This was Mrs Lilton, Danny assumed. She looked puzzled to see a uniform at her door. ‘What d’you want?’ she asked sharply. ‘No one’s called the police, have they?’
Danny shook her head. ‘I’m here on another matter… but are you all right? Do you need some help?’
The woman stared disgustedly at Danny. ‘Yeah, I’m okay — no thanks to you lot. As if you care.’ Her breath reeked of alcohol fumes. ‘You’ve never cared yet, have you? So what d’you want?’
‘ To see Joe Lilton, please.’
‘ Why? Won’t it wait?’
‘ Not unless he doesn’t want to get a firearms certificate.’ As she finished the sentence, Joe Lilton appeared behind the woman.
‘ Come in, come in,’ he said graciously to Danny. ‘There’s nothing going on here but a little family disagreement.’ He looked at Danny and their eyes locked ever so briefly and he knew she knew he was lying to his back teeth.
Danny remembered that face well, now, fifteen years later. Those pinched, mean features, now fleshed out by ageing.
At the door of the house in Osbaldeston, he had placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders. She had juddered visibly at the touch. ‘Come on,’ he said gently to her. To Danny he stated, ‘A misunderstanding, that’s all.’
Yeah, no mistaking it, Danny thought, closing her pocket-book.
It was the same Joe Lilton who was now Claire Lilton’s stepfather.
What a small world.
‘ Oh, fucking hell, he’s bleeding like a stuck pig, for God’s sake!’ the young, blood-covered prison officer screamed to the paramedics. ‘And he’s got internal bleeding too, for some reason,’ he blabbered. ‘Christ!’ he mouthed. ‘The bastard puked a whole gob-full all over me!’
The young man looked down his chest. He retched at the sight of the thick red globules all down the front of his uniform shirt which had once been white.
‘ God, I’ve never seen anything so foul. Taken a load of pills too.’
He was blithering these words to the green-jacketed paramedics whilst they stretchered the supposedly dying Trent expertly through the twists and turns of the prison, along walkways, down steep stairwells.
Finally they emerged at the yard behind the front gates of the prison where three ambulances, a couple of fire tenders and two cop cars were drawn up.
Trent was dumped in the back of the nearest ambulance.
Having listened to the screw babbling on, Trent was having difficulty keeping a straight face. He desperately needed to belly laugh, sit up and say, ‘Fooled you, you stupid set of cunts.’
Instead he continued to play the part of someone who has just tried to end his own life with a concoction of drugs and the old opening-of-veins ceremony.
When he heard the ambulance doors clunk shut, he was satisfied. Then more so when he experienced the forwards motion of the vehicle. Then orgasmically so, when through his rolling eyes, he saw the blue lights begin to flash and rotate.
He was on his way to freedom.
It had worked perfectly.
The prison officers, as Trent had rightly predicted, had reacted to the crisis like a bunch of headless chickens, running around the prison, not knowing whether they were coming or going. The fire in Blake’s cell, the discovery of the four bodies — two burnt-out in the cell, one knifed to death in the adjacent cell and the other toasted alive whilst suspended above an audience — had thrown them into utter confusion. No one seemed able to take control of the situation. Having a suicide attempt thrown in on top of all that was the last straw.
When they had seen how bad he was, Trent was certain they would not mess about by transferring him to the woefully inadequate medical wing. It did not have the staff or facilities to deal with someone who had tried to shred his arms and taken such a lethal dose of junk he was bleeding internally and puking blood.
He knew their reaction would be to get him out of the way, cart him off to the nearest Casualty unit.
Which is exactly what they did. And to speed things up in the chaos, they cut corners. Obviously they could not handcuff Trent because of his injured arms, but nor did they search him. They seemed happy to believe that the small penknife they found next to the bed was the one with which he had mutilated himself.
An absolute dream.
Having said that, the task of keeping a mouthful of pig’s blood ready to cough out onto a screw had created a few trying moments. That had been a case of mind over matter. It was a good job the screw had raced into the cell when he did (urged by Vic Wallwork, playing his part in the scenario), because Trent was about to puke anyway.
And now he was in the rear of the ambulance.
He moaned. He groaned. He writhed and twisted his body in agony, ensuring they could not quite find his pulse or clamp an oxygen mask on him or stick a tube up his arm.
‘ OOOARH — urgh,’ he uttered with deep pain, loving every moment of it.
‘ Come on, pal, keep still, you’ll be okay,’ the paramedic fussed caringly and tried to clean him up.
Less than thirty seconds later the ambulance had negotiated its way through the narrow prison gates, accelerating away smoothly, then screeching around a roundabout onto a dual carriageway.
The prison officer who had been tasked to remain with Trent — the one covered in pig’s blood — looked on with an expression of worry and repulsion. Over the paramedic’s shoulders he said, ‘I hope the bastard’s not got HIV, with all this fucking blood over me. He’s an arse bandit, you know.’
The paramedic put him straight immediately. ‘If you’ve had unprotected sex with this man and drunk a pint of his blood, you might have cause for concern. If not, don’t worry.’
Trent continued to squirm realistically, feeling the need to put more distance between himself and the prison before he took matters to their logical conclusion.
When he judged the moment right, he suddenly sat up with a scream as though a great pain had burned through his abdomen. He reached behind himself, his hand went underneath his shirt and his fingers closed on the hilt of the knife fastened to his spine with a couple of Band Aids.
He ripped the instrument from its moorings.
The paramedic, surprised by the sudden sitting up, stepped back. The roll of the ambulance unbalanced him slightly.
Without hesitation, Trent drove the knife into the unfortunate man’s neck. The razor-sharp blade pierced the jugular vein as Trent dug it in and rived it round and round. He withdrew the blade as the man screamed dreadfully and a glorious crimson fountain flowered into the air, splattering the inside of the ambulance with deep red swathes of blood. The paramedic’s hands reached instinctively for his neck to try and stop the flow.
Trent grabbed the man’s overalls at the chest and threw him sideways. Then he jumped to his feet and leapt across the small space at the prison officer. That man’s senses had not been capable, in those brief seconds, of taking in what had just happened to the paramedic.
Trent was on the officer, yelling, ‘I’m not an arse bandit, I’m a fucking paedophile, you pig-bastard.’
He plunged the knife into the officer’s right eye which burst with a pop as the blade entered the pupil, its watery contents spurting out. Trent pushed the blade further in, right up to the hilt, angled it upwards into the brain, killing him the instant the soft tissue was pierced.
Trent held the knife in there, grinding it round. The dead man’s jangled nerves reacted by making him dance like someone possessed by the devil. Then Trent extracted it as the man’s legs gave way.
Trent slid casually next to the ambulance driver, reached for the radio and ripped the handset out. He leaned across to the driver who had not even realised what was going on and pushed the point of the knife into his neck. A trickle of blood popped out from the prick.
‘ Taxi,’ Trent said with a smile.