All the Way

Chapter 1

First, you hear the clanking of boots, climbing metal stairs. Rising in volume as they march along the landing’s stone floor. The men behind the doors were never sure if it was their turn. Today, it was Danny King’s turn.

The two-inch Judas hole was pushed aside. Seconds passed before the bolt was drawn back; the lock released. Hinges screeched as the iron door was thrown open. A body of dark uniforms framed the doorway. At the front stands PO Willis. White shirtsleeves rolled up, arms folded above a bulky midriff. He towered above Danny, who was a fag paper shy of six foot.

‘You’ve got thirty minutes to get your kit packed and slop out.’ The words sprang from the slash in a flushed face that made Willis appear permanently angry. Danny smiled that smile of his, nodded, and reached under the bed for his shoes. He was being shanghaied. He wasn’t happy about it. But he’d conform. He had to. There was too much to lose now. You don’t argue with robots under orders. That was a hard lesson to learn, but after eight years away; one he had to accept. Show them nothing—smile and start packing.

One hour later Danny was waiting in a rectangular, gravel-strewn area outside reception. A green Ford Transit with darkened windows was waiting, engine purring, in front of a pair of steel mesh security gates. The late spring sun was midway in its ascent across a clear blue sky. Bird song shrilled across the treetops of the surrounding forest: Past the razor-wired perimeter fence, past the security cameras, and over the imposing external walls of HMP Parkhurst.

A thickset screw, that formed one of the two escorts and a driver, searched Danny’s kit and rubbed him down.

‘Hands out.’

Danny held out his hands, ready to be cuffed. The veins in his muscular arms standing out like blue rivers as the second officer applied the ratchets, tugging to check they were locked. Prisoner and escort boarded the Transit. They exchanged no words. They didn’t seem hostile. Danny was grateful for that. The question he needed answering was: what jail did they come from? But he decided not to ask.

The Transit taxied through the grounds, past several low outbuildings, on towards the Gate Lodge. The heavy wooden gates that separated one world from another edged back slowly on time-worn hinges. HMP Parkhurst was a decaying, dumping ground. A concentration of the worst rebels culled from the entire British prison system. A dangerous, hostile, and unforgiving world. Danny had spent seven years behind the door here. As the Transit shifted gear and drove through the gate, Danny looked over his shoulder. He’d learnt much behind those walls. Endured even more. He’d entered as a boy. Now he was leaving as a man.

The Transit turned onto the road to Ryde until it stopped at a set of traffic lights. A coach laden with holidaymakers edged slowly past on the opposite side of the road. Necks craned, attempting to see beyond the opaque windows of the Transit. Fingers pointed. Danny looked away; shrinking back against the cold, black vinyl of his seat.

Today was Spring Bank Holiday Monday, 1968. An odd thought struck him as they motored along the quiet Isle of Wight roads. Perhaps we were off on an outing? A jolly up? Paddling down at the beach with our trouser legs rolled up. Knotted hankies on our heads to ward off the sun. Maybe a fish and chip dinner? A plate of whelks or jellied eels? A few pints, a singsong around the piano, and then back to the nick in time for cocoa. Danny grinned. His escort yanked on the handcuffs; biting into Danny’s wrist.

‘What’s so fucking funny then?’

‘Nothing. Nothing’s funny.’

The Transit drove past downland veined by the boots of countless ramblers, past tall hedges hiding lush pastures until they arrived at Fishbourne ferry terminal. As they waited to board the ferry, Danny noticed a pretty auburn-haired girl wearing crème shorts and a purple blouse. Her arm was linked through the arm of a sandy-haired lad of Danny’s age, wearing a white open-necked shirt, slacks and sandals. Just behind them trailed a girl of about three in a floral print dress, clutching a fluffy teddy bear. The couple stopped to wait for the girl to catch up. When she was alongside them the lad scooped her up in both arms sitting her on the ferry’s handrail. The sea breeze ruffled her straw-coloured hair. He spoke a few words into her ear and pointed out to sea. She chuckled. The Transit rolled on board. Danny switched his gaze to the back of his escorts’ heads.

