Die Alone

by Simon Kernick

  As Ramone bent double, I delivered a second kick, this time straight to the face, and he took an unsteady step backwards, lost his balance, and fell over on his back, dropping the shiv in the process.

  The rage took me then and, grabbing a pool ball from the floor, I leapt onto his chest, pinning down his arms, and, before he could recover, I drove the ball into his face again and again, turning it into pulp, unable to stop myself. No longer caring about anyone or anything else as all the frustrations of a year of incarceration came tearing to the surface.

  I could hear shouting, a commotion behind me, and then suddenly hands were grabbing my arms and I was being dragged off him.

  Still consumed with rage, I struggled furiously, determined now to fight until the end, but a baton came out of nowhere, striking me on the shoulder, and suddenly my vision was filled with the black boots and flameproof trousers of the Tornado Teams, the riot-trained prison officers always brought in to quell jail disturbances.

  I let go of the cue ball as I was forced round onto my front with a knee pushing my face into the floor and, as I watched more and more of the riot officers pour in, some of them lashing out with batons and sending the inmates scurrying in all directions, I’d never felt so relieved in my life to be handcuffed.

  2

  Adrenalin’s an incredible thing. When your body pumps you full of it, you feel no pain at all. Consequently, I hadn’t noticed that when we were falling through the netting, Ramone had managed to slash my belly, leaving a nasty wound about four inches long that had bled all over my prison-issue sweatshirt.

  Fifteen minutes had passed and I was in the holding area at the front of the prison where inmates are placed when they’re being transferred or released. The place was bedlam. At least twenty injured staff and inmates were either being examined or waiting their turn, while the three flustered prison doctors on duty tried to calculate who was the most seriously injured. Meanwhile, the two senior managers on duty were trying to organize secure transport vehicles to take prisoners to the nearest hospital, as the prison’s own hospital had been looted and set on fire. One guard looked very bad. He was unconscious and covered in blood, and they were placing him on a gurney with a drip attached. Wallace Burke, the child killer, was sitting nearby, holding a wet towel to his head and complaining loudly that he needed help. Unfortunately, his injuries looked largely superficial. It seemed the men who’d invaded our wing couldn’t get anything right.

  A young female doctor in a headscarf approached me, and my handcuffs were taken off while she examined my injuries and did a quick, and remarkably efficient, job of dressing them. The adrenalin was fading now that I was comparatively safe, and the pain was kicking in. I winced as she applied the antibiotic cream. Ramone had hurt me pretty bad, although I was still standing, which was more than could be said for him. He was at the other end of the room, sitting in a chair, his face a complete mess where I’d beaten him with the pool ball, but still conscious as a doctor examined him. After bad blood like this, one of us would have to be evacuated to another prison. It would also go on both our records. That wouldn’t matter so much for Ramone who was in here for the best part of the rest of his life anyway, but for me, with my trial coming up in a month’s time, it was an added complication.

  Not that I had much chance of smelling the fresh, sweet air of freedom any time soon. I’d been charged with the murders of two people, a man and a woman. I’d shot them dead, then set fire to the house where I’d killed them, burning it to the ground. There was little point in me denying I’d done it. I was the only suspect. A gun had been recovered from the ruins of the scene with my DNA on it. The man I’d killed had been armed but the woman hadn’t. She was sixty-four years old and I’d shot her in cold blood.

  In my defence, both of them were brutal killers in their own right, and the world was a better place without them in it, but that wasn’t going to help me, since I was one of only a handful of people who knew their history. As far as everyone else was concerned they were innocent of any crime, and there were people out there – very powerful people – who wanted to make sure no one found out the real truth. Hence the half-a-million-pound bounty on my head.

  My lawyer had told me I had next to no chance of being released. According to her, my best defence was diminished responsibility, which seemed to be the only sure way of avoiding a life sentence. I’d probably be successful too. As well as being a decorated soldier and police officer who’d been at the centre of plenty of incidents which could have caused severe PTSD, my trump card (my lawyer’s words, not mine) was the fact that, at only seven years old, I was orphaned in an incident that made the front pages of every national newspaper in the country. One night my father, a drunk and a philanderer, murdered my mother in a booze-induced rage, a killing I witnessed. He then stabbed to death my two young brothers, before stalking the house hunting for me. I’d escaped by jumping from a first-floor window after he’d set the house on fire. I survived; he’d perished in the flames. At the time the press had called me ‘the boy from the burning house’ and, as my lawyer pointed out, anyone who’d been through that was going to get a sympathetic hearing from a jury. It had taken me a long time to come round to her way of thinking but ultimately anything was better than rotting in a place like this for the rest of my days.

  ‘This inmate’s going to have to be evacuated,’ the doctor said over my shoulder to one of the prison managers, referring to me. ‘He’s lost quite a lot of blood and needs stitching up.’

