Lazy Blood: a powerful page-turning thriller

by Ross Greenwood

  Table of Contents

  1

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  3

  4

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  8

  9

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  11

  12

  13

  14

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  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  Epilogue

  A Note from the Publisher

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Lazy Blood

  – ROSS GREENWOOD –

  Copyright © 2016 Ross Greenwood

  The right of Ross Greenwood to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2016 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  http://www.bloodhoundbooks.com/.

  Also now available:

  The Boy Inside; Ross Greenwood’s stunning follow up to Lazy Blood

  Amazon UK

  Amazon US

  ‘In order to understand, I destroyed myself.’

  Fernando Pessoa

  PART ONE – THE END

  1

  25th August 2014

  Prison. Again. This time though, people have died. His mind flickered back to his previous stay all those years ago and he remembered smiling at the banal promises of the great unwashed as they assured each other this would definitely be their last time inside. Did they believe it? Was it just more jail bullshit? Or was it the need to talk and to hope? Well he had known back then it would be his first and only spell inside and he had scornfully smiled at those deluded souls, confident that he wasn’t like them. Yet here he was. No short sharp shock for a driving offence that had typically been Darren’s fault. Now he could spend the rest of his life here.

  He shook his head gently; even now he was still blaming Darren. Well he wouldn’t be doing that anymore. The thought of his friend started to unlock the door on the compartment in his brain where he had put last week’s nightmares. Not now he thought. He could feel the horror building there, bulging and pulsing, demanding to be heard and let out. It was like the police investigating a crime, gently knocking and peeking through curtains before quietly leaving. They would be back though and more insistent, until the door was broken down and all hell was let loose.

  The prison van lurched as the obese driver got out, bringing him back to the present. He could see him through the tinted window searching in his pockets. The huge sweat patches on his shirt seemed to grow bigger as he hunched his back to light another roll up. An hour they had been parked outside the prison. This would be his third cigarette. He might as well have had it in the van as he seemed intent on blowing the smoke back into the cab. It could have been his intention to wind them up. He must have known nearly all of the prison population smoked and after the trauma of today’s events the new residents would all be begging for one. More likely though it was just a lack of thought, or interest, but Will was confident it would soon provoke the idiot in the cage in front of him into another round of ranting.

  He let himself debate for a moment which part of his anatomy he would donate right now for a shiny unopened pack of Benson and Hedges Gold, but Will doubted he would have been able to smoke it anyway as he was so dehydrated. As luck would have it the van was parked at such an angle that the powerful evening sun was beating directly on his side. They called them sweat boxes and the sensation was that of a takeaway rotisserie, gently cooking those within. The last drops of glistening moisture collecting on the glass sides. He could almost hear God’s voice in the distance saying ‘Your punishment starts here’.

  Not only was he parched, but bloated too. He could remember very vividly an old man on the wing saying ‘Do not get nicked on a Saturday, it’s nasty. That’s two days until the courts open, so you are in the cop shop until then. That’s two days of microwaved all day breakfast, three times a day. No showers, no books, no sleep, no fun’. Sage advice as it turns out. Since Saturday he must have had five meals, admittedly not all breakfasts, but reheated aeroplane food basically and he had the bloating feeling that went with it. He felt like if he could get a fart out it would last a good minute, leaving him kneeling on the floor exhausted but temporarily happy.

  No such luck. He also had the cramps such fare induced and was bursting for a wee. Two hours he suspected he had been stuck on the van as obviously they had taken his watch, as well as his shoe laces, to add to his disorientated state.

  The other two occupants were already inside when he got on, possibly from another court. That meant their bladders too must be under considerable pressure. He had only heard the guy on his left speak once about an hour ago. He had a mature voice, even elderly sounding. Most likely he sounded different this morning. Suddenly from nowhere he had cried out.

  ‘Please sir, I really need to use the bathroom’ he had said. Almost like Oliver Twist, polite and educated. He suspected it would be a long time before the poor guy would be using a toilet that could even remotely be described as a bathroom. No-one bothered to reply.

  As the driver got on and the van lurched the same way, some liquid rippled into Will’s compartment and he knew someone’s resolve had broken. Don’t think about it, he thought. You clearly wouldn’t need to be Galileo to locate the source but it was the weakening effect it was having on his own self-control that was more concerning. He stared at it as it trickled around his lace-less shoes and into some slits in the floor and idly wondered if the van was designed that way, or that the drainage system was a lucky fluke. It wasn’t going to make the van smell any worse however, as that would have been impossible.

  He knew he was responsible for his part of the aroma, maybe more than his fair share. His shirt was attached to his back like a layer of cling film and his jeans felt like they weighed three times more than when he had put them on. They sat below his hips all heavy with sweat, his belt long gone. The worst was his underwear. He could have rung the sweat out of his socks and he dreaded to think on the state of his boxers. It felt like he wasn’t sure where the drone of the idling diesel engine finished and the hum of his own body began.