There was to be no refreshing walk on the deck in the company of the returning holidaymakers. All four remained locked inside the Transit in the dark belly of the hold, listening to the steady thud, thud, thud of the ferry’s screw, until they reached the terminal at Portsmouth. Disembarking, the transit navigated its way through Portsmouth’s bustling streets until they reached the start of the A3: The main route to London.

Two hours later, after a meal and toilet break, they stopped at a set of traffic lights at Roehampton. Straight ahead led to Putney and HMP Wandsworth. A bang-up nick and one feared amongst cons for its uncompromising staff and the toughness of its regime. To the left was the route to the M1 motorway and the northern jails. When the Transit turned left, Danny’s heart beat a little faster. Ahead lay his manor and a thousand memories: good and bad. They rumbled across Hammersmith Bridge, over the murky, grey flow of the Thames. He shuddered. The escort threw him a quizzical look. Danny stared straight ahead.

Turning into Shepherd’s Bush Road, they eased down in traffic outside the Hammersmith Palais. The billboard confirmed that Joe Loss and his Orchestra were still playing. Accompanied by his brother Dead Loss was Johnny Boy’s stock jibe. The Market Boys always gathered up on the balcony close to the bars. All Brylcreem, drapes, drainpipes and brothel creepers. With one eye on the birds jiving below and the other on the lookout for rivals. The Transit moved on. On the right, Sam the Barber’s red stripy pole wasn’t revolving, and the front of the shop needed painting. Sam was probably feeling the pinch, Danny guessed. Five minutes back in the Bush and it was obvious that long hair had long since replaced the rockabilly quiff and a DA at the back.

The Bush Hotel came in to view as they approached Shepherd’s Bush Green. A notorious, rare up boozer. On Friday and Saturday nights, there was constant foot traffic back and forth from the Green as Irish navvies sorted out their grievances: real and imagined. Next to the Empire Theatre was The Essoldo; better known as The Fleapit to the locals. Within spitting distance stood the Gaumont. Every Sunday at 4 pm you had to be seen outside — not in the queue. It was compulsory.

White City dog track loomed ahead. Every Thursday and Saturday nights, the streets around here buzzed. First with optimism. Later, with cynicism. Five hundred yards on was a set of traffic lights showing red. A crossroads. Ahead was the route to the northern nicks. Danny tensed. The escort eyed him. To the left, two minutes up the road was HMP Wormwood Scrubs. The lights turned green. They turned left. Danny was pleased, but it set him thinking. Seven years prior to being shanghaied to Parkhurst, the Scrubs had been a dangerous jail for him. He had good reason to believe it could be again.

Chapter 2

The 2nd-floor room was in a grey stone tenement in a quiet avenue off the Rue Racine. On the floor was a telephone which started to ring summoning Emma from the shared bathroom along the hallway. She threw on her bathrobe, sidestepped her neighbour’s bicycle in the narrow hallway, lifted the receiver, drew back a strand of shoulder-length auburn hair, and placed it to her ear.

‘Yes?’

‘You know who this is?’

‘It’s Berndt, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Meet me in 20 minutes at the Café.’ He hung up.

Emma went to the chest of drawers, pulled open the bottom drawer, pushed aside her passport and a sheaf of papers until she found an unopened packet of Gauloises and a book of matches. She lit up and wondered, how the hell did Berndt get my phone number? Inhaling deeply, she blew out a plume of blue smoke.

A duvet like a massive marshmallow was hunched up in the middle of her single bed. Jules, a fellow student at The Sorbonne’s fine arts faculty, had thrown the bed’s brass headboard out of the window three weeks ago. He’d cursed loudly when he’d missed a squad of the CRS assembling below for a baton charge. Officers of the Sûreté’s Tactical Squad had detained and questioned Emma the following day. They arrested Jules on the “night of barricades” along with 500 others. Over two weeks since and still no word.

