The Village by Stan Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

England? I sat on the small wooden chair with a dozen thoughts flowing through my mind. Thee was something really sinister in that the police investigation fifteen years ago failed to find anything untoward. Where were all the elderly people who lived in the village? That was another mystery beyond my understanding. I hadn‘t seen one of them since my arrival. And why, according to PC7 had I entered another phase of my detention? What did that mean? I realised that in my present plight I might never know the answers. Worse still, there was a meeting at the village hall that evening of which I was the main item on the agenda. However, as I was incarcerated in a police cell there was no means by which I could attend. It made me quite angry. I mused on a question once put to a celebrity. ‘Would you rather remain out of the limelight or have people talk about you?’. He answered by choosing the latter. I wasn’t sure, at this moment in time, in my humble position in a police cell, that I felt the same way.
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    I sat on the straw mattress for a while ruing my situation before attuning my mind to a means of escape. It was quite possible that by revealing that I knew the pharmacy existed they might throw away the key and keep me there for ever. And only Wayne knew of my existence there. There had to be some way it could be done. Dammit... I had been a soldier and it was up to me to use my initiative! Hell... thirty-nine people had once found a way of escaping from Alcatraz. Admittedly seven were shot dead, three drowned and twenty-six were captured but three of them presumably made it to the mainland and were never heard of again. There was always a means of escape... if only one could fathom it out. I sat quite still with my eyes shut as I tried to work out a plan. Where was the most vulnerable part of the cell? It certainly wasn’t the walls. They were made of granite and impenetrable... even Edmund Dante discovered that in the Chateau d’If in the novel The Count of Monte Christo. The floor was made of similar stone so that was out of the question. Almost certainly there was nothing underneath anyway except earth and rubble which deleted it from consideration unless I wanted the task of making a tunnel which was likely to take some years... and would have been noticeable by the earth piling up inside the cell. In order to wrest away the strong iron bars I would need a horse with a long rope or someone with a tractor to pull them out. There was only one area left in the equation... the ceiling. Why should anyone want to reinforce the ceiling seven feet high in a small cell? I mused on the idea for a short while and then lifted the straw mattress to examine the bed underneath. It was made of long poles of wood, three inches by three inches thick, six feet long, bracketed together and fixed to the wall. The bed was held up by four short stout wooden legs, one at each corner, one foot high. I heaved the bed away from the wall, tearing I away from its brackets. I turned it upside down and stamped on the legs repeatedly until they gave way,, pulling the end pole away from the main frame. Suddenly, I found myself holding a fairly thick piece of wood in my hands by which I could engineer my escape. I moved nearer to the window so that if I managed to make a hole in the ceiling I could use the wall, and the iron bars, to steady myself. My main concern was that of noise. If the thudding of the pole could be heard by the police, they would shortly arrive to prevent me from continuing my actions. However, to my knowledge of the prisons in Basra, they were pretty much sound-proofed so I was practically certain that my luck would hold out. I stood on the chair and started to thrust the pole upwards at the ceiling with all my might. It proved to be the most vulnerable part of the cell for the plaster soon began to rain down on my head as the pole plunged repeatedly upwards. It wasn’t long before I had made a