by Michael Kerr
It was later in the chapel of rest that he decided on this avenue of retribution, as he had been holding the gelid hand of the shell that had so recently been his beautiful, intelligent, life-loving daughter. The makeup on her face did not fully hide the puncture holes in her lips. And although the high-necked shroud covered her stitched throat, he imagined, graphically, the tissue damage under the oyster gown. She was gone, and a large part of him had died with her. He now knew the frustration and anger that so many other bereaved parents of raped, mutilated and murdered children felt. He worked among the sick and evil creatures that carried out these crimes, and listened to them complaining over the quality of food, and demanding to have more and more privileges. He saw them laughing, wheeling and dealing in drugs, telephone cards and tobacco with others of their kind. They were cared for and cocooned, living better than millions of pensioners, who struggled to make ends meet, many still having to ration heating and food to claw through each winter; an undisclosed number dying of hypothermia as successive governments gave them less support and human rights than they afforded enemies of society, who had surely forfeited any rights to anything, including life itself.
Reaching A wing, Ron dumped his bag at the side of the desk and plodded around the two storey quadrangle of cells, opening and closing the hundred observation flaps in the doors to do a body count, or roll check as it was officially called. Back in the wing office, he rang his numbers through to the orderly officer, then waited for the prison roll to be reported correct, at which point the main gates were opened and the evening duty staff spilled out, a black-uniformed tide of laughing, whinging, shouting screws: an adult version of home-time from school.
Ron made a test call on his radio to the ECR, then poured himself a coffee and opened his book to the page where a photo of Heather marked his place and smiled up at him. Until midnight he proposed to function normally, visit the pegging points every thirty minutes to turn his key in the slots and record – for an untrusting system – that he had not just gone to sleep or stayed in the office. He would subsequently do what he considered to be a service to himself and society. He would, in the name of natural justice, snuff out a few shitheads, whom he deemed to have enjoyed far too much borrowed time.
Just a few miles from the prison, Shelley Stroud was writhing, drumming her feet on the hard earth. She was now more like a demented wild animal than a teenage girl.
He looked down at her. She was lathered in sweat, soil, straw and blood, her blonde hair now matted and red. The pad that he had taped to the raw hole where her ear had been had come loose, and her thrashing head had opened the scabbing wound. Her mouth resembled a zip fastener. He had gone a little overboard with the stapler.
Shelley was no longer sane. She had suffered the abuse, but the stapler clip...clip…clip…clipping her lips together had altered her state of mind. Adrenaline had pumped uselessly through her muscles, inciting her to take flight or fight, of which she could do neither. She reached a point where she knew death was imminent, and that there was nothing she could do to save herself. A crippling, absolute fear gripped her mind in a band of tightening steel as her brain fought to shut down and not be in this place of untenable horror. She prayed for quick release, to escape further torture, and her mind eventually came to her aid and began to fragment and crash like a computer invaded by a virus. She screamed, and the scream, like Shelley, had nowhere to go. The pressure of her attempts to vent the pain against the unyielding iron staples caused her cheeks to balloon out and her face to turn almost purple, distending hitherto unseen veins at her temples, and for blood vessels to rupture in her bulging eyes, sending crimson rivulets down her already bloody face. On the very brink of insanity, she felt a profound sadness for her parents, before her thoughts became an irrational, random and incoherent knot of mental static, and she retreated into a state of blissful unawareness.
He lay next to her, naked, and snuggled up against the now limp and mindless mannequin, his arm around her waist. “I love you, Mummy,” he whispered, before drifting into a deep and dreamless sleep.
The night orderly officer left the wing, locking the gate behind him at 00.05 hours. Ron dutifully recorded his visit on the docket. He poured himself another cup of coffee and settled to finish up the last few pages of his novel. Fifteen minutes later, he closed the book and returned it to his bag. There had been big game hunting in Wilbur’s fictional African adventure, but none to compare with the culling that he was about to perform. Taking out the shotgun, he broke it, loaded it, and filled his uniform jacket pockets with cartridges. He then wrote a final memo, addressing it to the prison governor as he chewed a thick wad of gum into a soft, malleable lump, and hummed an old lullaby that he had sung to Heather in her cot, back when the world had seemed young and full of promise.