  He was perched forward on the small seat with his head resting on the panel in front. Another trickle of sweat ran off his head and down the side of his greasy face, leisurely bouncing off his stubble as it slalomed down to his chin and then hung there like a diver on the high board. As it dropped, he felt a pressure on his chest. A rising panic coursed through his body, his brain fluttered with thoughts of completely losing it. Deep breaths, Darren always said. Control your breathing and you control your fear. A deep breath
of the fetid enclosed air was far from appealing but he didn’t want to be one of those carried off the van, a sobbing, snivelling, weeping mess. It always got back to the wings, so he sucked it up. Steady breaths, desperately trying to think of anything but his situation. He blinked the stinging moisture out of his eyes and tried to think of happier times. He remembered a sunset, the moment the sun went down and the temperature dropped and tried to sear the moment onto his fragile mind.

  2

  The van jumped forward as the driver suddenly engaged the gears and Will banged his forehead on the front partition forcing him into the present again. The barrier rose in front of them as they rolled toward the entrance. He wasn’t sure if the prisoner in front had been asleep and this had woken him, or if he had been waiting for this moment to resume his baiting. As the huge prison entrance door slid open and welcomed them into its dark mouth the kid let out a cheer, stamping and drumming his feet, shouting through the crack in his door.

  ‘Yee haa paedo. Welcome to hell. Bruv you’re gonna need a new ass after they’ve finished with you in here. No escape in those cells. You’ll be like a kid fiddling rat, stuck in a trap. If I see you man, I’m gonna cut you up.’

  Jesus, he winced, YO’s. Bloody Youth Offenders. All bluster and posturing. No doubt chest stuck forward as he bellowed in his best street accent. Surely he hadn’t been so irritating and stupid when he was young. He grimaced as it came to him that it was more than twenty years since he had turned eighteen and he was pretty sure he was in deeper shit than most in here. So who was the fool?

  These kids nowadays all seemed to have ADHD and verbal diarrhoea. Surely with all that pent-up energy being locked in a cell was the last place you would want to be? No wonder they went nuts when they were let out on association.

  The banging caused the guard to shout through to the back.

  ‘Jake, can it now you idiot, or I’ll issue you with a warning.’

  ‘Like I give a shit, screw,’ the lad retorted. ‘You make me laugh with your fucking bits of paper. You don’t know who you’re dealing with here. Go get your friends, put your riot suits on, I’m gonna fuck you up.’

  Will pushed up on his seat to give his arse a break from the unforgiving hardness and gave himself a smile. It should be very concerning when you are on first name terms with the prison transport staff. He had heard a similar threat from a prisoner on his last stay but it had come from a forty year old black man who could do the frog song with his chest muscles. The man had been bear sized, well over six feet tall and holding a pool cue and ball. It had carried a lot more weight. Prison was surely a great place for role models and learned behaviour. He suspected the officers would know exactly what they were dealing with here and his young friend would be sobbing for the mum he never knew before the night was out.

  The screws weren’t your enemy here anyway, time was. Time was a strange commodity. Here you couldn’t give it away, yet to a dying man it was the rollover lottery; an unattainable dream he would never acquire.

  He remembered reading the ‘Power of Now’, a book on living in the moment, whilst reclining on a tropical beach in Indonesia. Even then, when he focused, he had struggled to really see and hear the waves gently lapping at his feet, bathwater warm and startlingly transparent. He could not focus on the heat of the sun bronzing his body, or feel the crumble of the baked sand as he scrunched his fingers into it. Even in paradise his mind was whirring about whether there were going to be any girls tonight, or dreading the next ten hour bus ride on the local death-trap, or what he was going to do for a job when he got back to the UK when his CV had more holes in it than a piece of rotten wood.

  Yet here, in a place where time meant thinking and he would rather forget, he knew it all.

  The bored scuff marks on the panel in front of him, the gentle whistle of his shallow breaths. The exact feel of his hands on his eyes as he held his face. The smudged imprint of his forehead where he had rested it on the window and worst of all the awareness of what he had done and what was ahead of him. All this was his, with no effort at all.

  They came to an open door as they trundled through some high metal prison gates topped with vicious looking barbed wire where a big man stood blocking the view inside and the van pulled up. The driver went inside for a few minutes then returned and climbed into the back. His weight on the other side of the vehicle caused the remaining piss to wash away like the tide. Through the gaps he saw him help the man on the left out. He shuffled like a geriatric, stiff from being in the same position for a long time.

