picked up the little stool and hurled it at the window, again and again. All that banging on it earlier in an effort to get the detectives’ attention must have loosened it, because the thick Perspex window fell out in one complete piece and Candace shouted, ‘Yay, Harry!’ and they both did a little jig of triumph.
‘We’ve got to hurry,’ Harry said and lowered Candace out of the window, holding her by her hands until she was almost on the ground before he dropped her. She landed softly on a bed of nettles and hadn’t even started crying by the time Harry scrambled out and picked her up.
He ran. A difficult thing to do with a three-year-old child in your arms, especially a nettle-stung one, but sometimes it really was a matter of life and death.
It had grown almost dark by now. They were sitting by the side of a small road that seemed to have no traffic on it, but Harry didn’t think he could go any further. He had a signal now and he kept trying Crystal’s phone, but she didn’t answer. It had taken him for ever to remember her number and he thought that, after all, he must have got it wrong. From now on, he thought, he would memorize all the important numbers in his contacts rather than relying on his phone to do it for him. He couldn’t remember his dad’s number at all. There was only one other number that Harry knew by heart, so he phoned the next best thing to a parent – Bunny.
As soon as he’d dialled, a car appeared, so Harry cut off the call and jumped around at the side of the road, waving his arms around. He was quite prepared to throw himself in the path of a moving vehicle if that was what it took to get home, but he didn’t need to as the car glided slowly to a halt a few feet ahead of them. The rear passenger door was opened by an invisible hand and Harry picked Candace up and ran towards it.
‘Thank you for stopping,’ Harry said when they had climbed into the car. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘No problem,’ the driver said and the silver BMW drove off into the dark of the countryside.
The Final Curtain
Fee was taking a shortcut. It was a dark alley and the one streetlight was out, but it was familiar territory, she sometimes brought a punter down here for a quickie up against the wall. It stank – there were a couple of big rubbish bins because a fish-and-chip restaurant backed on to the alley. She wasn’t working, she was on the way to her dealer, ready to barter with Tina’s gold watch, which was hanging loosely on her bony wrist, the safest place for it right now. She would get a fraction of what it was worth, but it would still be more than she could make in a week on the street.
She heard someone entering the alley behind her and picked up the pace. She had a bad feeling, hairs on the back of her neck and so on. She had learned the hard way to trust her gut instinct. There was a light at the end of the alley and she concentrated on that, it was only twenty or thirty steps away. Her breath was tight in her chest. The spiky heels of her boots slipped on the greasy cobbles. She didn’t look behind her but she could hear whoever it was getting closer and she tried to run, but her heel caught on the cobbles and she went flying. She was going to die in this dirty place, she thought, just another piece of garbage for someone to pick up in the morning.
‘Hello, Felicity,’ a voice said. ‘We’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
She wet herself in terror.
The gates of HMP Wakefield opened slowly and an ambulance crawled out. When it hit the main road it started to accelerate and the sirens and lights were switched on, although the occupant, despite the vigorous CPR that was still being applied, was already dead.
The paramedic paused, ready to give up, but the prison nurse who had accompanied the patient in the back took over, pumping hard on prisoner JS 5896’s scrawny chest. The warden was keen that everything was done by the book, didn’t want anyone accusing them of letting the guy go prematurely. A lot of people would be pleased to see him dead.