To his horror, it wasn’t there.
He started patting his pockets with the urgency of a man trying to put out a fire, but it wasn’t in any of them. Then, with gut-wrenching clarity, he remembered; he’d put it down in the car’s footwell to snort cocaine and hadn’t picked it up afterwards.
“Shit,” he whispered, feeling the blood drain from his face. Winston would kill him if the breakout wasn’t successful, but how was he going to find another way out without the map?
◆◆◆
Dillon hadn’t realised just how big the Royal London Hospital was, and even though they were running at full pelt, it took ages to get all the way around to the other side of the building.
When they reached the freight elevator, there was no sign of Winston or his cronies. Annoyingly there were no stairs nearby, which meant they would have to wait for it to come all the way back up before they could go anywhere. Dillon glanced at the floor counter on the wall and then started jabbing at the call button impatiently. Each jab got harder and faster until his forefinger started to throb.
“Boss, you’re gonna break the damned thing if you don’t stop doing that,” Bartholomew pointed out when he showed no sign of stopping.
Dillon responded with a truculent harrumph, but he withdrew his finger and flexed it gingerly. “I’ll probably end up with RSI now,” he announced, glumly.
According to the needle, the lift was stationary on the second floor, and he wondered if Winston was inside it at this very moment, gloating because he thought they were home and dry.
“I can’t stand this waiting malarkey,” Dillon growled, prodding the call button again for good measure.
“Will you please leave that poxy button alone,” Bartholomew snapped, and then added a very polite, “sir.”
Suddenly, the needle was moving again, and they watched in silence as it travelled all the way down to the ground floor. They waited with bated breath, knowing that if George had got his team in place, this would be the moment of truth.
Seconds passed, but there was no news of an engagement over the radio. And then, as the three men looked at each other in perplexity, the lift started to ascend. The needle travelled steadily upwards, making no stops along the way. And suddenly, with a gentle ‘ping’, the doors began to open.
“About bloody time,” Dillon said, placing his hands on the slow-moving doors to pry them apart.
At which point, the world descended into chaos.
◆◆◆
The unexpected sound of radio chatter as the lift’s doors began to open on the third floor galvanised Winston into action. Assuming that the armed police they had encountered on the ground floor had somehow managed to get ahead of them, he was already raising the ME38 in his right hand in readiness for the shootout that must surely come.
Better to die than to go back to jail, he thought, grimly.
Ignoring the searing pain that the sudden movement caused him, and the horrible pinging sensation as a couple of his stitches popped, he lunged out of the wheelchair and swung the gun in a covering arc that stopped the three advancing officers in their tracks.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” he bellowed, pointing the gun in their faces. To his surprise, none of them were armed. To his delight, the one in front was the same pig who had smashed his face up pretty badly the last time they’d met. He almost laughed at the startled expression on the man’s gawping face.
His cruel features twisted into a malignant smile. Whatever else happened today, at least the pig would atone for the suffering he had put Winston through last year.
◆◆◆
Powerless to do anything but watch, George Copeland had stood there as the lift doors slammed shut a heartbeat before the nearest SO19 officer could get his hands into the rapidly diminishing gap. They had come tantalisingly close to apprehending the fugitives, but in the end, as the saying went, a miss was as good as a mile.
Dillon would not be pleased.
George’s idea of exercise was getting dressed in the morning and, despite the coldness of the day, he was perspiring heavily as he walked the last few yards to join the SO19 officers who had rushed ahead and were now waiting for him by the lift doors.
The senior Trojan officer came to meet him halfway. “Where’s the nearest set of stairs?” he asked.
Copeland was still too breathless to speak so he just shrugged. He didn’t know and, unfortunately, DI Dillon had purloined the hand-drawn map that he’d discovered during the search of the car.
One of the locals peeled away from the rest to join them. “I can take you to the nearest set of stairs,” she offered, “but it’s a bit of a trek from here.”
Copeland shook his head, spraying little beads of sweat everywhere. Dillon wouldn’t want them running around the hospital, chasing shadows. “No,” he said firmly. “Let’s regroup outside at the RVP and start setting up a containment on all the exits. At least we know what the suspects look like now, so they won’t find it easy to slip by us.”
At least I hope they won’t, he thought.
George noticed that the Trojan officer’s head was tilted to one side and he had two gloved fingers pressed to his left ear. Either he’d developed acute earache or he was listening to an incoming transmission over the Trojan channel in his earpiece.
“My gov’s just arrived,” the Trojan officer announced a moment later, removing his fingers and straightening his head, “and there are two more ARVs just pulling into the hospital behind him.”
“Let’s go and meet them,” George said, ushering the uniforms back towards the entrance. As he turned to follow them, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the freight lift had stopped on the third floor. Was that because the suspects were getting out, or had someone else just got in, completely unaware that the lift’s other occupants were armed fugitives who had
