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For this reason, officers were supposed to keep their keys concealed at all times. In reality, unlocking a door, putting the keys in the pouch, walking ten feet, and having to take them out again to unlock a second door was not conducive to following the rules.

Officer Finlay didn’t follow the rules. Arnold supposed that in his small, fat way, Finlay considered himself above petty rules, just like he did. Except, of course, when Finlay broke the rules it meant playing fast and loose with a bunch of keys. When he broke the rules, it meant choking the life out of a helpless child.

Everything was relative.

Arnold noticed now that Officer Finlay did not even like his keys banging against his not inconsiderable hip. Instead he liked to un-clip them from his belt entirely and twirl them on his fingers as he jingled up and down the echoing hallways. As Officer Finlay was the antithesis of athleticism and hand-eye coordination, sometimes he dropped them and, when he did, he took a shuffling age to pick them up—sighing and creaking down to the floor and back up again. Once upright, he’d blink dizzily for a few seconds as if the effort of bending double had knocked all the orientation out of him.

Avery watched him. Watched him come onto the block; watched him go out; watched the keys that he chose from the bulky ring to do those things with. The key onto the block was long and old-fashioned. Simplistic, almost. The keys he used to unlock the cells were Yales. That was harder. Apart from the Yales and the block key, Avery counted seven other keys on Finlay’s ring. He didn’t know what they opened but he had the feeling that seven keys would be more than enough to get an enterprising man out to the wall, or very close to it.

Avery was not fool enough to think he could just pick up the keys and let himself out of the prison, but it was something he mulled over; it was information catalogued.

The walls of Longmoor prison—at a mere twelve feet—were the lowest in the country. However, any man who managed to get through the fence, scale the wall, and avoid breaking both ankles on the other side was faced with a far tougher obstacle: Dartmoor itself.

For over a century, the prison authorities had relied on the spacious confines of the moor to keep prisoners inside. On the few occasions escapes had been made, prison officers only bothered patrolling the roads, confident that they offered the sole realistic route to freedom. Prisoners who struck out across Dartmoor were doomed to suffer the vagaries of the moor’s own brand of captivity—a malicious and unpredictable microclimate. Even in midyear, if the heatstroke didn’t exhaust absconders on the treeless landscape, the weather could perform a spectacular U-turn and send a blanket of damp, cold mist down on them within minutes, chilling their bones as they stumbled blindly off house-sized granite boulders, through slippery rills, and into sudden, gripping bogs that tempted the unwary with mirages of wiry grass growing almost hydroponically across their surfaces.

The moor was almost always the winner in the game of escape.

Now, with prisoner numbers rocketing and a nosey public’s demand for efficiency, a sturdy chain-link fence had been erected fifteen feet inside the perimeter stone wall. This was still only twelve feet high, but had the added deterrent of rolls of razor wire on top. There were four locked gates in the chain-link fence, as if there was a need to pop through and retrieve an errant football or something.

The wall alone would have been enticing. The wall and the chain-link and the razor wire were a daunting prospect.

Even so, Avery softened a bar of soap in warm water and kept it in his pocket at all times, suffering the scummy residue it left in his jeans by repeatedly telling himself that soap could not be dirty; it was the antithesis of dirty—the embodiment of clean—and that therefore he could and should and must bear the constant greasy weight of it on his person. What he would do if he ever managed to press a key into the soap, he wasn’t quite sure. He would cross that bridge if he came to it and felt something useful lay on the other side.

Avery also considered the walls of his cell. They were made of blocks but the mortar between the blocks was naturally vulnerable. The enemy of escape through the walls was time, of which he had too little, and light, of which he had too much. Although his cell was gloomier than most because of the board at the window, the electric lights went on at 6:30 A.M. and stayed on until 10:30 P.M. Avery started scraping at the mortar around a stone under his bunk at about 11 P.M., using the handle of his toothbrush.

Three hours later he had made a vague indentation in the mortar and a very sharp toothbrush. He gave up on the wall, but kept the toothbrush under his pillow. This was prison and nothing was to be wasted.