A slew of canvasses was propped between a Philips record player laden with LP’s and the chest of drawers. Its veneer had unravelled long before Emma had made Room Six her home. Sketchbooks, novels and textbooks were neatly stacked against the wall that housed the wardrobe. In the far corner, a stone sink big enough to bathe an infant in topped a cupboard laden with a variety of glasses, plates and cutlery. Compliments of Emile at the Café Latin where Emma worked: whenever she needed money. A large threadbare rug, small table, two chairs, and a reupholstered chaise longue filled the rest of the room.

Beside the front door spread across the rest of the far wall was a banner made from a double bed-sheet nailed to two wooden spars. Although crumpled and stained you could still read its message daubed in red paint: “Ensemble: Etudiants, Travailleurs” (All Together: Students, Workers), and beneath, “Le Même Problème, La Même Lutte” (The Same Problem—the Same Struggle). Emma had carried the banner, alongside Sylvie, on every march through Paris’s 5th arrondissement. Inside the Sorbonne’s Amphitheatre when Jean-Paul Sartre addressed the students. And astride the barricades in the Latin Quarter. For her and her fellow Situationists, those words captured the essence of the revolt.

Normally, it was a 10-minute walk to the Café Latin, but these times were not normal. She inhaled deeply from the Gauloise, changed out of her bathrobe into an old sweater, a washed-out pair of blue jeans, and hurried down the tenement’s stone stairs.

It had rained earlier in the day, a typical spring downpour, which peppered the trees with green. Usually, there would have been a feeling of warmth, of promise, that arrives in May in the Rue Racine. The last of the windswept leaves from the linden trees of the Saint-Michel Boulevard would still have been in evidence. As would the wafting aroma of percolated coffee flirting with your nostrils from nearby cafes. Today the Rue Racine was eerily empty. Emma tasted the change as if being made to suck on a rancid lemon. The CRS, the anti-riot police, had resorted to using chlorine in their tear gas, and the residual vinegar-like stench of it filled the Latin Quarter. The blue pall of the tear gas had dispersed. But the aftermath of the past week struck Emma like the blow from a truncheon as soon as she stepped out of the door of the tenement.

In a few short days, an awoken giant pitting itself against the forces of the French state had transformed the 5th arrondissement. The battleground was the Latin Quarters’ winding streets, normally packed with students, tourists and locals enjoying the mix of restaurants and cafés. They were still open for business, albeit viewed through smashed windows and broken doors. The narrow streets were strewn with smouldering vehicles, overturned cars, and buses with slashed tyres. Repeating past histories the students erected barricades of doors, fences, railings, tables, chairs, anything that could create a barrier was deployed to force back the repeated baton charges of the CRS.

Emma pictured a recurrent scene from past nights in the cinema of her mind as she hurried towards the Café Latin in the Rue Cujas: The peaks of the CRS’s helmets and the dull blackness of their mackintoshes shimmering beneath the arc of the Rue Racine’s street lights as they waited for their orders. People on the upper floors of apartment houses on both sides of the street threw flower pots, stones and anything else that came to hand on to the police massing below. Oblivious to this barrage, the men of the CRS pulled down their goggles to cover their eyes, adjusted their chinstraps, tightened their grip on long nightsticks, checked their tear gas grenades. The command was issued from the rear. Shields were raised from the ground. A unified bellowing erupted from within their ranks; like the roar of an angry beast. Then, they moved forward. In columns like giant black centipedes marching towards the barricades, down through the tree-lined boulevards, onward toward The Sorbonne. Against the riot shields, batons, tear gas and water cannons, the students fought back with torn up cobblestones, lumps of tarmac, paving stones and finally Molotov cocktails. The slogan CRS=SS was daubed on walls throughout the 5th arrondissement. The CRS’s task was to put the giant back to sleep.

