Die Alone

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