All done. Time to go a huntin’! A nonsense rhyme popped into his mind. It was one that his uncle Arthur had recited whenever they had gone rabbiting together, when he (Ron) had been a tousle-headed youngster, back in the seventies. He said it aloud: “There was a little man, and he had a little gun, and over the fields he did but run, with a belly full of fat, an old tin hat, and a pancake stuck to his bum, bum, bum!” It still didn’t make sense, but brought back good, solid memories. He rose and went to the barred entrance gate to the wing, where he took the elastic, pink gobbet of gum from his mouth, worked half of it into the lock, closed the inner wood door and kicked a wedge firmly under it. He then took the back stairs to the ground floor entrance to the wing and repeated the procedure, before returning to the office to collect his weapon and the list of cell numbers that he had carefully selected for special attention. He unclipped the leather, sealed packet from his key chain and ripped it open; an act reserved for life-and-death emergencies; the enclosed cell key only to be withdrawn after first alerting the orderly officer and control room staff. Ron alerted no one. He had a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it in. Removing his boots, he set off along the landing, moving silently, not wanting the cons to hear his approach. Taking a deep breath, he opened the door of A2-7 with practised ease, turning on the cell light by way of the switch outside as he entered, to find the occupant beginning to sit up in bed.
Toby Martin was a paedophile. He was a pencil-thin, weasel-faced man with a curvature of the spine that both forced his head down and made him walk off centre, continually fighting to keep a straight line, as a car will try to wander when the wheel alignment is out of true. Toby had molested children for twenty-three of his thirty-nine years. He had done eight stretches for his compulsive sex crimes, and had finally been given a life sentence after getting carried away and strangling a young boy to death.
Eyes blinking, adjusting to the sudden and unexpected light, Toby wondered what the screw wanted at this time of night. He was clean. There were no drugs in his cell, and so a spot search was going to be a waste of their time. And then he became aware of the shotgun pointing at him.
“What the fuck are you doin’?” Toby said a second before the barrels crashed into his mouth, shattering his small, decaying front teeth.
“I’m reducing the prison population. And you have the honour of being the first no good little turd to start the ball rolling,” Ron said, lowering the twin muzzles, pushing the cold steel up hard against Toby’s groin and pulling the trigger.
Toby was still screaming and bleeding to death as Ron ejected the spent cartridge cases, reloaded, and opened the door of A2-16.
Titus Jackson was out of bed as the light came on, and even tried to reach Ron, but was blown backwards off his feet as the double blasts tore into his chest. The ebony-black rapist and murderer, his thick mass of dreadlocks flying above his head like a startled, many-legged spider, was dead before he hit the back wall and slid down it, to leave a sanguineness slick on the periwinkle-blue painted plaster.
Cell call bells sounded, and inmates shouted and screamed as the echoing blasts punctuated the night. Ron became intoxicated with the smell of cordite, deafened by th
e noise, and robotic in his movements, now distanced from his actions. He walked stiffly as if in a trance from cell to cell; the killing becoming an almost mechanical act. “There was a little man, and he had a little gun...There was a little man, and he had a little gun...” He kept repeating the mantra, though was unaware of doing so. He was perhaps a little insane now, in that his disordered mind was in some way functioning on automatic, as if his actions were part of a computer programme that was running its course.
Principal Officer Ray Manning, the orderly officer, ran to the wing accompanied by three other officers. It took them almost ten minutes to gain entry through the gummed-up gate lock and wedged door. And as they laboured to enter the wing, the unmistakable roar of a shotgun being discharged echoed through the internal corridors; the sound trapped, reverberating as it travelled around the enclosed landings; a deafening wall of noise that heralded the ministering of death.
