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with rage and as easy for Meatyard to play with as a ball. Soon Gromek, a man who’d had enough of being shit upon by girls, was bringing in women from the ward next door. Used to being treated with kindness in the Priory, these women were trusting and were left unsupervised at night because they were among the milder cases of insanity. Meatyard persuaded Gromek to bring them into his little room knowing he could keep shut the mouths of the patients listening outside. Besides, the patients here were often raving mad and full of stories of the terrors of hell that happenedsolely in their tortured minds. Now Meatyard brought them experience of the real thing. Wherever he went was hell, but in that hell he made a heaven for himself. There was no angry despair involved in being Kevin Meatyard, no torment in his soul acting out revenge against an unkind world. It was bliss: inflicting pain, tormenting of souls, rape. He delighted in being himself.
    At night the lunatics listened to the girls whimpering softly – Meatyard liked a bit of crying but it must be quiet. There was the occasional loud cry of pain, and an answering yelp from a madman in the ward thinking it was the call of his own devils coming at last to drag him down. From time to time Meatyard would pop out to have a smoke, playfully swinging the pebble knotted in his piece of string, and chat to Cale as he lay in his bed, staring at rafters and the black beyond.
    ‘You take it easy,’ said Meatyard to Cale. ‘And if you can’t take it easy, take it anyway you can.’
    It was during one such break, as Kevin Meatyard, having left Gromek in his little room to take his turn with a girl alone, puffed on a snout and gave Cale the benefit of his opinions, that events took an unexpected turn.
    ‘You have to have the right attitude,’ Meatyard was saying to Cale, who was as usual staring up into the void above. ‘You’ve got to make the best of things. There’s no point just lying back and feeling sorry for yourself in life. That’s your problem. You just have to get on with it, like me. If you can’t do that then you’re a non-runner. This world is a pig – but you just have to get on with it, like me, see.’ He did not expect a reply, nor did he get one.
    ‘What do you want, Gibson?’
    This question was addressed to a man in his late forties who had appeared at Meatyard’s shoulder. The man didn’treply but stabbed him in the chest with a blade about ten inches long. Meatyard jerked to one side in agony as Gibson tried to wrench the blade free, snapping it off in Meatyard’s chest in the process. It was a cheap kitchen knife that one of the men in the ward had found rusting away at the back of an old cupboard in the cookhouse. Horrified and astonished, Meatyard fell and in a moment half a dozen lunatics were on top of him and holding him down. Cale, meanwhile, rolled off his bed and away from the fight, shaky and kitten-weak after a recent visit from Nanny Powler and the rest of his devils. He watched as four other men piled into the annexe and dragged Headman Nurse Gromek out into the main body of the ward, his struggles much restricted by the trousers around his ankles from which he was trying to free himself.
    The lunatics had decided to kill Gromek first in order to give Kevin Meatyard a chance to appreciate properly what was to come and to give him a brief taste in this life of what he could expect for all eternity in the next.
    Terror can either make men weak or miraculously strong. Freeing one leg from the trousers around his ankles, Gromek managed to get enough purchase, despite the men holding him, to stagger down the ward and get to the locked door, shouting for help as he went. The lunatic with his arm around Gromek’s neck immediately shifted it to his mouth, stifling his cries enough to make anyone passing think it was just a patient kicking off. As if they were wading upstream in fast water, the five of them lurched down the ward, then two