Cages by David Mark (reading fiction TXT) 📗

towards the maintenance exit and load him into the rear of the waiting ambulance; his right hand twisted shut as the paroxysms of pain gripped him like so many coils of barbed wire.

The paramedics checked his pupils, placed a breathing mask around his nostrils, and muttered in low voices that he seemed to have suffered a cerebrovascular haemorrhage and that his temperature was ‘through the roof’. Annabeth and PO Lambert squeezed themselves in to the rear of the vehicle as the sirens wailed into life and the driver swung them through the big arched gates and out onto the rain-streaked country roads of Holderness. Lambert suggested they cuff him to the stretcher. The paramedic told him there was no way he was going to permit that. Lambert tried to get a signal on his mobile to update his line manager about the sudden development. Annabeth made a great show of doing the same – leaving a voicemail for Governor Hussain and explaining she had done as instructed and made sure she was on hand to provide a reassuring presence for their most high-profile prisoner.

The paramedic who tended to Cox did a professional job. He knew nothing about the patient in his care – just that he looked bloody awful and that his heartbeat was erratic and there appeared to be blood in one of his eyes. Annabeth filled him in on the patient history. He’d been stabbed the previous day – taken to hospital and sewn up. He’d complained of a high temperature and sickness in the night. He’d been given painkillers but the wound smelled a little funny beneath the bandages and she was concerned that he had picked up an infection.

The ambulance was just passing the entrance to Hull’s Victoria Dock estate when the miracle occurred. The ambulance slowed down to skirt the roundabout that turned left into the great tract of identikit new-build homes, rising from the broken foundations of the filled-in dock. The paramedic leaned forward and peeled back the bandage on his pale, bony chest. He leaned forward, examining the stitches and seeking any sign of the infection that the professional, halfway pretty prison officer had suggested. And then Cox opened his eyes. The transformation was sudden and absolute. The figure who, moments before, had seemed like somebody recently disinterred, had sprung with a strength and ferocity that came from somewhere deep within. His right hand, twisted into an unyielding claw, changed position to better grasp the canister of pepper spray upon his palm, and unloaded the stinging liquid straight into the hapless medic’s eyes.

Later, the drivers of the vehicles that were near the ambulance, would tell police that the vehicle seemed to swing suddenly to the right, as if somebody had grabbed the wheel, and then barrelled straight towards the centre of the roundabout, crashing into the side of a Kingston Communications van, then rear-ending a Land Rover that had pulled in to the let the ambulance scream by. Moments later, the doors burst open, and a squat, plumpish man in a prison officer’s uniform collapsed onto the road, clawing at his eyes. Moments later, a wiry figure, barefoot and wearing pyjamas, leapt down to the road, dragging a female prison officer by the hair; something sharp at her throat. He dragged her to the nearest vehicle: a red Suzuki Swift with white stripes up the bonnet and roof, and yanked the driver’s door open before she had the presence of mind to lock it. He sprayed the driver straight in the eyes with the aerosol, then let go of his hostage for long enough to drag the driver onto the road and stamp on her head, twice, in quick succession. He pushed his prisoner into the driver’s seat, and jumped in the back, pressing the shard of glinting metal back against her throat. Then the little car squirmed up the muddy bank round the waiting vehicles, and sped off into the maze of the estate, leaving only the scream of the siren and the desperate shouts of ‘help me, help me’ from the officer on the floor. It would be six minutes before the police arrived. They would find the paramedic unconscious on the gurney, eyes streaming, a great trench on his crown where he had been struck, hard, with the base of the small fire extinguisher from the shelf above the medication locker. They would find the driver sitting at the side of the road, weeping into his hands, blood streaming from his nose, having lost control of the vehicle the moment he heard the commotion from the rear of the ambulance. It would be four months before the detectives at Humberside Police would untangle the complex transactions and maze of accounts that had been used to disguise the £50,000 deposited in his account by one Wilson Iveson to make sure it was he who answered the emergency call to the prison.

It would be several hours before Annabeth presented herself at the doctor’s surgery on the Victoria Dock estate, dripping wet and bleeding from a head wound, puking up sea water and mud and trying to tell the frightened receptionist to call the police, to call the hospital – to get divers in the water. He’d crashed through the sea wall, she said. He’d taken them into the water at forty miles per hour. The car was at the bottom of the river. As far as she knew, Cox was still inside. She’d only escaped because the windscreen had smashed when they hit the sea wall and she’d been able to drag herself free. Cox, who had taken the wheel once they were away from prying eyes, hadn’t been able to untangle himself from the airbag before the water rushed into the car, and down his throat. She had no doubt he was dead. Dead, at the bottom of the river. And then she had crumpled in on herself, and begged those who rushed to provide blankets and hot tea and motherly