One Last Breath. Stephen Booth

eight years.

      ‘Well, aren’t you pleased, Quinn?’

      ‘Oh. Yes, sir.’

      ‘You’ll be glad to be out of this place. I know things haven’t always been easy for you here. You went through a bit of a rough patch, didn’t you?’ The governor flicked over a page of the file in front of him. He wasn’t attempting to read it. Not even pretending to. He was just flicking it with his long, white fingers, as if he could consign Quinn’s memories to the past by turning a page, closing a file, sliding it into a drawer of a cabinet. Was it all there, on that one page of his file, summed up in a few paragraphs typed by a Prison Service secretary?

      ‘A bit of a rough patch. Yes, sir.’

      The governor looked at Quinn doubtfully, but relaxed when he saw the prisoner’s calmness.

      ‘You’ll find life an awful lot easier at HMP Sudbury. And, of course, it’s a step closer to your release.’

      He smiled hopefully. But something was happening inside Quinn. His body seemed to be filling with a cloud of poisonous gas that rose from somewhere deep in his guts and coiled through his intestines. It flooded his lungs and seeped into his brain. He waited, terrified, for the cloud to dissipate before he could speak.

      ‘Thank you, sir.’

      Another smile now, different. An ironic smile. ‘That’s provided you’re on your best behaviour, Quinn. You don’t want to end up back here, do you?’

      The governor waited a few seconds for a response, then began to get uncomfortable. He closed the file with a little swish and a click. ‘Perhaps it’s something that will take a while to sink in. I understand that, Quinn. If you want to talk to anybody about it, just let Mr Jeavons know, and it can be arranged. You know there are counsellors available. A chaplain, perhaps …’

      Quinn tried to shake his head, but the muscles in his neck would hardly move. He felt as though his face had swollen to a monstrous size and was swinging from side to side against the walls of the office, like a hot-air balloon. His skin was on fire and a curtain had dropped in front of his eyes, preventing him from seeing the governor clearly. Yet Quinn remained motionless in his chair, his hands resting on his thighs, as he listened to the sound of the man’s voice.

      ‘Well, your transfer is set for next week. You can let your family know where you’ll be, so they can visit.’

      The voice was distant, like a voice in one of his dreams, the words muffled but menacing.

      ‘Are you all right, Quinn?’

      ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

      ‘That’s it, then. You can go now.’

      And Quinn had walked back to his cell, hardly aware of the prison officer at his elbow and the doors that closed behind him, or the familiar noises of his block and the voices of prisoners echoing on the landings, like the calls of animals in a distant jungle.

      He heard none of them, because his mind was too fully occupied. Quinn had been thinking of all the people who were connected to that time in his past, the people who’d inhabited his dreams for so many years. And he had already been deciding which of them should die.

      Rebecca Lowe had taken a breath to scream, but it was too late. The air had been punched from her lungs. She felt as if massive fists were squeezing her chest and emptying her of air like a disused plastic bag.

      For a few moments, the shock froze Rebecca’s muscles. Deep in her belly, she could feel her diaphragm twitching helplessly, like a part of her body that had been amputated but refused to die until its nerve endings stopped spasming. The interruption to her oxygen supply made her start to feel light-headed, and she tried to blink away the dark shadows that formed in front of her eyes. A sound came from the back of her throat – a moan that rolled inside her head but failed to reach the air.

      Then suddenly she felt her diaphragm muscles spring back into place. They loosened their grip on her lungs, and a draught of air rushed into her chest. The sound it made was like a death rattle, that one last breath before you died. But you never heard your own last breath.

      Rebecca Lowe opened her eyes. She realized she was lying on the floor of her kitchen. She could feel the tiles under her back and the dampness soaking through her clothes. She’d washed the floor only an hour before, and the smell of detergent was overpowering. Tentatively, she moved a hand and heard one of her rings click against the tiles. But her hand seemed to be a long way from her face, and she couldn’t understand why her arm should be thrown out at such an awkward angle.

      Then she became aware of how much her head hurt. It was as though the oxygen drawn into her lungs had finally reached her head and activated the pain switch, alerting the nerve cells to the message of the impact on the floor, and now they were shrilling like fire alarms. Waves of agony rolled from the back of her head to the front and burst inside her eyes, forcing her to squeeze her eyelids shut against the light.

      Rebecca knew that moving her head would only make the pain worse. So she tried to move a leg instead. It seemed to be the furthest and safest part of her body. At first, she couldn’t tell which leg she was moving, because they both were tangled together. But then one leg fell away from the other, flopping on to the floor. It was only when she felt the dampness on her foot that she realized she’d lost one of her shoes. She’d been wearing her flip-flops – a mistake on a damp floor, because their soles were too smooth and slippery.

      Automatically, Rebecca began to lift her head to look for the flip-flop. She screamed, and continued to scream as the pain smashed into her brain, bouncing off her skull and surging along her body, ripping through every muscle and nerve. Her head fell back on to the floor, setting off the tide of agony all over again. Her fingers clawed and scrabbled on the tiles, making random patterns in the damp surface. Her stomach heaved and sent streams of bile into her throat. Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

      Rebecca found that her breathing was ragged and gasping, and she tried to steady it. Somehow, she had to work out what to do. She knew she was badly hurt, and alone in the house. She could call for help, but no louder than she’d already screamed from the pain. She could hear her own scream still echoing in her ears.

      The house was nearly airtight and well insulated. No one would hear her unless they were standing right outside her double-glazed window. And the nearest neighbours were three hundred yards away. Rebecca listened for a car on the road, but the only sounds she heard were the wind and the rain.

      She knew her one chance was to make it to a phone. But the mere thought of it made her wince in agony. She had no hope of reaching the next room without passing out from the pain and perhaps doing herself more damage. If only she had her mobile phone in her pocket. But she knew it was where she’d left it earlier – in her handbag, on the dining-room table.

      Just trying to think made her head hurt. Her tears flowed faster as she realized she might have to wait until somebody came to the house and found her. But she expected to be alone all night, and all day tomorrow.

      Slowly, Rebecca became aware that something else was wrong. She thought about her dog, Milly, who had been asleep in the utility room. Milly ought to have woken or reacted in some way to her scream. If she could just have touched the dog, felt her presence nearby, it would have provided a small scrap of reassurance, the company of another living creature.

      But there was a silence in the house that didn’t feel right. In the midst of her pain, Rebecca felt that silence nudging her towards some small thing that had been dislodged from her memory by her fall – something she couldn’t quite grasp, because her mind would no longer concentrate properly.

      Then she remembered the sound she’d heard just before she fell. It had been the soft cough of the back door opening.

      6

      There were no lights on at Parson’s Croft when Dawn Cottrill drove up to the house. Not even the security lights, which should have come on when the sensors caught the movement of her car on the drive. That alone was enough to tell her that something was wrong.