Freezer

If we'd 'ad just anuvver day - I tell a lie - what I actually mean
is anuvver night, the soddin' corpse would never have turned up found,
and nobody would ever have sussed a bloody thing. It was the most
incredible bad luck you can imagine. Not a single one of the screws had
bothered to drag their arse into that freezer room for bloody months;
then what happens? I'll tell you what happens. The one time it ever
shelters what you might call a foreign body - bazoom! - it's the
bleedin' Myrmidian hordes in cheap blue suits, and all of a sudden me
and Gibbsy are being invited to help the authorities with their
enquiries.
Well, of course, I should never have been in stir in the first place -
but that's a whole nother kettle of snakes. Anyways; seeing as how that
was where I'd landed up on account of that lying swine Nick Pearson, I
made use of what few connections I had, to get a cushy job in the
prison kitchens. Well, I ask you, who wouldn't. So I am well chuffed to
be working alongside Gibbsy, who is a master butcher and is in here
till income tax is abolished. Funny thing; they don't seem to worry
about him using all these knives and stuff - even though he's in here
on account of using them in more than one profession in the past.
Anyways, after I'm here about six months Gibbsy trusts me enough to let
me in on the big secret. There's this hidden private door in the back
wall of the freezer room. You'd never twig it was there if you didn't
know. It opens into a tiny alley off of a back street, where it looks
like a boarded-up window. See, it was Gibbsy's brother-in-law that was
the foreman when the new prison kitchen block got built. Enough said,
Right? So there's me on the dead exclusive roster that gives me a
sports afternoon out in the real world once a week.
I dunno about the other blokes (Gibbsy himself never goes out), but
what I generally do is, I go a couple of streets away, where I can
cement my relationship with this chick I know called Sylvie. I keep
some proper clobber at her bedsit, so we can nip out for the odd donner
kebab when my palette gets, you know, jaded like, from the prison
grub.
Well, after a few months of this, I get to thinking; there must be a
more, like, creative way to use this dead unique asset of ours. As a
for instance, what about we slip out three-handed at night and, say,
turn over a post office, and we're back in stir before the Old Bill
knows what's happened. The perfect alibi - i'nnit - and bang in tune
with today's enterprise society. Okay, it's maybe a bit complicated -
an idea ahead of its time, so I relegate it to the back burner for the
time being.
It's then I have my brainwave - a real money-spinner, and not in itself
criminal as such; well, not as criminal as robbing a post office, or
grievous bodily on a night watchman. I could have myself a nice lttle
earner, and at the same time do wonders for morale among all the lads
banged up in here.
Anyway, I go ahead and set up the whole thing; Sylvie's got some useful
contacts, so she does the actual booking of the act. Then on the
appointed day we let the stripper in the secret door, and get her set
up in the freezer room. I have to admit I was hoping for something
better. This Miranda is supposed to be some dead brilliant tassel
twirler, but I reckon if she had a supermarket label that said 'Best
before - ', the date on it would be sometime in the early
nineteen-eighties. All the same, she manages to look just a touch
better than the sides of beef hanging from the hooks - and the blokes
in here aren't in any position to be fussy.
This Miranda chick is getting paid twice her usual rate to dance and
strip to Radio 1 on my transister all afternoon in the freezer room.
I'm in pole position at the door trousering the audience's tenners and
letting them in two at a time for a strict five minutes.
All goes well for an hour or so, and then one of the blokes comes out
demanding his money back, or else. He says as how the stripper has gone
a funny shade of blue, and her current pose has completely failed to
turn him on. When I go in, she's just lying there, tassels like ice
lollies, and we cannot help but arrive at the conclusion that the old
slapper has snuffed it.
Who could have known that the local Public Health Inspector would pick
on that very day to insist on checking out our food storage
arrangements?
Now I can hear the boots clomping down the corridor towards my cell.
What the hell am I going to tell them?