The walls of the entire city had become the visual crystallisation of Paris’ opinions, beliefs, strategies, news, calls to unite, calls to demonstrate, appeals for the whereabouts of lost ones, and the veneration of martyrs. Pointedly depicted in images, posters, banners and poems. Ahead lay the stately Sorbonne with its imposing, pale grey stone neo-Renaissance facades which collided with the actuality that it was now the spearhead and epicentre of the revolt. Fluttering from its roof was the red flag. Along the length of the Rue des Écoles were the conflicting banners and ideologies of the competing Trotskyist groups, the Maoists, the Leninists and the black flags of the Anarchist Federation.

Emma skipped across puddles of petrol that formed beneath abandoned cars running the length of the Rue des Écoles gutters. In front of her was a throng of students deep in conversation. Several were gesticulating wildly, others shaking their heads. A few had transistor radios clutched to their ear, trying to listen over the clamour. Emma recognised Anton at the edges of the crowd who had several copies of L’Avant Garde Jeunesses, the mouthpiece for the Trotskyist JCR, underneath one arm. She beckoned him over.

‘What’s going on?’

‘De-Gaulle has run away.’ He beamed. ‘Disappeared.’

Emma eyed several students slapping each other’s backs and shaking hands. ‘So what? You think we have won?’

‘Ten million on strike, the refineries shut,’ he flashed a sardonic smile. ‘No metro, no railways, and you ask that?’

For a moment she didn’t know whether to reply or just carry on walking. Calmly she said, ‘He’ll do a deal. They always do. We haven’t won because capitalism is the problem, not De Gaulle.

‘De Gaulle is just the start.’ He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, brushing the underside of his chin. ‘Like this, we will rid France of—’ he narrowed his eyes, shaping his next words specifically for Emma, ‘all bourgeois scum.’

Emma could feel the bile in her stomach rising. She glared at him. Her pale green eyes forcing him back a step. ‘Does that apply to your parents; the industrialists—as well?’ Anton’s face reddened. For once, Emma resisted the urge to pursue the argument. Instead, she carried on towards the Café Latin.

The interior of the café reflected the eclectic mix of people that frequented it. The walls were decorated with a pastiche of artwork donated and borrowed from its customers and a variety of previous owners. Colourful was the word that came to tourists’ lips when they opened the door that now hung uneasily on its hinges. The smell of liquorice was rife on the breaths of the customers as many Anisette drinkers frequented the Café Latin. Blue smoke arose from the tables mushrooming above the patrons’ heads like misty wreaths.

Emma spotted Bernd. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket with leather patches at the elbow, a striped shirt and a black tie. He looked completely out of place in the café aside from his fair hair, which reached beyond his shoulders. Emma waved hesitantly, then edged her way past five tables to reach him in the far corner of the café. His chair was pushed tight against the wall, giving him a view of the entire café. He motioned her to sit down akin to an Indian Maharajah instead of a German student studying English.

‘I think we have a problem, Emma’ he began as soon as she sat down. Emma looked at him quizzically. She barely knew him. A friend of Max’s. She felt irritated by him. So high and mighty who does he think he is?

‘When did you last see Max?’ He stirred his coffee, deliberately scraping the spoon against the bottom of the cup, it seemed to Emma.

‘Why are you asking this? And what is this all about, anyway? What’s the mystery? And how did you get my telephone number?’ She felt herself becoming heated.

‘Max is dead.’

‘What!’ She said it so loud that everyone’s head turned towards them.

‘Shut up and listen. And lower your voice.’ His words were said with such venom. So belying his age. That she did what he said.

‘He was killed by the police four days ago. Shot dead. You didn’t know?’

‘No . . . I’ She felt like she should cry. Do something, but she just stared blankly at Bernd’s sombre looking face.

‘You don’t seem very upset to have lost your boyfriend.’ She interrupted him with a furious shake of her head.