by Conrad Jones
Constable Davis munched on salt and vinegar crisps and bit the first two inches from a Yorkie bar as the lift carried him back to the fourth floor. He slurped some of the hot liquid that was masquerading as white tea with sugar, and although it tasted like dishwater it was welcome. When he arrived, the corridor was empty, and the prospect of spending the next few hours reading the newspaper and munching on confectionery did not seem too bad any more. Things were looking much brighter until he opened the door to Jack’s room.
“Oh my God.” He spat a mouthful of potato snacks and tea across the room. The bed was empty and there was blood spattered on the floor. It made a narrow fan pattern up the wall and across the ceiling. A pair of shiny handcuffs was dangling from the bed frame, which he couldn’t understand as the bracelets were still closed at either end. He put the tea down on the floor and scanned the room for clues. There was precious little to see with the naked eye; forensic tests would obviously tell a more detailed story. He followed the blood spatter from the ceiling down to the skirting boards. Then he noticed a bloody lump of flesh on the floor, beneath the bed. Closer inspection revealed it was a human thumb, and it answered the question of how did Jack Howarth, the ‘child taker’ escape the handcuffs without opening them. Easily – either he or someone else sliced off his thumb at the root, allowing the bracelet to slip over the hand unhampered. Constable Davis pulled the Glock 23 from his holster and followed droplets of blood down the corridor.
Chapter Twenty-four
Warrington Police Station
Tank felt the vibration from the second explosion and instinctively sank lower in his seat. The ground floor windows at the front of the old police station were blown in, and flames from the exploded vehicles were flicking at the ceilings and walls inside. Thick black smoke was flooding through the shattered windows, filling the building with choking toxic fumes. A furtive figure ran across the car park to the left hand side, and darted down an alleyway. Tank couldn’t make out whether they were male or female, white or black, because it was too dark and they were hooded.
“What do you think?” Grace said watching the police station intensely.
“I think that someone is using diversionary tactics, do you?” Tank replied.
“That’s what I’m thinking. Too much of a coincidence to be anything else.” Grace took a small set of night sights from the glove box and scanned the area.
“You keep your eyes open here. I’m going to see why our hooded friend is running away down that alleyway.” Tank opened the door and sprinted down the road which ran parallel to the dark passageway. The road was well lit and on the left, set back, was an arts centre with a high glass foyer. A number of people had come outside to see what was happening at the police station. To his right was a row of terraced houses, and Tank assumed that the alleyway ran behind them towards the town centre. He kept his weapon holstered as he ran between the houses and a never-ending line of parked cars. The sound of sirens wailing drifted on the night air. The fire brigade were obviously en route. Fifty yards further on there was a gap between the terraces, and Tank stepped into the darkness and listened. He could hear heavy footsteps echoing from the alleyway and the sound of laboured breathing, but the runner was ahead of him further down the alleyway. Tank pushed his body away from the wall and sprinted along the pavement, nearly flattening a courting couple as he dashed past them.
“Hey, watch it!” The man shouted after him.
Tank ignored the warning and carried on towards the next break in the houses. A hundred yards on, he was panting for breath when he turned into the alleyway. He thought that he’d missed his target: maybe he’d been quicker or maybe there had been another access road for the runner to escape down, but then he heard footsteps approaching. The runner was walking now, either too tired to keep running or thinking that they’d put enough distance between themselves and the police station. Tank walked quietly to the back entry, and waited in the darkness for the fugitive to appear.
“Why were you running away?” Tank stepped out of the shadows and blocked his path.
“What?” The runner was a young white man, maybe late teens or early twenties. He had a hooded sports top on, black tracksuit trousers and dirty white trainers. Tank saw that his eyes were glazed and slow to react. “I’m not running away from anything, man.”
“Take the hood off and show me some identification.” Tank flashed his ID card and stepped closer to the youngster.
“Fuck you, man.” The runner tried to step past Tank but a huge strong arm slammed into his chest, stunning him. Tank pushed the hood off the man’s head and grabbed his face in his hand. There were spots and scabs around his mouth and his teeth were blackened and broken.
“Are you using crystal meth?” Tank pushed him against the wall.
“No way, man.” He tried to look offended but his eyes had a mind of their own.
“If I arrest you now, it will be twenty-four hours at least before you’re processed. Do you think that you can stay clean that long without really hurting?” Tank searched his pockets as he spoke.
“I didn’t do anything,” he whined. Tank pulled a Zippo lighter from one of his pockets, and five crisp twenty-pound notes from the other.
“You’ve got one chance to tell me who gave you this money and this lighter,” Tank waved them in his face.
“They’re mine, give them back.” he grabbed at them weakly.
“If they were yours, then you’d have already smoked this money, and swapped the lighter for more drugs. One last time, who gave you the money?”
“Fuck you!”
Tank brought his right hand up sharply and hit him across the face with the back of his hand. The runner’s legs buckled at the knees. Tank grabbed him by the back of the neck, and he twisted the hood around his fist, before lifting the youth from the floor completely. He dangled in mid air and his legs kicked uselessly. His face turned purple and his eyes began to bulge from his head as he choked. Tank brought him level with his own face.
