by Rod Madocks
I drove home a few hours later in a chill, misty, evening, while inside the hospital, the staff was gearing up for the regular patient dance at the Blue K. The Blue K was on K block, it contained a mock bar, selling soft drinks for credit tokens, the lights were protected by netting and the large room contained a stage area for Christmas reviews and the monthly film shows for privileged patients.
The lights were dimmed slightly. Two coloured spotlights played on the ceiling and the music started at about 6.30 in the evening. Lynch slouched in to the dance in his denim jacket along with one or two from his unit and about twenty other men from selected villas along with a contingent from the women’s blocks. Maeve was not among them. Many just smoked and chatted at the tables while a few jigged about on the parquet flooring to the sound of ’80s hits. One patient had appointed himself the DJ. The escorts relaxed and sat at the tables, key chains dangling. This was usually an easy detail for them with only occasionally the need to drag away one of the men if they became over-excited and pestered the women patients. A few couples sat holding hands but mostly each patient group remained apart and cautiously eyed each other.
The evening had gone over half way through its allotted time when Lynch rose and walked up to a women’s table as if about to ask one of them to dance. The women stirred, some giggling behind upraised hands. Lynch came closer, then he leaped up onto a table top, pulled out his belt and flailed at an unguarded spot light with the buckle end. As suddenly, he caught a piece of the falling glass, dropped back to the floor and seized a young female nursing auxiliary who had not reacted quickly enough. There were screams from the women patients and the music stopped. Lynch hauled the NA up to the stage with his belt and her key belt chain twisted around her neck in one hand, and a shard of the spotlight glass pressed to her jugular in the other. He was circled by the escorts, but kept them off by swinging his prisoner around with powerful jerks of his broad shoulders. Blood oozed from his fingers. It was not clear if this came from the NA’s neck or from his hand. She made a whimpering, muffled sound and her blonde hair was tangled in the brass buttons of his denim jacket. The 444 squad had been summoned by three different radios and the security team came running down the corridors carrying their shields and helmets. In the Blue K the other patients stood away against the walls. Some of the male patients began to shout to Lynch, “Do it! Do it!” while the DJ called for calm over the speakers.
Staff drained from blocks and villas to confront the crisis. Two from the team of five on Maple left that night in response to a general alert.
Hobman watched them go from the second story of the Maple villa landing.
He went down to the nursing station.
“Hot water for tea boss?” he asked, addressing the team leader while he stood at the office door and waved his plastic mug. The remaining staff were distracted and intent on listening to the crisis in the Blue K over the radio and did not acknowledge Hobman. He shuffled further into the office up to the desk saying, “And here’s your paper back boss, I have marked a few racing tips.”
The staff on Maple had become used to Hobman’s constant visits to the office for one thing or another, running errands for them, borrowing the newspaper. They still did not turn their heads as he affected to drop the newspaper onto the floor. He leaned down next to the switch panel on the wall for a moment and flicked off the rear villa door sensor. He picked up the paper again, neared the desk and placed it down. Only then did the team leader look up. He registered Hobman at last with a light-eyed stare, burned out by a thousand night shifts.
“Off you go now, Hobby, we’re busy,” he barked and returned to listening to the security radio as it fizzed and snatched with messages.
“Sure boss,” said Hobman. He then glided upstairs to his neatly-ordered room, put on a black fleece jacket and broke open the back of his large radio cassette recorder taking out from the back of the battery compartment four hooked implements spliced to leather straps. These were filed down eating utensils bent into shape and braided with leather fixings, which he had fashioned in his leather-making classes. He then tied each hook to his forearms facing inward and one each just below his knees, tightly lacing the leather criss-cross. He broke open a large battery that was hollowed out and contained a single brass key for the villa rear door, made from a soap mould taken from an impression of Pinsent’s cleaning lady’s access key. He picked up a bag of woven cotton, a Greek tourist’s shoulder bag with blue tassels brought back from holiday by some patient’s relative and appropriated by Hobman. Once his preparations were complete Hobman went back down the stairs, passing Mattie Head without a word. Mattie registered that Hobman was about some unusual business but just said, “Cool Hobby, cool,” and Hobman signed silence to him with a finger to his lips.
