Need You Dead

103 Saturday 30 April

There’s something big coming the other way, straight towards me. I can see the lights, massive lights, high up. Be good if it’s a lorry. Something solid. Please let it be a huge truck or lorry. One of those eighteen-wheelers. The driver high up, so I won’t hurt him.

Please.

Please.

Blinding lights. Blaring horn. This is it. This is how the end is. Whiteout. Noise. White lights. Noise. This is how it looks. This is how it feels. One split second. Just one second and then—

There was a small clunk that barely shook the car. That was all. It sounded like a rock thrown against his door. Then the lorry hurtled past and was gone in a blur of tail lights, and turbulence that shook the car.

His wing mirror had gone. Knocked off.

He’d been that close to the lorry. Should have been closer, right across it. Head-on.

Sweat was running down his face, stinging his eyes. The wipers smeared the screen. The road snaked into the distance.

I can’t even kill myself. JESUS!

He pounded the steering wheel in frustration and anger.

I’m running out of fuel and I can’t even kill myself.

I don’t have the guts.

He looked at the needle on the empty mark. At the orange warning light. It had been on empty for a while. He didn’t know how much was left in the tank when it showed empty. Not much. There couldn’t be much.

He saw the blue lights behind him, in the interior mirror. The police car was moving out, overtaking the line of traffic, gaining on him.

I’m not going to be arrested. Not going to have that humiliation. No way. No. Then he yelled out loud, ‘YOU WON’T BLOODY GET ME!’

He was crying. Thinking about his wife. His daughter. What was going to happen when they found out?

Trying to think; to figure something out. But it felt like there was a tornado raging inside his head, ripping all his thoughts off the shelves, off his desk top, out of cupboards, filing cabinets. Flinging them everywhere.

What do I do? Where do I go? Hide? Drive into a tree?

They had plans for him in that car behind him. The car with the blue lights. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you!’ he shouted out loud, to himself. ‘Whatever you have planned, it isn’t going to happen!’

No, no, no. He wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction. Wasn’t going to let Roy Grace put him behind bars. No way. No one was going to lock him up in the custody suite in Hollingbury and bang that door on him.

He wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.

And you didn’t get bail for murder. They kept you inside.

He wouldn’t let them put him on a remand wing in Lewes, or some other prison.

Cops in prison. He knew the stories about what happened to cops in prison. About what other prisoners did to them. Boiling sugared water on their genitals. Urinating in their porridge and soup. Razor blades in apples.

That wasn’t going to happen.

The lights of the police car were closing on him.

He drove with one eye locked on the rear-view mirror, thinking, desperately thinking. Their traffic car was faster than his. Any moment now they’d make their move and pull out to overtake him. They’d probably try the same trick he had done. Tap him behind the rear wheel and knock him sideways.

Had to think fast. Fast. Fast.

There was a manoeuvre he remembered from the police driving course he’d done years back, when he was qualifying for his blue lights permit. The instructor was called Roger Pitts. Like the pits at a motor-racing circuit, he’d joked weakly.

Pitts had showed him how to do handbrake turns at Dunsfold aerodrome. He didn’t trust himself to do one now. But there was something else about the handbrake that Pitts had told him: the handbrake didn’t put the rear brake lights on. The car behind wouldn’t know you were braking.

There was a narrow lane that he knew was coming up shortly on his right. Coming up in a quarter of a mile or so. He cycled all around this area regularly at weekends.

The police car was right behind him, filling his mirror, blue and white lights flashing, siren wailing, signalling him to stop. Headlights of a vehicle were coming fast in the opposite direction. The police car would wait until it had passed and then make its move.

He gripped the brake handle and waited. Waited. Then as the oncoming vehicle streaked past, he pulled the handbrake on as hard as he could. Instantly the car began snaking, its rear wheels locked up. There was a howl of sirens and the slither of tyres on wet tarmac as the Audi shot past, fishtailing crazily.

Then, only just visible in the headlights, its entrance shrouded with shrubbery, was the lane. Somehow he held on to the car, stopping it from swapping ends, and made the turn. Yes! He jammed the accelerator pedal to the floor, anxiously watching his rear-view mirror.

Then the fuel gauge.

The mirror again.

Two shiny pinpricks appeared ahead of him. Growing bigger. A deer standing in the road, mesmerized by his lights. Shit! He stamped on the brake, slewed round the frozen animal, missing it by inches, and then accelerated hard again.

Where do I go?

Petrol station.

No way.

Got to lose the police. Not going to do that by running out of petrol out here.

Where the hell do I go? Which direction?

He felt as empty as the fuel tank. All his juice gone. Everything gone. It would happen to everyone, eventually. Always had done and always will. All of us run out of life juice. Needle on empty. Dull little amber light showing. Then oblivion.

Or meet our maker.

Trees and shrubs were flashing by: 90 mph — 100 mph — 110 mph. He could swing the wheel to the right or to the left now and plough into them.

But what if it didn’t kill him? If he didn’t hit a big tree but instead a bunch of saplings? What if he was just injured? Blinded or paralysed?

Then he saw the blue lights again, in his mirror, tiny strobing pinpricks. Doubling in size every second.

Hurtling towards him.