  ‘All right, he can go on the next van, along with Ramone and Burke. You’re not going to give us any trouble are you, Ray?’ The manager put a hand on my shoulder. His name was Stevenson and he was one of those guys who’d been around for ever and preferred quiet diplomacy to playing the tough guy. I got on with him well enough. I think he liked the fact we were both ex-army although, like most people, he was still wary of me, as if I was a friendly but unpredictable dog, and one with an especially nasty bite.

  ‘Of course not, sir,’ I told him. ‘But can I travel without the cuffs? My arm’s killing me.’

  He gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Afraid not, Ray. Regulations.’

  He nodded to the guard, who replaced the cuffs and then led me through the gates to the main entrance where a prison transport van was waiting on the forecourt with its double doors open, amid an army of roughly parked emergency service vehicles, their flashing lights illuminating the night sky.

  It was the first time I’d been outside the main prison building in a year, and it was a strange feeling. My immediate impulse was to make a run for it, but there were riot police everywhere and, in the end, where the hell was I going to go anyway, on foot, injured, and with my hands cuffed behind my back? I looked behind me and saw thick clouds of toxic smoke, glowing pink from the flames at the rear of the building, disappearing into the night sky. A helicopter was circling noisily overhead. The air out here was humid and unpleasant, and I could smell burning plastic.

  Two other guards led me inside the back of the van, which was divided into three individual cubicles on each side so that the prisoners couldn’t have any physical contact with each other. I was put inside the one nearest the driver’s cab. As the guard leaned down to do up my seatbelt, he whispered in my ear in a soft Geordie accent, ‘Keep fighting, Ray. You’ll get through it.’

  It was a rare but welcome show of support and I nodded a thanks. I’d always had a high profile as a cop, not just because of what had happened to me as a kid, but also because five years earlier, while working in counter terrorism, I’d survived a kidnap attempt by a gang of Islamic radicals who’d planned to behead me on camera. I’d managed to shoot two of them dead, and arrest the third, which had gained me a lot of airtime, and yet more enemies. But it had also earned me a grudging respect from some of those on the right side of the law. And that had undoubtedly helped me in prison.

  Unfortunately, right now I needed a lot more than sympathy.

  The guard locked the
cubicle door, and I heard Burke being led in behind me, still complaining about the way he hadn’t been protected by the authorities, as was his right. Then, after him, came Ramone, who was still compos mentis enough to yell threats at me, and even managed to land a kick on my door before being manhandled into his own cubicle.

  Two minutes later, the van pulled away, drove out of the main gates of the prison, and accelerated quickly as it took us on the two-mile route to hospital.

  ‘You’re a dead man, Mason!’ yelled Ramone. ‘I will tear you into little pieces and gnaw on the bones.’

  Full marks to him. As threats went it was one of the more imaginative ones.

  ‘Yeah, whatever, Ramone,’ I said, sitting back in the hard metal chair and closing my eyes, wondering how different life could have been if I’d played the cards I’d been handed better.

  The thing was, before I’d ended up in here, I was a wealthy man. With the death of my family I’d inherited a sizeable amount of cash, and through shrewd investments over the years it had turned into several million. Not enough to put me in the super rich league, but financially speaking I’d been very comfortable. I hadn’t needed to be a soldier or a cop. I could have got a different job entirely, something outdoors, like a tour guide or a diving instructor, lived an uneventful life of contentment, maybe with a wife and kids. Sometimes when I was lying in my cell at night, listening to the shouts and sobs of my fellow prisoners from across the landing, I fantasized about this alternative life.

  It never did me any good, but at least it was a useful escape from a grim reality.

  The van did a sudden emergency stop and I was flung forward then backwards in the seat. I could hear the two guards in the front cursing, but then their tones changed.

  ‘Reverse! Reverse!’ yelled one of them.

  The driver put the van into reverse but not before I heard the distinctive blast of a shotgun, and the vehicle immediately dropped on one side as a tyre was shot out.

  We were being hijacked, which could only be because of one of us in the back. No one was interested in Wallace Burke. He’d been inside twenty years and was largely forgotten. And Ramone might have been a brutal killer but ultimately he was still small-time with no major organization to back him up.

  Which only left me.

  There were at least two hijackers and they were yelling orders to the guards as they came round the side of the van, passing directly below my window.

  ‘Open the fucking doors, or you’re dead! Now! Move! Move!’

  The guards’ voices were muffled but I knew they’d be complying. Like all prison guards, they were unarmed, and therefore an easy target, although to attempt a hijacking in the middle of London like this, and less than a five-minute drive from hundreds of armed police, you had to be either highly reckless or highly professional. Either way, it didn’t bode well for me.

  My hands were cuffed behind my back, palms outward in the ‘back to back’ position, which made it pretty much impossible for me to get out of them, but I tried anyway, scouring the floor for a pin, a paper clip, anything that could be used to pick the lock, knowing I had to do something, anything, that made me feel less helpless.

  The back doors opened. My adrenalin flooded back as I wriggled in the cuffs.

  ‘Which one’s Ray Mason in?’ demanded one of the gunmen, close now.

  ‘The left cubicle at the end,’ replied the guard who’d spoken to me earlier.

  ‘Unlock it. Now. Move!’