“Do you want to tell me where you got the money from?”
The youth couldn’t speak but he nodded desperately. Tank lowered him to the floor, but maintained the grip on his clothes.
“A guy on a motorbike gave me the money and the lighter, and a couple of rags.” He rubbed his throat and gasped for air.
“Carry on.” Tank lifted him an inch.
“Okay, okay. He gave me a ton to torch a couple of cars outside the station, man.”
“What did he look like?”
“What?”
“What did he look like – black, white, old, young?”
“Black, well, foreign anyway, youngish.”
“What type of motorbike?”
“It was a beauty, man, a Fire Blade, red and white faring.”
“When was this?”
“Five minutes ago, at the station.” The youngster was beginning to get angst. His skin had become pallid and covered in a film of perspiration.
“At the police station?”
“No. A man at the railway station.”
Tank had heard enough for now, and he pulled the young arsonist back onto the main road. He took two Plasticuffs from his belt and held them in his left hand as they approached a concrete lamppost.
“Put your hands out behind your back.” Tank grabbed his sleeve.
“What are you doing?” The junkie looked desperate. “I’ve told you what happened.”
“You’ve just set fire to a police station my stoned friend, and you’re looking at a long stretch in jail.” Tank fastened his hands behind his back and then strapped him to the lamppost. “I’ll tell the police where you are when I get back to the station.”
“What about my money, you bastard?” The youth called after him.
Tank ran back to the police station and had to push his way through a small crowd of onlookers who had left some of the late-night drinking clubs in the town. Fire engines were arriving en masse and the fire chiefs were directing the t
enders to the front and back of the building. Grace had moved her vehicle to the main road so that she could see both sides of the police station, and she was scanning the area through night vision glasses to see if she could spot anyone acting suspiciously or paying too much attention to the goings on. He spotted a junior officer holding the crowd back, and directing traffic.
“There’s a youth handcuffed to a lamppost a few hundred yards down the street,” Tank said as he approached him. The officer looked confused even when Tank had shown him his Counter-Terrorist ID. “He had this money on him and this lighter, and he started the fire by stuffing rags into the petrol caps and lighting them.”
“Have you arrested him?” The officer asked.
“You can do that, Constable,” Tank smiled. “It’ll be a great collar for you, might even get you a sergeant’s job.”
The police officer smiled and nodded. He pocketed the evidence and headed through the onlookers to apprehend the arsonist, visions of a commendation in mind. Tank walked the short distance to the main road and approached Grace’s vehicle.
“You seen anything?” He asked as he climbed in.
“Nothing of any note,” she replied. “Did you catch him?”
“Yes, he lit the fires.” Tank snapped the seatbelt into its anchor. “He said that a foreign-looking man on a Honda Fire Blade paid him to torch the police station.”
“I haven’t seen any motorbikes,” she said.
“Look over there.” Tank pointed towards the railway station, which was only three hundred yards away on the other side of the road. The station was situated on a sharp bend, the rails and platform thirty feet above the road and accessed by stairs and lifts. A line of white hackney cabs were standing on a rank to the left of the station approach, and to the right there were a few vehicles parked by rail passengers. There had been some reconstruction work carried out, and at the back of the car park there were two metal shipping containers, which were being used to store equipment. Grace scanned the front of the station.
“Bingo,” Grace said.
“What have you got?”
“Motorcycle, red and white faring, parked next to those shipping containers.” Grace handed him the night sights. Tank looked through them and sure enough, the motorcyclist was watching the rear of the police station intently.
“I’ve got him,” Tank said.
“What do you think?”
“He’s waiting to see what happens,” Tank replied.
“How do you want to play this?”
“We’ll wait and see what happens, but I think they’re trying to get Alfie Lesner out of that police station.” Tank settled down and waited. Whatever they were planning, they were about to show their hand.
Chapter Twenty-five
Sarah awoke from a dream-filled sleep when she heard a horse neighing. She opened her eyes and was frightened by the darkness. Zak was next to her and she snuggled into him, trying to gain comfort from something familiar to her. She had a headache and a sore throat, and the feeling of motion was making her feel sick. The horse neighed again, and she knew that it was close by, but she couldn’t see it in the darkness. She could smell the horses. Her mother had taken her riding as soon as she was old enough to walk and she loved every minute of it. The sounds and smells of the animals and stables were somehow comforting in this strange world that she had found herself in. She thought about her favourite pony, Misty, a grey with a pleasant temperament. Sarah took carrots to the stables every time she rode him, and she loved the sound of Misty crunching carrots, and the way his lips quivered as he munched them.
“Mummy,” she whispered as loudly as she dared, scared that she might alert any monsters that were lurking out of sight in the darkness. Her foot was sticking out of the blanket which covered them, and she pulled it back into the bed, out of reach of the snapping teeth of the ghosties and ghoulies that might live under there.