He leaned over the lower stair banister to see the brightly lit office and the backs of the staff. He checked the patient’s smoke room where there was the sound of a football match on television and the deep bell of Nelson Bamangwato’s laughter as he chuckled to himself in response to his voices. Then he was at the back door, click clack, opening to the chill night, the sensor not sounding in the office. He did not relock as the frail key bent and jammed. He flitted across the villa back lawn and crouched by the dark shadow of a viburnum bush. There was the sound of shouting from the Blue K, where staff continued to pour into the blocks a hundred yards away. He reached under the bush and drew out a long bundle that had been left there previously. It clattered faintly as he packed it into his deep, soft shoulder bag. He then moved, a quick shadow, across the grass courts, to shelter by the personality disorder unit budgerigar cages. After a pause to check for staff movement he ran over the short grass up to the great thirty foot wall of the black wire fence. No warning came up in security control because for three months previously Hobman, and perhaps other patients, had thrown pebbles through the bars of the windows or from the benches where they were allowed to sun themselves for an hour in the villa garden. The pebbles had fallen on the strip of ground laced with movement sensors up near the wire, setting them off time and again until security switched that sector off, suspecting bird interference, or moles, or perhaps electrical dysfunction.
Hobman went up to the fence, a shadow against the darker black of the four ply mesh, so tightly woven that it would admit no finger holds. He hooked the curved, filed ends of the spoons into the small interstices of the wire and began to climb slowly and steadily, occasionally resting, letting his weight be carried on the leather straps. He reached the sharp-edged top, rolled over it and, as carefully, hooked his way back down then crossed another stretch of grass coming to the shadow of the boundary wall.
He ran quickly along the foot of the curving wall down to a spot where the ground rose slightly next to the medium secure area. He paused and lay down flat as staff scurried past in the mist. Somewhere an alarm for a vehicle lock sounded. He lay just under a camera pole that seemed to point down at him in its arc of movement, but all eyes in security control were on the screens showing the Blue K. Hobman crouched and drew out from his bag jointed pieces of garden bamboo connected by three-way aluminium sleeves, made in the workshops and carried to their hiding place in the villa garden in a cleaner’s trolley many months before. These sticks fitted together like tent poles. He leant the structure against the boundary wall to form a shaky ladder with just enough height to get his hand over the slippery cold stone of the rounded parapet of the eight foot wall, then a leg hooked over, and he heaved himself up, rolling and dropping with a soft thump onto the other side.
The lights were turned up brightly in the Blue K. Lynch and his prisoner were pressed up in a corner of the stage by a wall of shields. The other patients had been evacuated back to their wards and Poynton had arrived, furious and wildhaired in his shirtsleeves, staring over at Lynch behind the shoulders and helmets of the security response squad.
“Now, Lynch, be sensible,” said the team leader, “Let her go and everything will be alright.”
There was a lull in the noise of thudding boots and shouted orders for a moment. The security team could hear him growling, “Lovely, lovely, lovely,” to himself.
He threw down his shard of glass and took out a pen from his prisoner’s top pocket and inserted it in one of her ears. “I’ll ram it,” he roared, pressing the flat of his hand to the pen.
Poynton had a brief discussion with his team leaders, “I am not tolerating a hostage situation in this hospital,” he snapped, “I want you to take him now.”
His team leaders tried to argue with him, concerned for the terrified NA.
“Do it now, use a thunder flash and rush him.”
The snatch team lobbed a flash over the shield line then, after the stunning bang had disoriented Lynch, they steamrollered him against the stage wall and the NA was dragged out, sobbing and gasping but relatively unharmed.