  I could hear the guard put his key in the lock, and I knew I had only seconds to live, that this had been their plan all along. Stage the riot, make sure I was transferred, and then take me down en route. It showed the power of the people who wanted me dead.

  But I wasn’t going to die quietly.

  The cubicle door opened. I braced myself for the inevitable shot, but it didn’t come. I couldn’t quite see the gunman but his arms and the shotgun were just in view, pointed at the guard. Smoke was still coming from the barrel from when he’d shot out the tyre.

  ‘Get him out of there,’ the gunman ordered. ‘Fast, or I’ll kneecap you.’

  The accent was local, my guess belonging to a white man in his forties, and from the way he was holding the gun he definitely had a firearms background. A pro. I knew that if they’d wanted to kill me here they’d have done it already. Which meant they were taking me somewhere, and that was an even worse prospect.

  The guard didn’t look at me as he came into the cubicle, unclipped my seatbelt and pulled me to my feet. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t help.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I told him as he pushed me out into the corridor and I saw the gunman for the first time. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a bomber jacket, his face covered by a balaclava, and he held a Remington automatic shotgun in his gloved hands.

  ‘All right, bring him out fast,’ demanded the gunman, retreating out of the van while still keeping his weapon trained on me.

  Behind him, I could see the second gunman. He had a pistol pressed into the back of the other guard.

  The lead gunman got out of the way as I climbed down the steps at the back of the van. We were on a one-way residential street, and there were already three or four cars backed up behind us. One of them even beeped his horn, and it looked like the driver of the car in front was filming the scene on his mobile. There was a convenience store with its light on and door open barely ten yards away, and it felt strange to be so close to normality and freedom, and not to be able to do a thing about it.

  The second gunman swiftly bundled the other guard into the back of the prison van and slammed the doors shut, automatically activating the locking system. I was now on my own. He grabbed my arm, shoved the gun against the wound on my belly, and manoeuvred me round the front of the van, with the lead gunman following close behind. I could see several people looking out of windows, and another person filming the scene, but no one seemed to be calling the cops or making any move to intervene.

  I could see their car now: a white Toyota saloon parked at a right angle to the flow of traffic, blocking the road. The boot was open and they were manhandling me towards it.

  It’s hard to make the decision to make a run for it when you’ve got two guns trained on you, especially when one of them’s pressed against your gut, and if I’d been living the life of a free man I don’t think I’d have done it. But as it was, I didn’t have a lot left to live for, and if I had to die, then at least it would be on my terms.

  As we reached the boot and the second gunman’s grip on my arm momentarily eased, I slammed my body into his and twisted away from him, bolting up the street, almost losing my balance but somehow managing to right myself just in time, waiting for the inevitable bullet to slam into me and end it all. But in that handful of seconds I felt a real sense of elation. I was a free man.

  And then my back spasmed uncontrollably, followed a split second later by every muscle in my body. My legs went from under me and I toppled over, unable to break my fall as the concrete raced upwards, slamming into the side of my face. I tried to lift my head and move my legs, but nothing seemed to work, and I lay there utterly helpless as a car wheel roared into my field of vision, stopping inches away. The gunmen were shouting at each other but I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and their voices sounded far away.

  And then I was being lifted up and forced into the darkness of the car boot, and I knew then that I hadn’t been shot, but tasered, and already the effects were beginning to wear off.

  The boot slammed shut and, as I regained feeling in my body, the Toyota accelerated away in a screech of tyres, making continual sharp turns and hardly braking as my abductors tried to get as far away from the crime scene as possible. I was forced to brace myself against the side to stop myself from being flung all over the place.

  A few minutes later, the car screeched to a halt. I made a promise to myself that I was going to resist as I heard the gunmen come round the back, but as the boot flew open and I
found myself staring at the barrel of the shotgun, I felt my will fading, and I hardly moved as the second gunman reached in with a hypodermic needle and jabbed me quickly in the arm.

  I remember being taken out and led unsteadily over to a bigger car, then bundled into the back of that, thinking that, having gone to this much trouble to take me alive, whatever they had planned for me was going to be very, very bad indeed, before mercifully I lost consciousness.

  3

  For Alastair Sheridan, being born without a conscience had always been a boon. It had enabled him to achieve what weaker, less ruthless people had never been able to, and it had propelled him to the position he was in now: a self-made businessman with a reported net worth of £60 million (it was actually a few million less than that, but who was quibbling?), a beautiful trophy wife ten years his junior, an even more beautiful six-year-old son, and now, out of the blue, a career in politics which was threatening to go stratospheric thanks to the squabbling that was tearing his party apart. Having been parachuted into a safe government seat barely nine months earlier, things had moved rapidly and now the prize at the very top was his to win. He was good-looking and in the best shape he’d been for years, thanks to the recent diet and exercise regime that had knocked a stone off his six-foot-three frame. And most importantly of all, the public loved him. Even the very few in the party who’d got wind of some of the suspicion that surrounded him were no problem. Especially when he had someone as powerful as George Bannister in his pocket.