He woke at the cusp of dawn as the first birdsong heralded a new day, and the greyness of morning filtered through the skylight. She was still out of it, conscious, eyes open, but staring with the vacant, glassy-eyed idiocy of a stuffed animal. This had been the first time that one of them had actually become catatonic. It was interesting. He felt as though he were in the presence of a warm-blooded vegetable. He fashioned a noose in one end of a rope and secured it around her ankles, then took the other end, threw it over the beam above them and hoisted her up like a flag, tying the rope off to the rail of a stall, to leave her hanging with the tips of her limp fingers only an inch off the ground, and her mane of pale hair brushing the compacted dirt. Firmly gripping her wide, childbearing hips, – that would never play their part in that function, – he ran across the floor of the barn, pushing her, and then letting go to watch her swing in a wide arc, backwards and forwards, rope and wood squeaking and groaning as she became a human pendulum. He watched amused as the living body passed in front of him, the displaced air wafting him with a cool breeze. He pushed her again, harder, and then lifted his knife, and as she sped by he lashed out to slit open her throat with the keen blade.
Shelley felt nothing – protected in a chrysalis of imbecility – as her jugular vein discharged the blood from her brain and a severed carotid artery pumped out much more, to paint him and the dirt floor in abstract patterns of bright red lines. He moved in, pushed her again, this time at a tangent; the angle of deflection causing her to circle him.
“Hey, Wendy, help me catch my shadow,” he shouted as she flew by. But Shelley was past participating in any further endeavour, already turning right at the second star and going straight on to the wonderful world of Never Land. Her heart had taken flight, and she would truly never grow old, though would sadly be in no position to appreciate that in others’ memories, she would remain forever young.
The sight, touch, smell and even the taste of the blood turned him on. He basked in its sticky, silky, coppery-scented warmth and waited until the pulses waned to become a dribble and finally just droplets, before taking a couple of photographs. He then went over to the wall-mounted hose reel, unwound several feet of it and turned the tap on, playing the powerful jet of the spray gun over the corpse and then himself. The rich lifeblood, if left for even a short period of time soon lost its charm, to become a sour-smelling, congealing material that proved stubborn to remove. This initial hosing down would make thorough cleaning and disinfecting a much easier procedure, when he had showered, eaten and returned to finish up later. He had no wish to cut them up, eat them, or keep any part of them as trophies. He wasn’t a fucking idiot like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Yank who had got caught through a lack of discipline. Dahmer’s killing had got away from him. He had corpses mounting up in his apartment; even heads in the fridge, and body parts in pans on the stove. The guy had been a raving lunatic, surrounding himself with the incriminating evidence. Christ knows what his apartment had smelled like. No, he wasn’t about to lose control like that. He had buried many of his victims deep under the barn’s floor, sealed in lime-filled, plastic fertiliser bags. And now, to save digging, and to add a new dimension to his exploits, he had started to leave them posed for the plods to find. The risk of transporting them to his chosen sites was calculated, and he reckoned, minimal. He enjoyed sharing his work, creating humorous little tableaux that he thought a nice touch. He was even leaving them with identification, to ensure that their families could give them a proper Christian burial. He wasn’t all bad.
Ron knew that he was running out of time. He would soon have company, and then it would be over. It had been a success, but although he had moved quickly, the cons were now organised, and many of them had wedged and barricaded their doors against him. The hydraulic jacks that prised cell doors open in a matter of seconds, once in place, were not kept on the wings, but in the security office, separate from the residential areas, to be deployed when needed. They were effective, but too cumbersome and heavy for one officer alone to operate. Ron did have a set of Allen keys, and could have unscrewed the locking plates and reversed the hinge mechanisms, which would have allowed him to open the doors outwards, away from the barricades, but that also took time, which was a luxury he didn’t have too much of left. Twenty from his list of twenty-five wasn’t bad. He had wiped out a score of tossers who’d been a waste of space and a blight on society. They would never walk free, or have the chance to harm anyone else ever again. If his actions were deemed to be an outrage by policy makers who had wimped out, then tough shit. He wasn’t looking for brownie points, but knew that most ordinary coppers, screws, and the majority of the general public would applaud his actions, even if they didn’t voice their approval openly.
