Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [58]
Think.
The floor. The bed.
Granger examined the bolts fixing the bed to the floor. They had been ground smooth and then welded to their surrounds. He couldn’t free them without tools. He ripped open the mattress with his bare hands, and rifled through its innards. Nothing inside but hair and dust. Useless. He felt his way around the walls, testing the mortar between the stones with his fingers, but he found no weakness. Too much care had gone into building this place. Too much money. He tried to kick the water pipes away from the sink, but they wouldn’t budge. He examined the metal door, hunting for a flaw in the design. The hinges were outside. A floor-level hatch allowed food to be passed through, but even if it had been open he doubted he could have squeezed his arm through.
Hana’s screams continued.
Slowly, slowly.
He was breathing too rapidly. He had to think. He checked the bars in the window. Solid iron. This was one part of the building they hadn’t salvaged from cells below the waterline. He couldn’t bend them without leverage. The ends were buried into holes bored deep in the surrounding stones. No way to prise them loose. He paced the cell, looking closely at everything again. Floor, walls, bars, ceiling. A length of chain hung from a hook at the apex of the room. It must have once have been used to support a lantern, but there was no lantern there now. Granger might be able to reach it by standing on the commode, but he couldn’t see how he could get it loose. Everything looked as tough as anything that could be made by man. No way out without explosives. If old Swinekicker had had the resources, he might have built a prison like this.
But not quite like this. The old man had talked at length about the art of confinement: the escapes, the little oversights that could let your income slip away from you, the changes he’d make to his own place if he only had the money. And now Granger examined his own cell with the same cold cynicism. To look into the room from the corridor outside required the guard to kneel on the floor and peer through that narrow food hatch in the bottom of the door. Wealthy prisoners, it seemed, were granted a peculiar degree of privacy. It was the only flaw Granger could discern. How could he use it to his advantage?
Hana’s cries filled the air.
Granger returned to the torn mattress. He scooped out the rest of the hair stuffing and then set to work tearing the blanket into thin strips. He plaited the strips together until he had fashioned two short lengths of rope, one longer than the other. He tied a knot in the end of the shorter.
Then he stripped to his underwear.
He pushed the legs of his breeches down into his galoshes, then stuffed the breeches full of mattress hair. He chewed holes in the hem of his shirt and used his bootlaces to tie the shirt to the belt loops in his breeches. Then he began packing the shirt too. When he’d emptied the mattress of stuffing, he used the remains the mattress itself and then pieces of blanket, keeping only a fistful of scraps aside. Finally, he slid his whaleskin gloves on to the padded-out arms of his shirt and stood back to inspect his creation. He had made a mannequin, a stuffed figure dressed in his own clothes. It wouldn’t suffer a close inspection, but it didn’t have to. He didn’t even bother to furnish it with a head.
Granger climbed up onto the cistern, from where he could just reach the lantern chain hanging from the ceiling. He fed the longer of his two makeshift ropes through the bottom link, until it snagged on the knot at its end. He gave it a gentle tug. It held well enough. He hopped down again, then hoisted up the mannequin and tied it to the rope.
From the food hatch at the bottom of the door, one could see a pair of boots dangling before the window.