“Alright, alright.” Lynch’s muffled voice could be heard from below the scrum as boots and shield rims hammered down on him. He was double-cuffed ankle and wrists and dragged down the blocks with staff slamming the doors behind him boom boom boom. More kicks assisted his passage on up the stairs to Dove ward, where the admissions intensive care staff awaited him.
“Here’s your fuckin’ freaker,” said the security team leader.
Lynch was propelled into an observation cell with unbreakable perspex doors where the lights would blaze day and night.
“Lock down and sweep,” said Poynton with a sigh of relief.
Hobman was already flitting through the medium secure compound annexe, which stood as an adjunct to the main hospital grounds. He had spotted that this was a weak point in the system when studying the grounds from the upper floor of Maple and had spoken to patients who had used it years ago as an experimental rehab area for the least dangerous. It was now used for restraint training and cell search courses for staff. It had a few villa-type buildings and was not well lit at night. Hobman heard the distant boom of the thunder flash and smiled as he approached the gates. The wire here was not as formidable as the main fence and he scrambled and hooked his way up. He paused and balanced on the top poles, brought to a halt where razor wire was furled along the top in a thick coil. He reached into his shoulder bag and brought out home-made tin cutting shears with sharply honed blades that he had made secretly in the workshops. Snip snap, and one strand parted. He paused on the rattling gate looking for the fifteen minute walking dog patrol but they were not out tonight — all drawn to the Blue K mayhem. Snip Snap he cut another strand which whipped back under tension and stung his cheek just below his serpent tattoo. He swayed back, recovered, and then carefully bent the severed ends of wire away, making a gap, and hooked his way through and over. He dropped onto the cindered perimeter track and looked out to the grey expanse of the staff football fields and beyond to the field, the dark hedge lines somewhere in the mist. He untied his fence climbing hooks, left them on the gritty track and moved off into the mist.
Staff poured back to wards and villas chattering about the events of the night. The security team were tired but congratulated themselves on a job well done. They grounded their shields in the yards, lit up fags and recounted the incident to each other. Poynton was edgy, however. “Lock and sweep,” he repeated in his reedy voice as outside the mist thickened, and patients were counted off on all units.
On the women’s villa Maeve asked of her returning ward residents, “What’s going off?”
“One of the sex offenders gone mental,” was the reply.
On Maple the TV football match was switched off as the patients grumbled and a count was made. At first there was mild concern.
“Where’s Hobby?” asked the team leader.
Then the pace of worry increased. Everyone was locked down in their rooms. A door check found the back door open with the crude key jammed in the lock. No one could understand why the rear sensor was switched off. Events moved on as security control received more bad news. Hobman was not to be found. The ladder was found against the west wall. The dog men reported claw-like implements with straps on the perimeter track. At some stage, Poynton ordered, “Crank it up!”
From its chamber in the boiler house, the great siren started up at 8.15 p.m. It had not been heard in earnest for twenty years. At first there was a whirring, then a steadily increasing shriek, followed by a howl. SCREE EE WHOO, echoed through every corridor in the hospital and out over the countryside.
Hobman heard it in shadow and I imagine him grinning. Villagers stirred in the night from their TVs. Pinsent’s girlfriend, the villa cleaning lady, heard it in Redford seven miles away. It went on and on, the sound rolling down the river valley and echoing back. The rooks began to leave their nests under its onslaught and the whole hospital cowered under the brutal sound. The night wore on, new sounds took over, the twitter and whoop of police cars setting road blocks to the roads north and south, the thudding of a police chopper scanning on infra red somewhere above the mist line.
Dawn came. Poynton had been up all night and now sat in the security control room. He angrily waved away one of the staff who brought him a coffee and a roll. There was still no sign of Hobman although road blocks had been secured up to twenty miles away. The mist had thickened through the night and the hospital humped under it. There was no patient movement at all.The whole hospital was locked down. Headlights came and went on the long drive. In the car parks there was more movement and lights. Coach loads of searchers unloaded and were briefed. A police incident van distributed photographs of Hobman and the press began to gather. Already the first national headlines ran, “VAMPIRE KILLER ESCAPES!”