“Give it up,” Ray Manning shouted as he rounded the corner of the spur and saw Ron covered in blood, breaking open the smoking weapon he held. “Put it down, Ron,” he said, stopping ten feet from the officer, suddenly very scared as he saw the manic look in the other man’s eyes.
“There was a little man, and he had a little gun...” Ron mumbled, thumbing two fresh cartridges into the sawn-off and bringing it up to point down the landing.
“Ron, no...Please!” Ray said, positive that he was about to die.
Ron blinked the sweat from his eyes and focused on the trembling orderly officer who stood before him with hands outstretched as if to ward off the lethal load he expected to be loosed. “I did it for Heather and Brenda, and for all the families out there who are still suffering because of what these lowlife’s did to their loved ones,” Ron said before turning the shotgun, pushing the hot ends of the sawn down barrels between his teeth, deep into his open mouth, and smoothly pulling the trigger, to blow his brains out.
Ray Manning and the other officers stood frozen to the spot in disbelief as Ron jerked backwards and fell to the floor.
“Fuck me!” Ray murmured, reaching for the radio that was clipped to his belt, already trying to imagine the shitload of paperwork that this unprecedented mess would generate, as in the first instance he told control to contact the duty governor, the Medical Officer, emergency services and the Home Office press office. As he spoke, a serpentine red stream flowed across the floor towards him from Ron’s blasted head. He stepped back away from it as though it were acid, not wanting it to touch his shoes.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE iron steps were cold on Laura’s feet as she hurried down the corkscrew staircase with a small, contented smile on her face. She felt truly alive for the first time since Kara’s death, and was tingling under her oversize Winnie the Pooh T-shirt and brief cotton panties. The sensation of Jim still inside her and holding her persisted, arousing her again as she walked through to the kitchen and poured a steaming brew from the coffeemaker, that as usual had fired up as the timer triggered its operation, half an hour before her alarm clock buzzed like a fly and lured her from bed to turn it off. She switched on the portable TV – that was positioned in the corner, atop the marble effect counter between the bread bin and an empty spaghetti jar – before sitting at the pine table t
o watch the early morning news.
“…And now we go live to Long Hutton prison,” the newsreader said, “where shortly after midnight a lone warder is alleged to have gone on a killing spree inside the jail. Early reports suggest that at least twenty inmates were gunned down in their cells.” The newsreader turned to a large screen behind her, on which a correspondent was outside the well-lit walls of the maximum security prison. “John. Can you tell us what is happening at this time?” he said.
“Yes, Fiona,” the suitably concerned looking young man, with sparse hair waving like corn in the light breeze, said. “A prison spokesman has confirmed that an officer on night duty smuggled a shotgun onto one of the wings, where he is believed to have coldly and methodically opened cell doors and executed inmates. Unofficial reports suggest that up to twenty category A and B prisoners, all serving life sentences, died before the officer turned the weapon on himself. As you can see,” – the camera panned back to give a wide angle view – “there is a heavy police presence, and coaches full of prison officers have arrived from several other establishments, including Manchester, Hull, Leeds and Wakefield, due to the unrest inside. It is not yet known what the motive was for this unparalleled action, and the names of the dead inmates and officer have been withheld.”
The picture snapped back to Fiona Clarkson in the studio. “That was John Kelly, live from outside Long Hutton prison,” she said. “We will keep you up to date with the situation, as and when we receive further details. I can tell you that the officer responsible for this tragic incident is believed to be the father of one of the so-called Tacker’s victims. This may prove to be an act of indirect retribution carried out by a disturbed man. The Tacker is still at large and continues to prey on young women in the York area.”