Hell Is Too Crowded - Jack Higgins [8]
Why me? he asked himself. Why me? But there was no answer, could be no answer until he got out of this place and found one. He turned his face to the wall, hitched a blanket over his shoulders and drifted into a troubled sleep.
The days that followed merged into a pattern. Each morning after breakfast, fifty men paraded for the chief officer in the main yard and were allocated their work for the day. The main fabric of the building was already in an advanced state of construction, but there was still a considerable amount of work to do on the steel framework of the fourth storey.
Evans had been working as a welder and riveter up there and Brady was placed in his charge. After seeing the skill with which the American handled a blow torch, the old man sat back and let him get on with it.
"By God, son," he said. "What I could teach you to do with that torch is nobody's business. You're a natural."
Brady grinned and pushed his goggles up from his eyes. "You're incorrigible, you old hellion. You'll come to a bad end yet."
Evans gave him a cigarette and they crouched down in a corner between crossed girders and looked out over the town. It was a crisp autumn day, the air tinged with a hint of the winter to come. Beyond the gaunt chimneys of the grimy Yorkshire industrial town, the moors lifted in a purple swell, fading almost inperceptibly into the horizon.
"By God, it's good to be alive on a day like this," Evans said. "Even in here."
Brady nodded and glanced briefly down into the main yard below, watching the men working on the brick pile below with the duty screws hovering near by. There could be no illusion of freedom there, not with those dark uniforms standing out so clearly.
He looked across at the glass dome of the central tower and his eyes followed the fall pipe that dropped forty feet to the roof of D block. The block branched out from the central tower like a pointing finger, and stopped thirty or forty feet from the perimeter wall. He sighed and flicked his cigarette end out into space. A man would need wings to get out of this place.
Evans chuckled. "I know what you're thinking, son, but it just isn't possible. You're in a privileged position because it's all spread beneath you like a map. If you can find a way out, I can get you five hundred quid for the information any time."
"Maybe I'll hold you to that" Brady picked up his torch. "Let's get back to work."
For the next two weeks he kept his thoughts to himself, but each day, working high on the extension, he used his eyes until finally, every detail of the prison buildings was imprinted on his brain. It would take careful planning, but already there was the glimmering of an idea at the back of his mind.
Just before noon on Thursday, a duty officer called him down and told him he had a visitor. As he waited in the queue outside the visiting room, Brady wondered who it could be. He had no friends in England and both his parents were dead. There was only his sister in Boston, and she had been over already for the trial.
When his turn came, the duty officer took him in and sat him in a cubicle. Brady waited impatiently, the conversation on either side a meaningless blur of sound, and then the door opened and a young girl came in.
She was perhaps twenty, her dark hair closecropped like a young boy, the skin sallow over high cheekbones, the eyes dark brown. She was not beautiful, and yet in any crowd, she would have stood out.
She sat down hesitantly, looking rather unsure of herself. "Mr. Brady, you won't know me. My name is Anne Dunning."
Brady frowned. "I'm afraid I don't understand."
"You knew my father, Harry Dunning," she said. "I believe you worked together on the Zembe Dam in Brazil."
Brady's eyes widened and he leaned forward. "So you're Harry Dunning's daughter. How is he? I haven't heard from him since we parted company in New York after finishing the Zembe job. Didn't he go to Guatemala?"
She nodded, hands twisting her purse nervously. "He's dead,