Hobman at one point had claimed to have drunk his father’s blood after killing him. Hobman — Dracu, with his illuminated face and dead-pooled eyes — now reached the nation’s breakfast tables along with articles about the easy life that the hospital afforded its patients.
As the morning wore on there was still no news of such a recognisable fugitive. Rings of searchers narrowed on fields, sheds and barns. They tramped through the sticky loam of the bare fields and sieved the larch copses and the bramble thickets of Heaton Camp, but still there was no sign. How far could he have got? More rings were drawn on the maps and the chopper cast its infra-red eye right down and along the reedy banks of the river system. All the drains and culverts were searched. Inside, his files were combed through again for clues and his room on Maple was taken to bits. The team that went to his sister’s funeral were questioned. A police guard was put on his remaining sister Nikki and her husband at their house near Brancaster.
The wards and villas seethed with rumours about the escape. Lynch was questioned time and again but gave nothing up. The inhabitants on Maple were broken up and redistributed around the other units in case they had colluded in the escape. Jim Popple appealed to staff to leave him alone. He had been in for twenty years for rape and murder and had become set in his ways on the villa.
“Leave me alone staff wouldja? Gawd I don’t want to get out. I don’t know if I could account for what I’d do if I got out.”
He was moved, nevertheless, as was young Mattie Dread who skipped out with a small box of his possessions, singing, “Hobby’s out, the moon will shout.”
Nelson Bamangwato also lumbered out to a block ward, as ever with a copy of the Times under his arm which he never read. An elderly Dahomeyan, who had come here in the fifties as a student; he had left the severed, enucleated head of his landlady’s daughter on the kitchen table for her parents to find. He later told the police “I needed her head for muti — for medicine — you unnerstand? I needed her eyes!”
He now keened and moaned, “Kindoke stalks; Kindoke says bad muti is heah, evil on the loose, there must be a sacrifice! Spirit needs sustenance, needs something to live on. Papa Legba need something to eat — a sacrifi
ce!”
He clutched a cardboard box of his possessions more tightly and continued to yell, “Kindoke — ancestor spirit. Protect me and all of us.”
“Out you go, Nelson!” the nervy staff bustled him out back to the blocks and he trudged off still booming out, “Protect us Lord!”
The searches and transfers went on all day and some staff were reinterviewed several times. Poynton reviewed the results of the room searches and sent off Hobman’s writing pad for forensic examination. Late in the day he went back down to Hobman’s room on Maple and sat there smoking his umpteenth Royal whilst leaning against the wall, his eyes ranging over the heaps of clothing, the scraps of paper and the shards of his dismantled bed.
*
Hobman waited and watched all the comings and goings that foggy Wednesday. He was not far away — in fact he was only feet away, deep-nested under a hedge by the hospital drive, a dense and prickly hedge where, inside, a fox path had created a hollow that Hobman had widened by whittling at the twigs with his wire cutters. We now know that, after clearing the medium secure gate, he had not run to the fields but instead he doubled back across the staff sports pitch to the white shape of the old cricket score board that had been unused in many seasons. He had leaned down by a grass roller and drew out from behind it a waterproof rucksack. Then he burrowed under the hedge, dragging the bag after him. Once in his hide he unbuckled it and drew out a roll of camouflaged canvas that made a military bivvy. There was an aluminium foil survival wrap that could block infra-red if you wrapped yourself in it; a torch and a survival knife, with a six inch blade, and a saw back. Deeper in the bag he found packets of raisins and nuts, a can of sardines, two bottles of water, some boiled sweets and a rolled up comic entitled Daredevil: The Man Without Fear with an illustration on the front showing a man in a red suit with a crimson face.