“Daddy,” she whispered a little more urgently. The only sound was the horses, and the hum of a diesel engine. Sarah wanted to go back to sleep where she was safe, and she closed her eyes and waited for it to take her. Her brother stirred and moved closer still, oblivious to the darkness that surrounded him, and Sarah held him tightly as she drifted back to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-six
Constable Davis reached for his radio as he followed the blood trail down the corridor. He needed backup to track down Jack Howarth. His superior officer would be over the moon that he’d let him escape. The Constable knew that his boss wanted him out of the Armed Response Unit, and he would use this gaffe to discipline him for his poor performance. He would also crucify him for leaving his charge unguarded while he bought crisps and tea from a vending machine. There was no reason that he could think of to justify leaving Howarth alone.
“Constable 2235, to base. I require immediate backup at Warrington General. A suspect has absconded, I repeat, a suspect has absconded.” The radio crackled in response but there was no reply. Davis stared at the radio, confused. The modern radio communicators that the police used were virtually fail-safe, and they never went down. Nor were there many black spots where a signal could not be received. If there was no reply to a call, then there was no one in the police station, and that was impossible. The Constable tried the call again, but there was still no response.
“How can there be nobody in the radio room?” He asked himself. He hooked the radio back onto his utility belt and followed the trail. The blood had fallen in blobs at random. There didn’t appear to be any pattern to it, which indicated that the wound had been wrapped to stem the blood flow, and that the blood was dripping from the sodden cloth. He stayed close to the walls as he tracked down the ward. A door opened to the right, which startled him. He pointed the Glock 23 at the doorway and frightened the life out of the nurse who was stepping out. She screamed and slammed the door closed again.
“Stupid bitch, I nearly wet myself then.” Constable Davis muttered under his breath. He reached the stairwell at the end of the corridor and pointed the gun into the landing area while he checked that it was clear. Globules of blood had dropped onto the beige floor tiles and there were smears on the stairs where someone had stood in them. From the smears, he gauged that there were at least two people, and probably three, moving together down the stairwell, which meant that Jack Howarth had help. Davis approached a metal banister rail which had been painted with pastel-pink gloss, and leaned over it to see who was on the stairwell. The floors above were empty. He looked down. Two floors below he could see two men wearing green trousers, and a third who was barefooted and wearing a dressing gown. Constable Davis supposed that the green trousers belonged to ambulance men, and the dressing gown was obviously a patient. There was nothing unusual about seeing two ambulance men helping a patient down the stairs, but he remembered entering the lift earlier, and two paramedics had stepped out as he’d stepped in. Was it a coincidence or were they looking for Jack Howarth? He’d made enough of a cock-up of his posting today without adding wrongful arrest to the list. They were a long way down the stairs, and he could only see their bodies from the knees down. He decided to take a punt.
“Jack Howarth,” he bellowed at the top of his voice. The men in the green trousers stopped walking, which was to be expected, considering, but when they bolted he knew that they had Jack.
“Armed police, stop where you are,” he shouted. The men took no notice of his warning and continued running down the stairs, jumping them three at a time. Constable Davis launched himself down the first flight of stairs like an Olympic sprinter out of the blocks; his considerable weight carried him down at breakneck speed. By the time he’d turned onto the second landing he was puffing like an old steam engine, and he leaned over the banister to see how far ahead of him they were. One of the paramedics was looking up the stairwell directly at him, and he was pointing an Uzi nine millimetre machine pistol up at him. The Israeli-built weapon is capable of firing nine hundred bullets a minute and Constable Davis threw himself
onto the floor as it kicked into life. Bullets smashed into the stairwell all around him and ceramic floor tiles exploded into thousands of tiny shards as the volley of nine millimetres ricocheted off the concrete walls. The police officer waited until the deafening noise had subsided, sucked in a deep breath, and took off down the next flight of stairs. He paused briefly before taking the next flight two steps at a time, then as he reached the first floor landing he used the wall to slow himself down, and he had to swerve violently around a wheelchair-bound woman who had been abandoned on the stairs by a frightened porter when the machinegun was fired. She seemed senile and completely oblivious to the fat police officer as he lumbered past her at full tilt.
He heard a clattering noise echoing up the stairwell and he risked another quick look over the banister. A nurse wearing a dark blue matron’s uniform with a stiff white headpiece was sprawled on the floor. She was surrounded by dozens of dark brown tablet bottles and sterilised dressing packs. To the right of her was the trolley that she had been pushing before she’d collided with Jack Howarth and his associates. It had been upturned and its contents were strewn across the corridor. Constable Davis had a clear view of one of the paramedics. He’d fallen just a few feet away from the matron, lying on his back winded by the collision with the medicine trolley.
“Armed police! Stop or I’ll shoot,” he repeated the warning. The dark-skinned man looked straight into his eyes, but there was no fear in them, only contempt. He moved so that he was sitting up, resting on his hands with his legs out in front of him on the floor. He couldn’t spring up to his feet from that position quickly, and Constable Davis had him cold in the sights of his Glock. His superior might think that he was overweight but no one could criticise his aim. He’d won the unit sharpshooter shield two years running for his skill with a pistol, but his boss said that all around fitness and stamina was more important to the unit. Davis wondered if he’d be saying the same thing now, faced with a foe armed with automatic weapons. Would it be more important to run a mile in under six minutes, or would being confident that he could hit his enemy square in the chest be more useful in this situation?
