The darkness sharpened his senses: the pungent stench of his assailants’ body odour, the taste of blood in his mouth where the razor blade had nicked the flesh, the pounding of the rain on the roof. The driver would be waiting for a signal, so he thumped the metal wall dividing the rear section of the van from the cab. Three solid blows.
The engine coughed immediately into life, and the Transit moved forward.
Joe felt the van swing to the right then slow down. He wished he had the geography of the place clear in his mind so he knew when they were approaching the prison exit. But he didn’t. The van came to a halt, but the engine continued to turn over. A minute passed. It felt like much longer. What was happening outside? What was the hold-up? Had someone found Hobson? Were they locking the place down?
But then they were moving again. Slowly at first, then accelerating. Too fast, surely, to be within the confines of the prison. He felt a surge of grim satisfaction. Was he out? Had he done it?
Joe moved quickly. One of his attackers was wearing an overcoat – hardly prison issue, he thought. Were they being rewarded for killing him by a well-planned escape of their own? He pulled the coat off, slipped it on, then pushed himself to his feet – he had to fight a sudden, leaden exhaustion that threatened to knock him back down again. He didn’t know where he was being driven to, nor did he want to find out. In the gloom, he ripped open one of the cardboard boxes and rummaged inside. Perhaps there would be something useful. His fingertips identified a pencil-length scalpel, tightly sealed inside sterile packaging. A roll of bandage. Some surgical tape. He stuffed all these in the deep pockets of his overcoat, then lurched to the back of the Transit. They were now doing some 40 mph, he reckoned. He could hardly just open the door and jump out. He’d kill himself. He had to wait an excruciating couple of minutes before the van slowed down. It ground to a halt.
Joe seized his opportunity, opened one of the rear doors and debussed.
The rain was still pissing down, and he was instantly blinded by the headlights of the vehicle behind him. It took a moment for him to realize that it was a bus, which had stopped no more than a metre behind the Transit. Joe closed the door gently so as not to alert the driver, covered his eyes with one hand and staggered across the road to the pavement.
The traffic moved on. The Transit disappeared. Joe blinked heavily in the rain and tried to get his bearings.
He was in a high street standing outside a McDonald’s. Boots on one side, Coffee Republic on the other. A road sign thirty metres to his right indicated that he was a mile from both Brixton and Wandsworth, and two from Clapham. He turned on his mental GPS and continued to look around. The weather had forced most people off the streets – a blessing, given Joe’s appearance – but one woman passed, huddled under an umbrella, dragging an unimpressed cocker spaniel on a lead. She gave him a look of distaste and hurried on. Joe half considered entering the McDonald’s and cleaning himself up in the bathroom, but he quickly dropped that idea. There were about twenty people in the restaurant and he couldn’t risk one of them recognizing his face from the papers. Instead, he pulled up the collar of his overcoat, lowered his head and started to walk.
He had only two things in mind. First, he needed to get as far off the Transit’s route as possible. It wouldn’t be long before his disappearance from the prison was noticed, and it wouldn’t take a genius to work out how he’d done it – at which point every police officer in the capital would be looking for him.
And second? The world thought he was a murderer. The people he loved were dead, or in danger. And someone was hell-bent on killing him. He needed money, shelter, help. He needed someone he could trust.
The rain fell harder, soaking through his coat and running into his eyes. But his mind’s eye, for the first time in days, was clear. It focused on the pale, frightened face of a woman who, once upon a time, he had trusted without question.
The trouble was, in a world turned upside down, how did he know he could trust her now?
FOURTEEN
‘I still live in the same place… Dawson Street… if you need anything.’ When he had heard these words in prison, Joe hadn’t expected to act on them. He’d been wrong.
Number 132 Dawson Street, Hounslow, was a small terraced house: two up, two down. The curtains were shut both downstairs and upstairs, and he could see no chinks of light. He lingered outside for a few minutes. He felt like he had a fucking spotlight following him, like everybody he’d passed on his way here had stared at him, recognized him. Like they could see through his overcoat to the beige prison uniform underneath. And with dried blood on his fingers, he kept his right hand hidden inside the sleeve.
He noted that he was under a Heathrow flight path. Aircraft flew overhead at a rate of one every three or four minutes. He could use that. A black van drove down the street, registration KT04 CDE. If he saw it a second time, he knew he’d have to disappear. If any of the occasional passers-by paid him too much attention, same deal. And his senses were alert for any other sign that this place was being watched. That was the trouble with surveillance: you often didn’t know what you were looking for until you saw it.
The rain had stopped, but his clothes were still uncomfortably wet and he had to suppress the occasional shiver as walked fifty metres along Dawson Street before coming to the end of the terrace. The final house had a two-metre-high wooden gate to its side, clearly giving access to the back garden. Joe checked once more that he wasn’t being watched. The gate was bolted so he climbed over it and squeezed past two wheelie bins to the back of the house. It was a postage stamp of a garden, mostly taken up with a kid’s trampoline. The shared fence was only a metre high. He clambered over it, then crossed the intervening gardens with little difficulty, until, counting carefully, he reached number 132.
A tiny water feature tinkled gently in one corner of the garden. The rest of the space was paved and covered with twenty or thirty plants in pots. He examined the rear of the house. On the left was a door – no catflap, two mortise locks, and a bolt at top and bottom. Impenetrable without proper equipment. He could see through the window next to the door into a small kitchen. To the right were French windows, each with two panels. It was a moonlit night but he couldn’t make out much inside, except that it was a sitting room. His eyes scanned the darkness for the glow or blink of a burglar alarm’s sensor. There was nothing.
From the pocket of the overcoat he removed the scalpel and the surgical tape. As long as he was silent, he could use these to gain entry.
The glass of the French windows was wet. Joe removed his overcoat and used the sleeve of his prison jacket to dry the lower right-hand pane. Taking the scalpel, he slowly, precisely, scored around the edge of the glass, loosening the putty that held it to the frame and easing it out. It was slow work – it took about ten minutes – and he had to be quiet. If the neighbours heard a constant scratching sound, they’d be out to investigate.
Once he’d removed as much putty as he could, he unrolled the tape and stuck strips across the pane until it was entirely covered. These two jobs done, he returned to the water feature and selected a smooth, grey pebble no bigger than an orange and carried it back to the French windows. He stood very still, brandishing the pebble, waiting for another plane to pass overhead. And when the air was filled with the thunder of jet engines again, he struck.