One Last Breath. Stephen Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ his mind for the past fourteen years. This one was no mere trick of déjà vu. It was the memory of blood – blood pooling and streaming on a golden field.

      It had begun to rain. He hadn’t noticed the clouds gathering, hadn’t even thought to look at the sky. He put on the smock and pulled up the hood. But his face was already wet, and more water dripped on him from the trees.

      Quinn had started making his plans two years ago – on the day they told him he’d be making his final move. It had been a morning in early April, a day when the beech trees visible from the exercise yard at Gartree were starting to change their shape and colour, the outline of their naked branches blurring with the suggestion of spring.

      ‘You’re being transferred to an open prison,’ his wing governor had told him. ‘HMP Sudbury. It’s in Derbyshire. That will be a lot closer to your home, Quinn. It will make it much easier for your family to visit you.’

      Quinn had stared at the man as if he were speaking a foreign language. He might as well have been, for all the sense he was making. Quinn waited for the translation, but none came. The governor looked at the file on his desk, but failed to see that Quinn had never received any family visits at Gartree, not once in 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 СКАЧАТЬ