK, Max, I’m hooked. So tell me how you came to be sentenced for the wrong crime.”
Max struck a match, lit his hand-rolled cigarette and inhaled deeply before he began. In prison, every action is exaggerated, as no one is in a hurry. I lay on the bunk above and waited patiently.
“Does the Kennington Set mean anything to you?” Max began.
“No,” I replied, assuming he must be referring to a group of red-coated gentlemen on horseback, glass of port in one hand, whip in the other, surrounded by a pack of hounds with intent to spend their Saturday morning in pursuit of a furry animal with a bushy tail. I was wrong. The Kennington Set, as Max went on to explain, was in fact a chess set.
“But no ordinary chess set,” he assured me. I became more interested. The pieces were probably crafted by Lu Ping (1469-1540), a master craftsman of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). All thirty-two ivory pieces were exquisitely carved and then delicately painted in red and white. The details have been faithfully recorded in several historic documents, though it has never been conclusively established exactly how many sets Lu Ping was responsible for