  Will immediately thought of Darren’s joke of dodgy looking old men in Thailand, ‘If it looks like a paedo and walks like a paedo-’. The man’s face was flaccid white, etched with fear, although no doubt this would be unfounded. He would be put on a foul smelling sex offender’s wing, or vulnerable person’s wing as they called it so as not to upset the foul smelling sex offenders, with a load of other dirty old men. No-one would ask what anyone else was in for, everyone would be innocent and the sick bastards would swap pictures of each other’s kids and take turns with the underwear section of the children’s section in the clothes catalogue. The unused showers a final testament to their warped mind-set.

  He knew though it was fear of the unknown that unhinged most. This man’s experience of jail would probably be gleaned almost entirely from the Shawshank Redemption and the Daily Mail and he would be shitting himself. He was looking at many months of remand time himself and he too was tingling with the knowledge that it was going to take a superhuman effort not to fold under these conditions. Innocent until proven guilty but incarcerated nonetheless. The not knowing when he was going to be put under the critical gaze of some bitter old judge, who no doubt would be savouring the thought of his rambling verdict making the national news. Months of poor sleep leading to a zombie-like existence. He had seen strong men broken by these long haunted nights.

  He had said nothing during the police interview. Rarely muttering the words ‘No comment’, and feeling like an idiot as if he had watched too many US cop shows. By their questioning it seemed they had little idea what had happened. Huge pools of blood and spent bullets everywhere, but no dead bodies.

  He was jerked from his recent past by the lad in front asking him what he was in for.

  He thought for a minute, then replied. ‘A mistake, when I was young.’ Wanting to change the subject quickly he commented on the stench in the van. ‘Hums in here, I can’t believe the old guy pissed himself.’

  ‘That wasn’t him. I did it,’ the youth said laughing. ‘I asked the fat bastard if I could go and he ignored me. So I pissed on the floor. Ignorant prick can spend the end of his shift mopping it up. I didn’t even need to go that much.’

  As Will shook his head thinking at least the youth hadn’t needed a shit, his own door opened.

  ‘OK Mr Reynolds, out you come, nice and easy.’

  He too struggled out, his back stiff, shoes slipping on the wet floor. He went through the reception door remembering the way from before and blinked at the glaring lights. There were officers everywhere. He recognised a few who must have been here from all those years ago. Prison had aged them as surely as it did the inmates. They had tired eyes and blank faces which no amount of fresh horror would surprise or shock. There were younger ones too, round eyed and nervous looking, more than likely not much older than Jake on the bus.

  The Senior Officer at the desk gave him a hard stare. His red badge announced him as John Cave. He had a substantial beard shadow on a heavy jaw. He looked familiar to Will but he suspected he would remember someone so aggressive looking. He had huge arms and a barrel chest and the red faced demeanour and look of someone who had spent a wasted day and got sunburnt doing it.

  ‘William Reynolds,’ he stated. ‘Put your finger on the scanner’.

  The computer gave a confirming beep and the man looked at the screen and then directly at him with a cold smile on his face. ‘Welcome back.’

  Trying to add
some levity into the situation, he looked around and nodded to the bank of officers behind him.

  ‘Bit of overkill isn’t it, for dragging a naughty boy off the bus?’

  ‘It’s not for him,’ Cave replied. ‘It’s for you. It’s not often we get murderers here.’

  Will felt a cold sheen of sweat appear on his body and almost felt his legs go. His head buzzed as though he had stood too close to the edge of the platform as a tube train screeched through. The court earlier had been a blur and his solicitor worse than useless. Refusing to think about anything had clearly not prepared him for this. Saturday’s madness would no doubt have been all over the papers and on the TV. He pulled his eyes away from the man’s magnetic gaze and stared at the floor.

  Unsure how to react, he just grumbled, ‘OK.’ In the background the radio began playing ‘Nothing compares to you’ by Sinead O’Connor and another wave of emotion threatened to engulf him. Unbelievable he thought, that song again and as he desperately tried to prevent the collapsing dam of memories from engulfing him, he felt a tap on the shoulder.

  ‘Mr Reynolds, here please, you know the drill.’

  He turned round and looked at the officer behind him, who gave him the hint of a commiserating smile. It was an older man, mid-thirties, with a paunch hanging over his belt and a hairstyle that was failing to hide his glistening pate. He had been here before, Prison Officer Duke he recalled. One of the more reasonable professional officers who had realised it was fine not to treat the inmates like they were all the scum of the earth.

  He motioned for him to sit on the BOSS chair. A hard, black, plastic, full bottomed seat device you could imagine sitting in to play a video game at the arcade. The piece of equipment whirred and gave a ding, so he got up assuming that it had confirmed that he hadn’t got a phone wedged up his arse. Chance would be a fine thing. He was wound so tight that if he had tried to insert a blade of grass in there it would have caused him to go screeching off round the ceiling like a rapidly deflating balloon.